Sigmund Freud: Biography and Early Life

Biography

• Sigmund Freud was born on March 6 or May 6, 1856, in Freiberg, Moravia, today part of the Czech Republic.
• Freud lacked close relationships with his younger siblings.
• He had a warm, indulgent relationship with his mother.
• This led him to consider the mother/son relationship as the most perfect.
• When Freud was around 1.5 years old, his mother gave birth to Julius, which significantly impacted Freud's psychic development.
• Sigmund had hostility toward Julius and harbored an unconscious wish for his death.
• Julius's death at 6 months left Sigmund with feelings of guilt for his brother's death.
• Freud excelled as a student from a young age.
• Despite limited family finances, Freud had his own room with an oil lamp.
• He had a classical education, studying Greek and Latin.
• Freud had a command of German and fluency in French, English, Spanish, and Italian.
• Freud dreamed of becoming an Austrian general or minister.
• Due to anti-Semitism, professional careers except medicine and law were closed to him.
• Freud reluctantly chose a medical career and entered the University of Vienna's Faculty of Medicine in 1873.
• In 1885, Freud studied in Paris with neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot.
• He learned the hypnotic technique for treating hysteria from Charcot.
• Hysteria is characterized by paralysis or improper bodily functions.
• Freud had a professional association and friendship with Josef Breuer.
• Breuer taught Freud about catharsis: removing hysterical symptoms through "talking them out."
• Freud gradually discovered the free association technique through catharsis.
• Free association soon replaced hypnosis as his main therapy.
• During the late 1890s, Freud experienced professional isolation and personal crises.
• He analyzed his own dreams and, after his father's death in 1896, initiated daily self-analysis.
• He completed his work, Interpretation of Dreams (1900/1953).
• The book, finished in 1899, was based on self-analysis revealed to Wilhelm Fliess.
• The book contained Freud's own dreams, disguised with fictitious names.
• World War I was difficult for Freud, he was cut off from followers and lacked food and heat at home.
• After the war, despite aging and 33 mouth cancer operations, he revised his theory.
• In 40 years of writing and clinical practice, Freud developed a comprehensive personality theory, clinical observations based on his therapeutic experience and self-analysis, a method for treating mental disorders, and a procedure for investigating inaccessible mental processes.

Albert's Case

• An 18-year-old man is referred to a psychoanalyst due to headaches, dizziness, heart palpitations, anxiety, and a fear of death.
• Albert thinks he has a brain tumor and is going to die, even after medical tests find no physical cause.
• The physician concludes Albert's symptoms are psychologically based.
• Albert describes his relationships with his parents as "rosy".
• Though, his dad is "a little on the strict side", exemplified by rules about week nights, Saturday nights, and breaking up his relationship.
• Albert displays no conscious resentment.

Levels of Mental Life

• People are motivated primarily by drives they have little or no awareness of.
• Freud used a mental "map" to describe how thoughts and fantasies vary in accessibility to awareness.
• He proposed 3 levels of mental life: the unconscious, preconscious, and conscious, known as the Topographical Model.

Unconscious

• It involves drives, urges, or instincts beyond awareness.
• These drives motivate words, feelings, and actions.
• While overt behaviors may be conscious, the mental processes behind them often are not.
• Its existence is proved indirectly through the explanation for dreams, slips of the tongue, and repression.
• Significant aspects of behavior are shaped by unconscious impulses and drives.
• These unconscious forces face resistance in becoming conscious. Unconscious modes are inadmissible to awareness.
• Psychoanalysis emphasizes interpretation of fantasies and dreams for deeper understanding.

Preconscious

• Sometimes called "available memory," it includes elements not conscious but can readily become so.
• Memories, ID number, towns lived in, and favorite foods may be included.
• The preconscious bridges the unconscious and conscious.

Conscious

• It includes sensations and experiences of which one is aware at the moment.
• It is the only directly available level of mental life.
• Freud insisted only a small part of mental life is contained in the realm of consciousness.

Structural Model

• Unconscious mental processes was central to Freud's early description of personality organization.
• In the early 1920s, Freud revised the model of mental life and introduced three structures: id, ego, and superego.
• The tripartite is known as the structural model of mental life, though Freud viewed the divisions as hypothetical processes.

Provinces Of The Mind

• They are hypothetical constructs with no territorial existence, but they interact with the levels of mental life
• The ego has conscious, preconscious, and unconscious components and cuts across the topographic levels.
• The superego is preconscious and unconscious, while the id is entirely unconscious.

The ID

• It contains instinctive drives and is the only personality structure at birth.
• It's primitive, chaotic, unchangeable, amoral, illogical, unorganized, and filled with energy discharged for the pleasure principle.
• The id is completely unconscious.
• There is no contact with reality, but it reduces tension by satisfying basic desires.
• The id operates according to the primary process and functions only to seek pleasure and avoid pain.
• It ignores time, recognizes no past or future, and demands immediate gratification.
• If reality does not satisfy urges, it resorts to, hallucinatory wish fulfillment, simply imagining that needs are met.

