Sigmund Freud, creator of psychoanalysis, is the most influential psychological theorist of 20th-century. Freud’s theories have had an enormous influence on art, literature, and social thinking. Freud’s fundamental idea was that all humans are endowed with an unconscious in which potent sexual and aggressive drives, and defenses against them, struggle for supremacy.
Freud revolutionized modern thought with his conception and development of depth psychology (Roger Horrocks, 2001). The present paper focuses on historical perspective of Freud’s major contribution in development of personality theory, psychoanalytical approach, Oedipus complex, causes of Neuroses, life and death complex, feminism, detail explanation of unconsciousness and therapies. Freud’s influence can be traced from his natural science background as a scholar of neurology.
The tension between a more phenomenological approach to understanding the mind and Freud’s inclination toward natural scientific explanation is a tension, which exists in all of his work and writings, as well as throughout all of psychoanalytic theory developed by Freud. Much of modernism is noticeable in the philosophical thought of Freud, who featured significantly in Brave New World. The dealings of Freud ignore the higher ends of human nature. Freud treated the mind as a piece of neurological machinery.
The modernist movement, triggered by the Fordist system of mass production and solidified in its origination of the term by its deification in Brave New World, managed to transport its ideals through art and architecture into philosophical thought. It is the negative aspects of this movement, as are especially apparent in this last construction of the ‘ideological testimony’ of modernism, that Brave New World satirizes (Meckier, Jerome, 1978). Between 1895 -1905, Freud’s advances directed to the development of his theory, all of which were developed from his clinical work with patients.
Freud became more and more refined in his technique of psychoanalysis, and he became particularly proficient at using his patient’s subjective impressions of him to help the patient to discover the origins of the unconscious memory (or memories), which led to the symptoms from which she suffered (Roger Horrocks, 2001). In the early 1900s, Sigmund Freud developed the psychodynamic view of human behavior. This model relies on the premise that human behavior is brought about by inner forces over which the individual has little control. Dreams and slips of the tongue are clues to what the individual is really thinking.
Freud constructed the model of personality with in three parts: the id, the ego and the super ego. The id refers to the raw, unorganized, innate part of the personality. Its main objective is to reduce tension created by our primitive drives, which are related to hunger, sex, aggression and irrational impulses. The id operates according to the pleasure principle, in which its goal is immediate gratification and reduction of tension. Id contains the sexual and aggressive instincts, and is located in the unconscious mind. The sexual instinct is known as libido.
Second, there is the ego. The ego is the safeguard between the id and the world’s realities. The ego operates on the reality principle. In this principle, instinctual energy is restrained in order to maintain the safety of the individual and help integrate the person into society. The ego is sometimes called “the executive” of an individual’s personality. The ego makes the decisions, controls actions and allows for a higher capability of problem solving. In other words, this is the conscious, rational mind, and develops during the first 2 years of life.
Third, there is the superego. The superego is the last facet of Freud’s model of personality. It is similar to the id, in that it is somewhat unrealistic. The superego represents the rights and wrongs of the society as handed down to an individual over their lifetime. The superego has two subparts: the conscience and the ego ideal. The conscience prevents us from doing morally bad things. The ego ideal motivates us to do what is morally proper. The superego assists to control the id’s impulses, making them less selfish and more morally correct.
It develops at about the age of 5, when the child adopts many of the values of the same-sexed parent in a process known as identification. The superego is partly conscious and partly unconscious. The conscience is formed as a result of the child being punished, and it makes the child feel guilty about behaving badly. The ego ideal is formed through the use of reward. It makes the child feel proud after behaving well (Morgan, Pg: 519). Psychoanalysis is a set of theoretical ideas about personality and, a method of psychotherapy (Morgan, Pg: 518). Sigmund Freud was the founder of psychoanalysis and one of the best-known figures in psychology.
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) is the most influential psychologist and best known for developing psychoanalysis, which was the first systematic form of therapy for mental disorders. He introduced psychoanalytical methods, which are still in use today. Freud showed us a fundamental split at the heart of the individual that is derived from our conception of ourselves as selves. That is, the fundamental conflict between ego and id, between the conscious and the unconscious, between the repressing force and the repressed- is said to lie at the heart of being a human self. (Roger Horrocks, 2001).
