Revision:Freud
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Life of Freud
- Oldest of 8 children born in Moravia (Czech Republic); Jewish family
- Medical school in Vienna; neurology
- Showed male eels had testes
- New characteristics of neurons in fish
- First gold-chloride technique of staining nerve tissue
- Cocaine could be used as anesthetic
- Private practice in Vienna for treatment of nervous disorders (Berggasse)
- Had 3 girls and 3 boys
- Persuaded to leave Vienna after Nazi invasion-1938 b/c of Jewish oppression
- Considered all religion an illusion used by civilization to cope w/ feelings of infantile helplessness
- Died from cancer of mouth and jaw (from cigar smoking) on Sept. 23, 1939
View of the Person
- Human nature dominated by instinctual, unconscious, and irrational forces
- Human is selfish; at war w/ self both internally and externally; aggressive and sexual
- No free will; therefore incapable of dealing with own psychological problems
- People turn to religion in hope of gaining control over their urges
- Used self-analysis in order to understand others behavior in terms of himself
- Most important book The Interpretation of Dreams
- Another book Psychopathology of Everyday Life
- Dreams allow people to experience wish fulfillments
- Psychological Determinism a belief that nothing about human behavior occurs by accident or chance
- Personality is "determined"
- Didn't promote biological determinism. Emphasized psychological determinism
- Explored his own childhood as the origins of his behavior
- Belief that boys want to "kill" their fathers in order to "marry" their mothers
- This feeling of his may have created guilt when his dad died. Freud was 40.
Personality Structure
- 3 basic components of personality; 1st is biological side, 2nd is psychological side, 3rd is societies contribution
- Id, Ego, Superego are processes of the mind w/ "job" to organize mental life and interact w/ one another
- All powered by Libido (energy described as psychical desire, erotic tendencies, sexual desire, and motive forces for sexual life)
- Always struggling with each other to dominate personality
- Id origin of personality
- Operates according to the Pleasure Principle (achievement of pleasurable feelings as quickly as possible through the reduction of discomfort, pain, or tension)
- Satisfies it's needs through the Primary Process (continual flow of events involving images and wishes that demand immediate satisfaction)
- Id is the reservoir of instincts
- 2 basic instincts
- Eros represents energy for preserving love for self and love of others.
- Thanatos towards destructiveness and death aimed at returning living things to original lifeless state. Promotion of aggressiveness is most important function.
- Preoccupation w/ self and needs "I want"
- Ego coherent organization of mental processes that develops out of Id energy, has access to consciousness, and devoted to contacting reality to satisfy Id's needs
- Adapt to outside world
- Guided by the Secondary Process (includes intellectual operations like thinking, evaluating, planning, and decision-making that determine whether certain behaviors are beneficial)
- Bridge to reality but not totally conscious
- Ego's reaction to threatening instincts is stress/anxiety
- So, Ego calls upon Defense Mechanisms (internal, unconscious, and automatic psychological strategies for coping and regaining control over id instincts)
- Repression - threatening material is unavailable for recall b/c it's been pressed down into the unconscious
- Projection - protects individuals from threat by allowing them to literally project their own traits to other people
- Rationalization - excuse for threatening and unacceptable behavior and thoughts
- Intellectualize - talk and think at intellectual level rather than emotional about what is threatening them
- Undoing bad behavior by displaying behavior designed to reverse the effects of the undesirable acts
- Exaggerated use of defense mechanisms results in Neuroses (anxiety driven patterns of abnormal behavior from over control of instincts)
- Hysterical Neurosis person develops symptoms of physical disorder to avoid threatening experiences. Pretends.
- Superego representation of society in personality that incorporates norms and standards of culture
- Kid adopts society's rules, regulations, and codes of right and wrong
- Introjection process where personality incorporates norms and standards of its culture through identification w/ parents or role models of society
- Operates according to Morality Principle (code concerning society's values)
- Conscience (internal agent punishing people when they do wrong; guilt)
- To help control Id impulses by directing energy toward inhibiting id's expression of sexual and aggressive instincts
- Seeks to suppress needs of Id rather than satisfy them
- Illogically striving for 100% perfection
- Superego can result in feelings of pride and self-respect through the influence of the Ego Ideal (positive standards in form of internal representations of idealized parental figures)
Five Stages of Personality (Psychosexual Stages)
- 4 of stages associated w/ erogenous zones (sensitive areas of body)
- Sexual as defined by Freud any pleasurable feeling associated w/ stimulation of erogenous zones.
