Sigmund Freud Biography

Sigmund Freud Biography

• Born either March 6 or May 6, 1856, in Freiberg, Moravia, now part of the Czech Republic.
• He lacked close friendships with younger siblings.
• He had a tender, indulgent bond with his mother, leading him to believe the mother/son relationship was the most perfect in the world.
• When Freud was about a year and a half old, his mother gave birth to a second son Julius, an event that greatly affected Freud's psychic development.
• Sigmund was filled with hostility toward his younger brother and harbored an unconscious wish for his death.
• Sigmund was left with feelings of guilt at having caused his brother's death when Julius died at 6 months of age.
• Freud was an excellent student from a young age.
• Despite his family's financial constraints, Freud had his own room to study in.
• Freud received a classical education, studying Greek and Latin and reading the classics of various countries.
• Freud had a superb command of German.
• Freud earned a prize for his literary skills and had considerable fluency in French, English, Spanish, and Italian.
• Freud had childhood dreams of becoming a great Austrian general or minister of state.
• Because he was Jewish, all professional careers except medicine and law were closed to him due to the prevailing anti-Semitic climate.
• Freud reluctantly decided upon a medical career.
• He entered the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Vienna in 1873.
• In 1885, he decided to study in Paris with the famous French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot.
• He spent 4 months with Charcot.
• Charcot educated Freud in the hypnotic technique for treating hysteria, a disorder characterized by paralysis or the improper functioning of certain parts of the body.
• Freud developed a close professional association and a personal friendship with Josef Breuer while still a medical student.
• Breuer taught Freud taught about catharsis, the process of removing hysterical symptoms through "talking them out."
• While using catharsis, Freud gradually discovered the free association technique, which soon replaced hypnosis as his primary therapeutic approach.
• During the late 1890s, Freud suffered both professional isolation and personal crises.
• Freud had begun to analyze his own dreams.
• After the death of his father in 1896, he initiated the practice of analyzing himself daily.
• Freud completed his Interpretation of Dreams (1900/1953) during this period.
• This book, finished in 1899, grew out of his self-analysis, which he revealed to his friend Wilhelm Fliess.
• The book contained many of Freud's dreams, some disguised behind fictitious names.
• Communication with followers was cut off, his home was sometimes without heat, and his family had little food during World War 1.
• Important revisions to theory followed 33 operations for cancer of the mouth

Freud's Development

• Freud developed through active writing and practice:
  • The first comprehensive personality theory.
  • An intensive body of clinical observations based on his therapeutic experience and self-analysis.
  • A compelling method for treating mental or behavioral disorders.
  • A procedure for investigating otherwise inaccessible mental processes.

Levels of Mental Life (Topographical Model)

• People are motivated primarily by drives of which they have little or no awareness.
• This mental "map" describes the degree to which mental events such as thoughts and fantasies are accessible to awareness.
• Mental life divides into three levels: the unconscious, the preconscious, and the conscious.

The Unconscious

• Involves all the drives, urges, or instincts that are beyond awareness.
• These things motivate most of our words, feelings, and actions.
• Although we may be conscious of our overt behaviors, we often are not aware of the mental processes that lie behind them.
• Its existence could be proved only indirectly with the explanation for the meaning of dreams, slips of the tongue, and certain kinds of forgetting called repression.
• Significant aspects of human behavior are shaped and directed by impulses and drives that are outside the realm of awareness.
• These forces are unconscious, but there is resistance within the individual to their ever becoming conscious.
• Unconscious modes of thought are completely inadmissible to awareness, yet they largely determine the actions of people.
• Psychoanalysis thus emphasizes the interpretation of fantasies and dreams as avenues for deeper understanding.

The Preconscious

• Sometimes called «available memory.
• Involves all those elements that are not conscious but can become conscious either quite readily or with some difficulty.
• This include memories of everything you did last week, ID number, all the towns you ever lived in, favorite foods, and a host of other past experiences.
• Bridges the unconscious and conscious regions of the mind.

The Concious

• Includes all the sensations and experiences of which we are aware at the moment.
• It is the only level of mental life directly available to us.
• Only a small part of mental life (thoughts, perceptions, feelings, memories) is contained in the realm of consciousness.