The EGO

• It resolves conflict and operates according to the reality principle.
• The EGO adapts to real-world limits.
• The EGO can delay gratification and plan, termed Secondary Process, characterized by logical thought, and is the only region of the mind in contact with reality.
• During infancy, it grows out of the id and communicates with the external world.
• It is governed by the reality principle, substituting for the id's pleasure principle.
• As the sole region in contact with the external world, the ego makes decisions.
• It is partly conscious, partly preconscious, and partly unconscious, and it makes decisions on each of those levels.
• For instance, a woman may be consciously motivated by their ego to dress well because it is comforting.
• There is unconscious motivation to be excessively neat and the decision takes place on all three levels of mental life.

The Superego

• It represents moral and ideal aspects of personality and is guided by moralistic and idealistic principles.
• The Superego has no contact with the outside world and is not concerned with happiness or practicality.
• It is known to be unrealistic in its demands for perfection.
• A well-developed superego controls sexual and aggressive impulses through repression.
• It does not produce repressions itself, but can order the ego to do so.
• It watches and judges the ego's actions and intentions.
• Guilt is the feeling when the ego acts contrary to the superego's moral standards.
• Feelings of inferiority come when the ego that does not meet the superego's standards.
• The superego has two subsystems: conscience and ego-ideal.
• Conscience comes from experiences of punishment from improper behavior and tells us what not to do.
• The ego-ideal comes from experience of reward for good behavior and tells us what we should do.

Dynamics of Personality

• Levels of mental life and provinces of the mind refer to the structure of personality.
• People are motivated to seek pleasure and reduce tension and anxiety
• This motivation comes from psychic and physical energy that springs from basic drives.
• Drives operate as a constant motivational force, differing from external stimuli because they can't be avoided through flight.
• The drives can be grouped under sex or Eros and aggression, distraction, or Thanatos. These originate in the id but come under ego control.
• The aim of the sexual drive is pleasure, but it is not limited to genital satisfaction, but the entire body is invested with libido.
• Erogenous zones, including the mouth and anus, produce pleasure.
• To Freud, all pleasurable activity is traceable to the sexual drive.
• Sex can take many forms, like narcissism, love, sadism, and masochism.
• Infants are self-centered.
• Their libido is invested in their own ego, called primary narcissism.
• As the ego develops, children give up primary narcissism and become more interested in others.
• Adolescents redirect libido to the ego and focus on self-interests, called secondary narcissism.
• Moderate degree of self-love is common to nearly everyone.
• The aim of the destructive drive is to return the organism to an inorganic state, leading to self-destruction.
• Aggressive drive can take many forms and everyone has an aggressive tendency.
• Anxiety is a felt, unpleasant state accompanied by a sensation that warns against impending danger.
• The unpleasantness may be vague, but the anxiety itself is felt.
• Only the ego feels anxiety; id, superego, and the external world are involved in one of three anxieties.
• The ego's dependence on the id results in neurotic anxiety, its dependence on the superego produces moral anxiety, and its dependence on the world produces it to realistic anxiety.
• Neurotic anxiety is apprehension about an unknown danger and an emotional response to the threat that id impulses will become conscious.
• Neurotic anxiety exists in the ego but originates from id impulses.
• Childhood feelings of hostility are often accompanied by fear of punishment, generalized into unconscious neurotic anxiety.
• Moral anxiety stems the conflict between the ego and superego.
• Moral comes when the ego is threatened by punishment and expresses immoral thoughts and acts, and superego responds with shame, guilt, and self-condemnation.
• Realistic anxiety occurs as a response to real dangers in the external environment.
• It is an unpleasant feeling involving a possible danger..
• However, fear has a specific fearful object.

Ego-Defense Mechanisms

• Freud defined ego defense mechanisms as strategies to defend against open expression of id impulses and superego pressures.
• Ego defense mechanisms all share two features and operate at an unconscious level.
• They distort reality, making anxiety less threatening, acting in a deceptive manner.

Repression

• Freud regarded repression as the primary ego defense.
• The ego protects itself by repressing undesirable id impulses, which forces feelings into the unconscious.
• For example, a young girl may repress hostility toward a younger sister because her hateful feelings create too much anxiety.
• As a result, a person who has failure cannot recount it due to repression.
• Impulses may remain unchanged in the unconscious or force their way into consciousness in unaltered, or anxiety-inducing form.
• They may be expressed instead in displaced or disguised forms.
• Repressed drives find an outlet in dreams, slips of the tongue, or other defense mechanisms.

Reaction Formation

• Here the user adopts a disguise that is directly opposite its original form.
• First, the unacceptable impulse is repressed, but, then, the opposite is expressed on a conscious level
• Reactionary behavior can be identified by exaggerated character and obsessive form.

Displacement

• Reaction formations are limited to a single object.
• Expression of an instinctive impulse is redirected from a threatening person/object to a less threatening one.
• In displacement, people redirect unacceptable urges onto a variety of acceptable alternatives so that the original impulse is disguised.