The expression psychoanalysis is referred to many features of Freud’s work and research, as well as Freudian therapy and the research methodology he used to develop his theories. According to psychoanalytical theory, individual experiences certain sexual and aggressive urges springing from id. These urges come into conflict with the realistic barrios imposed by ego and taboos of society incorporated in the superego. Individual repress the urges and conflict hide from conscious awareness in the unconscious mind. He cannot consciously think about or verbalize a repressed drive.
But the urge is still there, driving for expression, though always in conflict with ego and super ego. Various normal and abnormal defense mechanisms are developed to reduce anxiety. The aim of psychoanalytical theory is to lessen anxiety and the need for neurotic, exaggerated defense mechanisms through insight, self-understanding and knowledge of source of anxiety (Morgan, 1981). In 1902 Freud was selected Ausserordentlicher Professor, and in 1905 emerged Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In 1902, Freud organized the Psychological Wednesday Society.
Psychoanalysis is essentially, and necessarily, a theory about creatures that have minds. But Freud’s vision is continually in threat. He himself, attracted as he was by mechanism on the one hand, biology on the other, and always passionate that psychoanalysis be a science, continually tried to reduce mind to something else. In this many analysts continue to follow Freud, when they have not fled in the opposite direction to ‘hermeneutics’ (Marcia Cavell, 1993). In 1909 Freud moved with Carl Jung in the United States. Jung’s close collaboration with Freud ended until 1913.
Jung had become progressively more critical of Freud’s exclusively sexual definition of libido and incest. By the beginning of the 1920s, Freud’s writing had given grow to several associates of psychoanalysis. Many intellectuals have questioned Freud’s theories. Freud, along with Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Albert Einstein (1879-1955), revolutionarized modern Western thinking. Freud considered hysterical symptoms to be the consequence of traumatic experiences, and these traumatic experiences were invariably sexual in nature (New York Times, February 12, 1984).
The Oedipus complex is the core issue of Freud’s theory of childhood development. According to Freud, a boy’s close relation to his mother, as the primary love-object, leads to a desire for complete union with her. A girl, on the other hand, who is similarly attached to the mother and thus caught up in a same sex desire, directs her libido toward her father. This produces a triadic relationship regardless of one’s sex, with the parent of the same sex cast in the role of a rival for the affections of the parent of the opposite sex.
The boy will eventually throw out his incestuous desire for his mother out of fear of being castrated by his father. The girl’s route through the oedipal stage is far more awkward in Freud’s view. “Realizing” that she is castrated and thus inferior, the girl turns away from her similarly castrated mother and attempts to “seduce” her father. Freud discovered that, with many of his patients, conflicts arose during the phallic stage, which occurred between the ages of three and five.
With the onset of the phallic stage, Freud argued, the child’s genitals become libidinal charged, and this leads to a desire for the parent of the opposite sex and a feeling of competitiveness with the parent of the same sex. The particular organization of these conflicts depends on how the child has negotiated the earlier psychosexual stages. Freud felt that the Oedipus complex is ultimately resolved, at least for males, by “castration anxiety”(Morgan, 1981). Freud viewed that the defense mechanisms originates in conflicts among id, ego and super ego.
The ego deals with the demands of reality, the id, and the superego as best as it can. But when the anxiety becomes overwhelming, the ego must defend itself. It does so by unconsciously blocking the impulses or distorting them into a more acceptable, less threatening form. The techniques are called the ego defense mechanisms such as denial, repression, projection, displacement, intellectualization etc. The most fundamental concept of psychoanalysis is the notion of the unconscious mind as a reservoir for repressed memories of traumatic events, which continuously influence conscious thought and behavior.
The scientific evidence for this notion of unconscious repression is lacking, though there is ample evidence that no conscious memory and processes influence conscious thought and behavior. The notion of the unconscious is perhaps one of the most important concepts of the modern age, for it introduces into the human self-image a fundamental gap, ‘heteronomy’. Freud points out that the unconscious seems to be a timeless zone of the psyche, but he does not elaborate on this fascinating idea, which seems to have many reverberations and connections with his ideas about time, memory and repetition (Roger Horrocks, 2001).
