The thoughts of Sigmund Freud

This post is inspired and predominantly contains excerpts from the book – ‘Really what Freud said’ from David Stafford-Clark. I fully recommend the book.

Consciousness, pe-consciousness and unconscious

For Freud consciousness is the spotlight which sweeping the arena, lights just that area upon which it falls. If consciousness is then the sum total of everything in which we are aware, per-consciousness is the reservoir of everything we can remember, all that is accessible to voluntary recall: the storehouse of memory. This leaves the unconscious area of mental life to contain all the more primitive drives and impulses influencing our actions without our necessarily ever becoming fully aware of them, together with every important constellation of ideas or memories with a strong emotional charge, which have at one time been present in consciousness but have since been repressed so that they are no longer available to it, even through introspection or attempts at memory.

Freud believe that if everything that we know and remember is regarded as the part of iceberg above the surface at least seven times as much lies below the surface, and determines both the centre of gravity of the whole and much of the movements, direction and fate of the iceberg.

The id, ego and super-ego

The power of the id expresses the true purpose of the individual organism’s life. This consists in the satisfaction of its innate needs. No such purpose as that of keeping itself alive or protecting itself from dangers by means of anxiety can be attributed to the id. That is the task of the ego. Whereas the id is entirely and necessarily unconscious, Freud believed that the ego is that part of it which has been separated to establish contact with the external world and has also thereby found itself able to receive information from within the body and mind, as though it were observing. It remains a part of what it observes and, just as it free neither of the impact of the external world on the one hand, nor of products of the id and of repressed complexes on the other, so too it is influenced by a super ego, that aspect of childhood acceptance and respect for adult authority, standards and ideals which has eventually been introjected. The Ego serves for self-protection; it stores up experiences (memory); avoids excessively strong stimuli (flight); deals with moderate stimuli (adaption); learns to bring expedient changes in external world to its own advantage (activity). Perhaps, because filtering and forgetting serves to protect us, memory failures are seen as acceptable in society in a way that body failures aren’t – whether this is rationally fair is another question.

The id and the super-ego have one thing in common: they both represent the influences of the past – the id the influence of heredity, the super-ego the influence, essentially, of what is taken over from other people – whereas the ego is principally determined by the individuals own experience, that is by accidental and contemporary events. The forces which we assume to exist behind the tensions caused by the needs of the id are called instincts.

Eros (life drive) and Thanatos (Death drive)

Freud believed in two fundamental instincts. He defined the death instinct as a drive commonly encountered in nature to reinstate the former state of affairs, to return organic or living matter to its inorganic unorganized state: life is a but a preparation for death and has its own instinctual drive towards its end. It is seen most obvious in the urge to self-destructive habits such an unnecessary risk-taking, in alcoholism or drug addiction, or in the psychopathic pattern of the lives of those individuals which bring destruction upon themselves and everyone closely associated with them.

However, he specialised in Eros, the life drive. In Freud’s view, the death instinct was so strong in some individuals it ultimately was likely destined to triumph over all the other instinctual drives serving Eros, the life instinct.

First, he states women are more sexually inhibited than men and that the sexual life of normal adults nearly always exceeds in one direction or another what is conventionally regarded as normal, and that excess takes origin from earlier and multiple undifferentiated activities of childhood.

In fact, he believed we think highly of the happiness of childhood because it is still innocent of sexual desires.

He stated the libido gets frustrated by threats of frustrations- anything which threatens, denies or absolutely prohibits the fulfillment of libidinal satisfaction can set up a state of anxiety. Famously, Freud controversially believed that the sexual seduction of parents of opposite sex created mental problems down to the excruciating passion that children hold for parents. Sexuality lies at root of all neurosis, for example OCD and eating disorders. This is because sexuality can be repressed, forbidden or even forgotten, and is unconsciously denied.

Direct anxiety was the expression of dammed up sexual energy; direct exhaustion, in the form of irritable fatigue or neurasthenia, was the effect of over-expenditure of such energy.

COMPLEXES

Oedipus complex

This complex is based upon the classic Greek myth of the innocent prince of Therlas who is victim of an oracle that predicts he will murder father and marry his mother. After learning this, his father abandons him to die as a baby but he is saved and raised by strangers. He proceeds to slay the king, beat the oppressive evil sphinx haunting his people, and marry the queen – who is his mother. Having found out subsequently what he has done, he ends up gouging out his own eyes and wanders blind through the world.

In short, Freud believed the child wanted exclusive possession of his mother, and feared as a result castration from his father – a retaliation for his selfishness. Freud believed girls also held phantasies over possession of their mothers till they became sexually more conscious. Freud saw in the fondness for dolls of very young girls simply a symbolic ownership of another creature over whom they could exert their power.