- Libido substituted as term for sexual cravings (reflections of Eros the life instinct)
- Everyone's basic personality is established by age 5
- May become fixated upon a stage; satisfaction frustrated; fixated people likely to show regression
- Every decision you display results from influences present in the unconscious
- Oral (narcissistic) Stage
- birth to 1 year
- focus upon satisfying needs of mouth and digestive tract; incl. Tongue and lips
- Aim of Eros for self-preservation is made possible by nourishment through mouth
- Thumbsucking
- Oral Receptive personality type derived from childhood pleasures of receiving food and digesting it. Form relationships dependent upon others. Gullible. Interested in getting info and knowledge and material goods "will swallow anything"
- Oral Aggressive derived from childhood pleasures of mouth, food, eating, but w/ more chewing, biting, and use of teeth. Sarcastic and argumentative. Seek to hold firmly to others. Aggressive in relationships w/ others<
- Anal Stage (2-3 yrs)
- sexual gratification occurs w/ relieving tension of full bowel and stimulating anus
- toilet training (issue of interpersonal interaction and conflict b/t parent & kid)
- Anal Retentive delay of final satisfactions to last possible moment. Always "save" for the future whether relating to $ or need. Orderliness, stingy and stubborn.
- Anal Expulsive inclination to disregard accepted rules of cleanliness, orderliness, and appropriate behavior. React against others attempts to restrict them by doing what they want whenever and wherever. Messiness, sloppiness, aggressive destructiveness, temper tantrums, emotional outbursts and cruelty.
- Phallic Stage (4-5 yrs)
- satisfaction through masturbation
- central to Freud's theory b/c
- last infantile stage
- provides context where 2 important complexes develop and critical issues of anxiety and envy become relevant
- basis of psychological and social identification for children
- results in psychological and sex-role differences
- determines development of superego
- difference b/t boys and girls
- boys have possessive love for mothers and see fathers as rivals (this thinking influenced by Greek myth)
- Oedipus complex feelings, desires, and strivings revolving around a boys desire for mom and hate toward dad.
- Electra complex love of dad and hate of mom for girls
- Boys experience Castration Anxiety fear that they might lose "boy parts" -vital organ of pleasure
- Girls display penis-envy the wish to obtain one of their own. Girls might blame mothers.
- final step of Oedipal complex is formation of superego
- Fixated male may devote life to sexual promiscuity in quest for sexual gratification not gotten as a child. Or he might get attracted to men.
- girls have more difficult time of identification w/ mothers. Why? Girls have ambivilance for mothers and blame for not giving/taking away her the "boy part" Girls Electra complex also turns to dad in hope of getting "missing part" from him.
- Freud believes that female superego develops less completely than males
- Latency Stage (6-12)
- notable for absence of dominant erogenous zone
- children lay aside attraction to parents and become sexually disinterested
- Libidinous instincts transformed through sublimation (process reorienting instinctual aims that are more personally and culturally acceptable)
- (Ex) teen fixed in anal stage might be interested in clay substituting earlier desires to play w/ feces
- Genital Stage (puberty +)
- phase of mature sexual love; directing feelings of lust and affection towards others
- 1st 3 stages revolved around Cathexes (attachments of libidinous energy to external world objects or fantasized internal images). Pregenital stage cathexes typified by self-centered images. Genital stage Cathexes directed less towards bodily pleasure but more to emotional
- final resolution of Phallic stage identification difficulties for women. Accept themselves.
Freud view of Females
- Girls more dependent on defense mechanism of repression
- Weaker superego development
- Women function at lower morality level than men
- Elizabeth Young-Bruehl (1990) reasoned Freud's view on women that they are innately bisexual. Females first masculine b/c of wish to have "boy part" then female b/c they accept themselves by Genital stage so bisexual.
Free Association
- Freud's primary technique for getting to unconscious
- Person adopts a mental orientation allowing ideas, images, memories, and feelings to be expressed spontaneously
- One can experience Catharsis (process by which inner feelings are openly expressed in words or behaviors)
- Allow expression of anything and everything that comes to mind
- Provides therapists clues about unconscious
Dream Interpretation
- Manifest content of dreams (what is remembered) is deceptive and shouldn't be taken literally
- Dreams are processes of the Id
- Ego deals w/ conscious suppression of dream material by modifying Id instinctual impulses and images represented by dreaming using censorship and symbolic substitution. So, true content of dreams is disguised.
- Latent content underlying meaning of dreams
- Dream symbol something in dream representing some person, thing, or activity involved in the unconscious processes.
- Symbols are personal rather than universal
- Each dream analyzed separately. Result is to discover some wish-fulfillment for the dreamer (the primary purpose of dreaming)
Psychoanalysis
- Systematic procedures for providing systematic procedures for providing a patient with the insight necessary to rid the personality of it's neurotic conflicts.
- Through insight, personally unacceptable and socially taboo experiences buried in unconscious can be made conscious.
- Freud tried hypnosis but was discouraged b/c afterwards symptoms didn't go away
- Free association allowed patients to consciously comprehend everything they said while saying it.