In 1896 Freud posited that the symptoms of ‘hysteria’ and obsession neurosis derived from “unconscious” memories of sexual abuse in infancy, and claimed that he had uncovered such incidents for every single one of his current patients. Freud developed his first topology of the psyche in ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ (1899) in which he proposed the argument that the unconscious subsists and explained a method for gaining access to it. The preconscious was described as a layer between conscious and unconscious thought, which we could access with a little effort.
According to Freud, people often experience thoughts and feelings that are so painful that people cannot bear them. Such thoughts and feelings and associated memories could not be displaced from the mind, but could be evacuated from consciousness. Thus they come to constitute the unconscious. Dream analysis introduced observable facts of such a varied type that Freud’s theory, in the form we have examined it, was subject to great strain. In Freud’s mind, no matter how much complexity is introduced into mental events, this fundamental insight must not be lost.
And connected with this insight is the twin conviction that organically derived sexual impulses influence the mind mainly through unconscious channels. These basic ideas focused Freud’s attention on the Unconscious as the dominant factor in mental events (Bartlett H. Stoodley, 1959). Freud observed all human behavior as stimulated by the drives or instincts, which in turn are the neurological depictions of physical needs. Life instincts perpetuate the life of the individual, by motivating him or her to seek food and water, and the life of the species, by motivating him or her to have sex.
The motivational energy of these life instincts powers one’s psyches. Through clinical experience Freud view sex as much more important in the dynamics of the psyche than other needs. In later stage of his life, Freud began to believe that the every thing is not covered in life instinct but it tells some thing more. Libido is an active thing; the pleasure principle keeps us in perpetual motion. And yet the goal of all this motion is to be still, to be satisfied, to be at peace, to have no more needs. The goal of life is death. Freud commenced to believe that “beneath” and “beside” the life instincts there was a death instinct.
He believed that every person has an unconscious desire to die. Freud referred to a nirvana principle. It denotes to non-existence, nothingness, the void, which is the goal of all life in Buddhist philosophy. Freud theorized, sometimes we direct it out away from ourselves, in the form of aggression, cruelty, murder, and destructiveness. Freud’s therapy has been more influential than any other, and more influential than any other part of his theory. In, Free association, the client may talk about anything at all. The theory is that, with relaxation, the unconscious conflicts will certainly drift to the fore.
In therapy, there is the therapist, who is trained to recognize certain clues to problems and their solutions that the client would overlook. Dream analysis: During sleep, person is somewhat less resistant to unconscious and allows a few things, in symbolic form, to come to awareness. These wishes from the id provide the therapist and client with more clues. Many forms of therapy make use of the client’s dreams, but Freudian interpretation is distinct in the tendency to find sexual meanings. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) he reported his self-analysis but also set forth an audacious new theory of the human mind.
He elaborated, applied, and at times revised this theory over the years. Transference takes place when a client projects feelings toward the therapist that more justifiably belong with certain important others. Freud felt that transference was necessary in therapy in order to bring the repressed emotions that have been plaguing the client for so long, to the surface. Freud has largely put the basic form of therapy. Except for some behaviorist therapies, most therapies involve a physically and socially relaxed atmosphere. Psychoanalysis was introduced by Sigmund Freud at the turn of the previous century.
Freud was very defensive of his theory, and he entered into clashes with various colleagues who offered substitute theoretical perspectives. Freud’s psychoanalytic theory is only the commencement. Even those faithful to Freud would significantly expand upon and, ultimately, change Freud’s origin insights into the nature of psychological life.
Work- cited
– 1) Bartlett H. Stoodley; the Concepts of Sigmund Freud. Publisher: Free Press. Place of Publication: Glencoe, IL. Publication Year: 1959. Page Number: 70. 2) Marcia Cavell; The Psychoanalytic Mind: From Freud to Philosophy.Publisher: Harvard University Press. Place of Publication: Cambridge, MA. Publication Year: 1993. Page Number: 1. 3) Morgan Clifford T, King Richard A. , Robinson Nancy M. , Introduction to Psychology; Sixth Edition; Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited; 1981. 4) Roger Horrocks; Freud Revisited: Psychoanalytic Themes in the Postmodern Age. Publisher: Palgrave. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 2001. Page Number: 3. 5) Meckier, Jerome. Our Ford, Our Freud and the Behaviorist Conspiracy in Huxley’s Brave New World. Thalia: Studies in Lit. Humor, Ottawa, 1978, 1:1, pp. 35-59.