Electra Complex

This complex represents girls temporary fixations on father’s, at the ages when girls lose sexual innocence. She seeks to win over father using feminine and naive, shameless attraction at the same time as to defy her mother.

Freud believed the choice of a husband in a marriage may be the image of the father, or it may be the narcissistic ideal of the man whom the girl herself wished to become.

Further he believed in transference, after mother’s die, in long lived Electra complexes. ‘The woman’s husband, who to begin with inherited from her father, becomes after a time her mother’s heir as well. So it may easily happen that the second half of a woman’s life may be filled by the struggle against her husband, just as their shorter first half was filled by her rebellion against her mother.’

Psychodynamics of Art

Freud wrote - ‘There is a path that leads back from phantasy to reality – the path that is of art. An artist is once more in rudiments an introvert not far removed from neurosis. He is oppressed by excessively powerful instinctual needs. He desires to win honor, power, wealth, fame and love of women; but he lacks the means for achieving these satisfactions. Consequently, like any other unsatisfied man, he turns away from reality and transfers all his interest, and his libido too, to the wishful construction of phantasy, whence the path might lead to neurosis… for those who are not artists the yield of pleasure to be derived from the sources of phantasy is very limited. The ruthlessness of their repressions forces them to be content with such meager day-dreams as are allowed to become conscious…. An artist makes it possible for other people once more to derive consolation and alleviation from their own sources of pleasure in their unconscious which have become inaccessible to them; he earns their gratitude and admiration and he has thus achieved through his phantasy what originally he had achieved only in his phantasy – honour, power and love of women.’

Childhood

Starting from childhood, the first organ to emerge as an erotogenic zone is the mouth. Independent from nourishment, a baby observes pleasure from sucking and biting in breast-feeding, and children suck their thumbs.

The second organ that emerges as pleasurable is the anus. Anal pleasure comes first from the physical satisfaction of emptying the bowels, and secondarily, as a reward – the mental satisfaction that a child feels from performing the function for their anxious parents.

Thus, it could be interpreted that the holding on to the the contents of rectum, and obstinate behavior of a child refusing to do one’s job in the pot, are ways of defying parental authority, whilst at the same time the child experiences pleasure in the power to prolong the emptying of the bowel.

Freud stressed that parents should not judge a kid, below five years, for playing with genitals as it remained normal exploration.

Freud judged homosexuality as the commonest form of deviation in adult sexual life, an inversion – that is, the in turning of libido on to an object like oneself, rather than a perversion – the turning away from normal heterosexual desires to a desire for partial or distorted symbolic objects. Occurs typically in adolescence when an individual can only fully express sexual feeling through some kind of union and emotional involvement with a member of the same sex. Freud believed sometimes homosexuality stemmed from childhood- the concept of the vagina which bites off the penis, the vagina dentata, can sometimes be found underlying the preference of a male homosexual for another man.

NEUROSES

- Masochism and Sadism

Masochism according to Freud is the primal, natural drive that forms sadism and a primary instinct. It is the urge deconstruct oneself and submit oneself to fate, which Freud conceived as part of the organic and emotional equipment of all living creatures. Freud saw sadism as an an extension of the normal aggressiveness and physical and emotional dominance necessary for one partner to secure full sexual union with another. Thus sadists are masochists and visa-versa. Freud believed sadism came about as a result of masochism.

-Melancholia

A depressive illness most resembling mourning. Freud concluded that there the ego is in fact mourning for somebody or something who has been lost or denied and with whom, once all investment of libido in that person or possibility has been withdrawn, the ego now identifies itself ‘I cannot have you any longer for myself, and so I will become you for myself…’ But this unconscious mechanism is not enough to prevent the sense of outward loss. Not only must the lost object be abandoned and its image identified with the ego, but the lost object must become a bad object because it has been lost, otherwise its loss would be quite unbearable. It may have to be so bad an object that it no longer deserves to live. Can lead to suicide, representing the killing of the ego by the self at the command of the super-ego, if contact with reality gets broken.

-Obsessional Compulsive Disorders

Can be seen mentally when people have an excessive occupation with thoughts in which he or she is not in fact interested in, or likewise in impulses or actions – that is in performances which give him or her no enjoyment.