- Couch used helps patients relax for effective free association
- Sat behind patients to minimize therapist influence upon psychological explorations
- Transference patients relate to psychoanalyst as if he were from their past w/ whom they continued conflict with.
- Countertransference when analysts project their own unconscious needs to the patient
Supporting and Qualifying Evidence
- McVicker Hunt (1979) assessed evidence of lines of investigation from Freud's ideas. Found the studies "lent support"; to Freud's proposition about "importance of childhood" but not to his psychosexual experiences.
- Salvatore Maddi (1968) concluded that there's qualified support for 2 Freudian concepts. Although Not all behavior is defensive, ego defense is supported by studies relating to repression and there's more evidence of castration anxiety among men than women.
- Lloyd Silvermam (1976) summarized 2 10-yr research programs. These independent lab studies support relationship b/t certain types of abnormal behavior and and types of unconscious conflict.
- Psychoanalytic Theory predicts that info relevant to a certain fixation or inner conflict would affect persons w/ that fixation/conflict, but info related to other kinds of fixations would have no effect on them.
- Blum (1949,1950,1962) assessed psychosexual fantasies in college students asked to tell stories of series of cartoon pictures of a dog. Study on castration anxiety in men and "envy" in women.
- Hall and Van de Castle (1965) to determine presence of castration anxiety, wishes, and envy. Study severely criticized b/c used explanations of results provided by non-Freudian theories.
- Raskin and Shaw (1988) research for evidence on Freud's oral stage.
- Gabriel, Critelli, and Ee (1994) examined positive illusions of intelligence and physical attractiveness among people administered a narcissism test
- DeAngelis (1994) 1st convincing experimental evidence for Freud's transference. Reported research by Anderson where subjects described sig. Other and exposed to characterizations of fictional others including one like the descriptions. Memory test where they falsely remembered features of a significant other as belonging to the partially similar fictional other, even if the feature was not part of what they said. Show we have mental images of sig. Others from earlier that we may project as a whole onto people we encounter later in life that resemble the sig.other. Freud would agree that we tend to see the partial replica as totally like the original. Emotional reactions may also be consistent w/ memory image and persons resembling.
- Slips of the Tongue have evidence of unconscious.
- Michael Motley (1985;1987) slips are due to misfiring of brain and verbal mechanisms. Motley believes traditional notions of unconscious may not be entirely w/o merit. Can be embarrassing. When environment contains clues relating to certain motivations we tend to have in unconscious mind, words representing the forbidden motivation may pop out.
- Greenwald (1992) says unconscious may be simple, straightforward and unanalytical compared to consciousness
Limitations on Psychoanalytic Theory (PT)
- Cannot be considered a fully scientific theory
- Concepts are not open to direct observation; hard to test significantly
- Little ability to predict behavior
- Concepts work well when applied backwards, accounting for the past after facts have been gathered (Stanovich, 1989)
- Primary setting for gathering data has been the clinic, not laboratory. In clinic, events that are irrelevant to diagnosis and treatment act on patients and analysts but can't be controlled.
- Analysts, as observers, influence what they observe (Joseph 1980) Maybe requiring analysts to undergo psychoanalysis may lessen their influence by allowing them to see from patients' perspective.
- Clinic subject samples are unrepresentative of people in general
- Freud's major case studies were of Venetian women w/ abnormal behaviors, upper class and single.
- Ideas relied heavily on childhood. He had few child patients
- Assumptions about children may be questioned
- 2 studies show 50% of kids 4-6 have knowledge of differences b/t girls and boys and these children showed little emotional trauma over it. (Conn and Kanner 1947, Katcher 1955)
- Kohlberg (1966) says a better alternative to castration anxiety is general childhood fear of bodily injury, not fear of losing a sex organ.
- Foundation of Psychoanalytic theory has been questioned.
- Freud's Seduction thesis belief that early patients were actually sexually molested in childhood and repressed memories of these traumas were source of their adult hysterical neuroses.
- Freud changed his "real abuse" to "fantasy abuse" in later letters to Masson. Changed not for objective, scientific purposes but for personal reasons.
- Masson's reliability has even been questioned. Some believe Freud had honest change of heart.
- Early patients never claimed they were seduced (Esterson 1993
- Freud may have just suggested their seduction. Patients were under pressure to report memories of seduction so they may have falsely admitted (Powell and Boer 1994)
- Patients may have also shown "false memory syndrome" (Loftus 1993)
- Freud reported different findings at different times. Could've been a liar or collected false evidence.
In summary of Masson guy
Masson accused that Freud, for personal reasons, abandoned an earlier seduction theory in favor of fantasy position. In addition, Powell and Boer charge that Freud suggested seduction scenarios to patients who incorporated them into memory. Esterson asserted that patient's reports to Freud contained nothing regarding to seduction; rather Freud consciously or unconsciously invented the seduction scenarios.
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