Fixation

• This means a fixation of psychical growth versus psychological growth
• Anxiety-provoking prospects can cause the ego may resort to the strategy of remaining at a present, but still, a comfortable psychological stage.
• Fixations reveal inadequately resolved problems in the developmental stage. People who continually derive pleasure from self-destructive behaviors may have an oral fixation.

Regression

• Regression is a special case of fixation.
• A form of libido has been present in a developmental stage.
• Yet and especially under times of stress and anxiety, may revert back/regress to that earlier stage.
• Reverting to an earlier stage of psychosexual development and displaying the behavior appropriate to that period.
• For example, a completely weaned child can revert to infantile habits when they're born a a sibling.
• Whereas more severe stress or trauma can cause adults to curl into a fetal position, or even return to their childhood homes.

Projection

• Projection as a defense mechanism.
• Projection is ranked second to repression in it's' theoretical importance.
• It refers to that of unconsciously attributing someone else's own, otherwise, unacceptable impulses, attitudes, and behaivors to another individual or its' surrounding's.
• When another impulse provokes too much anxiety, the ego itself may need to somehow get rid of that anxiety by giving it away a unwanted impulse.

Introjection

• Adapting positive qualities of another indivdual. For example, an adolesecent to make an introject an adult could copy and lifestyles or attitudes
• For example, an adolescent is inspired and introjects, and begins to mirror/ copy their values. And thus, inflates sense of worth.
• Resolution of that so soughted after.

Sublimation

• The repression of the genital aim of Eros by instead introducing something which is a either a cultural or social aim.
• Sublimation can help more than just the individual but also the social group.
• Expressed as that of creative or even cultural accomplishments.
• An idnivual who may in fact have a lot of unrecognizable hostility.

Rationalization

• Misinterpretation of otherwise irrational action of bad decision making in itself in one to at least somehow, appear more and then rational in the end. Then, and thus, find a way to at least, be more then justifiable to other individuals.
• This means to explain away certain action, through that of rationalization in and for itself.
• A student get's declined and rationalizes it by concluding as someone whom simply wasn't attractive anyway.

Psychosexual Development

• Theory of development is based simply on two premises.
• One, adult personality will be shaped by each individuals types of early childhood.
• Sexual enery (libido) is now present at birth and thus is only progress to therafter of a series of psychosexual changes.

Stages of Development

• Each and every stage here, is simply marked by one main and primary erogenous zone.
• Major human development has a sexual instinct. Which is as if and only progresses through that in whih are both erogenous zones and throughoout these early development
• At almost point in which there are several dequel ce someone must go and attempt to make and feel there are certain objects being sought after.
• Social experiences will supposedly tell those traits.
• Frustration is over indulgent and thus, in and because of frustration, those individuals psycgosexual.
• In that which case, that of where the childs physical development is thwarted.

Oral Stage

• The mouth is their first organ that has been show able to tell provid some bit of pleasure,
• Sustain life through oral.
• Sucking and shallowing in its' ability, is what grants it's' pleasure.
• Infants are more then just, very reliant on certain others .
• Breast or bottles provide some bit of pleasure production.
• And by doing so, feeling any ambivalence is rare, needs have been meet.
• As such, they begin to experience anxiety of weaning.

Anal Phase

• Oral sidism grows during the second half of any year in and during that very anus phase.
• In that very time ,a child that is young and small ,and young during those feces moment .
• In toliet trainging, a child with distinguish between the in that demand.

Phallic Stage

• Once those genitas, begin to become.
• But thus as an anatomy , difference in certain sexes.
• Children must express themsselvsd.

MALE OEDIPUS COMPLEX

• Identitying with a father must want to his mother
• Fantasy or overt behaivros
• The boy see's the father as a obstacle along their path for that.

FEMALE OEDIPUS COMPLEX

• Love for a mother.
• If the first thing in their existence.
• Discovering certain traits has to be the reason for all this.
• The so called, final solution is, if that or other This happens while, as a result of a traumatic evnet, or an experience. Or not at all.

Latency Period

• A child will want, if and when successful,.
• During puberty all youth experiences suppression.

Genital Period

• All youth begin to go through puberty during these processes.
• First then. They then must. Thereof, they all more that, attempt.

Albert: Why the hell did you decide to take a two-week vacation with your wife

This has and had come to as a certain realization That is of a level. One can even go as to say. Someone is more then likely reacting to that of whatever.

Later Technique

• Is of all which this will need to find and find that in which, most. All of in and of for which. In the position is, because that, that transformation.

Free Association And Resistance

• Has as an insight if and. If any thing this seems.
• In their mind in itself, this is what.

Applications of Psychoanalytic theory

• Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of development is based on two premises:
• The genetic approach: Adult personality is shaped by experiences in early childhood. Sexual energy is present at birth, progressing through psychosexual stages rooted in the instinctual processes of the organism.

Freud/ Science

• Freud attempted to exclude psychoanalysis from the realm ideology, and philosophy
• He did not try to include it in the definition of natural science
• Freud viewed M/F psychosexual development in the early years as the inverse of one another
• Later proposed that female development was not actual development (failed males)
• He refused to compromise views and staunchly backed them.