Impulses drive obsessional neuroses. Freud wrote ‘the impulses which the patient is aware of in himself may also make a childish and senseless impression; but as a rule they have a content of the most frightful kind, tempting him, for instance, to commit serious crimes, so that he not merely disavows them as alien to himself, but flies from them in horror and protects himself from carrying them out by prohibitions, renunciations and restrictions upon his freedom. At the same time, these impulses never – literally never- force their way through to performance; the outcome lies always in victory for the flight and precautions. What the patient actually carries out – his so-called obsessional actions – are very harmless and certainly trivial things, for the most part repetitions or ceremonial elaborations of the activities of ordinary life. But these necessary activities (e.g. cleaning or going for a walk) become extremely tedious and almost insoluble tasks…. He cannot help himself. What is carried into action in an obsessional neurosis sustained by an energy to which we probably know nothing comparable in normal mental life. There is one thing he can do: he can make displacements, and exchanges, he can replace one foolish idea by another somewhat milder, he can proceed from one precaution or prohibition to another instead of one ceremonial he can perform another. He can displace the obsession but not remove it...’

In short, obsessional disorders, such as rituals, are displaced but highly emotionally charged, defensive action designed to propitiate or prevent the fear that he himself may damage, destroy, contaminate, or in some way become sexually involved in a forbidden way with the person whose very identity must be concealed from him and who is, in fact, his father, mother or both.

PYCHOSES

Arise out of a conflict between ego and external world. Chiefly characterized either by a disintegration or by a totally unrealistic and entirely subjective relationship with the outside world, based on fantasy.

-Schizophrenia

Freud believed paranoia and homosexuality were massively linked. The individual believes himself to be the object of persecution by other people, who are either entirely non-existent or who, in the reality of the outside world, may have neither knowledge of his existence nor any wish nor motive to persecute him whatsoever. The central theme is a threatening sexual desire, first denied, then displaced, finally repressed, to e-emerge as a distorted rationalization.

Freud believed this was defense of the ego against an awareness of homosexuality, which in this case is unacceptable and repressed. Thus, to avoid homosexual feelings the ego flips and states ‘I do not love him; on the contrary, I hate him. The final displacement projects this feeling upon the other person or upon all men: ‘It is not that I do not love them, but rather that they hate and do not love me. It is their hatred for me which leads them to persecute me. I remain innocent’. The price of compulsive remained innocence can be delusional.

Thus, a man might become jealous of his wife because his repressed homosexual impulses compel him to envy that he did not want her, and force him to substitute the displaced projection that she did not want him and was therefore being unfaithful to him. He might later develop schizophrenia.

In schizophrenia the egg is the biochemical disturbance, the chicken the emergent illness with its pathetic, poignant combination of malevolent despair, incongruity and contradictory mixtures of elation, terror, dream and delusion. It would be impossible to analyse a schizophrenic patient to complete recovery unless the underlying physio-logical disturbance had subsided or been reversed.

-Narcissism

In these disorders the libido has been withdrawn from the outside world altogether so the object cathexis of normal developing emotional life is lacking. The essential characteristic of psychotic illnesses, of the more severe forms of depression, paranoid delusions, delusions of grandeur, of persecution and of the excessive self-concern with which these conditions are characterized, is that in them, the libidinal cathexis of objects has been withdrawn. Freud believed ‘patients with narcissistic neuroses are simply not interested in analysis or even in the analyst himself. They live in their inner world of woe or exaltation, of terror or despair, and have nothing to offer or to accept from the outside world.

Freud believed narcissism , the preoccupation with oneself as an object of love, is to some extent a normal phenomenon during adolescence. Teenagers begin to concern themselves with their appearance as much as girls do, as both sexes begin to be particularly vulnerable to appeals to their vanity or threats to their private fantasy of what they wish to be like. This period of narcissism leads into a period of normal homosexual interest when the drive for the love object outside the individual’s own self becomes more powerful.

Dreams

When Freud was asked how a person could become a psychologist he would reply -

‘By studying one’s own dreams.’

Freud believed dreams were very sexual and all about repression and metaphors. For instance knives, daggers, resolvers, could be penis metaphors; bottles, rooms, doors, gates, mussels all could could be vagina metaphors. Furthermore, flying, climbing, ladders, staircases, mounting horses could be symbols for sex. There could be many forbidden wishes of an individual that come clear in dreams, and dreams may be censored particularly if dreamer is lucid.

Freud saw dreams as coded puzzles. However, I feel he underestimate that are stories and feeling feelings as much as symbols and repressions. He did however state that the part of the dream wrestled from forgetfulness could be most important – since, it might even lie on the shortest path to the solution of the dream and therefore, was exposed to the most resistance. Thus, he advised people to remember details and stretch the memory hard when you wake, and then to write down dreams.

Religion

Freud treated the idea of and the fact of religious beliefs as no more than projections of the child's relationship to his father made in response to the wider stresses and threats of human existence against which no human father could be expected to protect his son from. He believed abandoned faith survives as superstition whilst theories given up by science mostly still survive in popular beliefs. Neuroses he said is both socially disapproved and related to private sexual anguish. Taboo is socially approved and is related to public social prohibition. For Freud therefore, religion was the survival of tribal neurosis.