Structural Model

• The concept of unconscious mental processes was central to early descriptions of personality organization.
• However, in the early 1920s the conceptual model of mental life was revised and introduced three basic structures in the anatomy of personality: id, ego, and superego.
• Known as the structural model of mental life.
• Divisions should be understood as hypothetical processes rather than as specific structures of personality.

Provinces of the Mind

• Provinces or regions do not have territorial existence, merely hypothetical constructs.
• Interact with the three levels of mental life.
• The ego cuts across the various topographic levels and has conscious, preconscious, and unconscious components.
• The superego is both preconscious and unconscious.
• The id is completely unconscious.

The ID

• Contains instinctive drives, the only personality structure present at birth.
• Primitive, chaotic, unchangeable, amoral, illogical, unorganized, and filled with energy received from basic drives and discharged for the satisfaction of the pleasure principle.
• Completely unconscious.
• No contact with reality, yet strives constantly to reduce tension by satisfying basic desires.
• It serves the pleasure principle because its sole function is to seek pleasure and avoid pain.
• Functions according to the purely instinctive primary process.
• The primary process ignores time, recognizing no past and no future, only the present moment.
• Demands immediate gratification, it cannot wait or plan.
• If reality does not satisfy its urges, it may resort to hallucinatory wish fulfillment to simply imagine its needs are met.

The EGO

• Resolves conflict and operates according to the reality principle, adapting to constraints of the real world.
• Can delay gratification and plan, abilities termed Secondary Process, characterized by logical thought.
• The only region of the mind in contact with reality.
• It grows out of the id during infancy and becomes a person's sole source of communication with the external world.
• The ego governs the reality principle, which it tries to substitute for the pleasure principle of the id.
• As the sole region of the mind in contact with the external world, the ego becomes the decision-making or executive branch of personality.
• It is partly conscious, partly preconscious, and partly unconscious, the ego can make decisions on each of these three levels.
• For instance, a woman's ego may consciously motivate her to choose excessively neat, well-tailored clothes because she feels comfortable when well dressed.
• At the same time, she may be only dimly (i.e., preconsciously) aware of previous experiences of being rewarded for choosing nice clothes.
• In addition, she may be unconsciously motivated to be excessively neat and orderly due to early childhood experiences of toilet training. Thus, her decision to wear neat clothes can take place in all three levels of mental life.
• When performing its cognitive and intellectual functions, the ego must take into consideration the incompatible but equally unrealistic demands of the id and the superego.
• Thus, the ego constantly tries to reconcile the irrational claims of the id and the superego with the realistic demands of the external world.
• Finding itself surrounded on three sides by divergent and hostile forces, the ego reacts in anxious manner.
• It then uses repression and other defense mechanisms to defend itself against this anxiety.

The SuperEgo

• Learns what to do in order to gain pleasure and avoid pain as children begin to experience parental rewards and punishments.
• Pleasure and pain are ego functions because children have not yet developed a conscience and ego-ideal.
• As children reach the age of 5 or 6 years, they identify with their parents and begin to learn what they should and should not do and the superego is formed.
• The superego has two subsystems:
  • the conscience results from experiences with punishments for improper behavior and tells us what we should not do.
  • the ego-ideal develops from experiences with rewards for proper behavior and tells us what we should do.
• It represents the moral and ideal aspects of personality and is guided by the moralistic and idealistic principles.
• Moralistic and idealistic principles stand opposed to the pleasure principle of the id and the realistic principle of the ego.
• It has no contact with the outside world and it is neither concerned with the happiness of the ego nor the practicability of its requirements.
• Therefore, it is unrealistic in its demands for perfection.
• A well-developed one acts to control sexual and aggressive impulses through the process of repression.
• It cannot produce repressions by itself, but it can order the ego to do so.
• It watches and judges the ego's actions and intentions.
• Guilt results when the ego acts contrary to the moral standards.
• Feelings of inferiority arise when the ego is unable to meet the superego's standards of perfection.
• Guilt is a function of the conscience, and inferiority feelings stem from the ego-ideal.

Dynamics of the Personality

• Levels of mental life and provinces of the mind refer to the structure or composition of personality, but personalities also do something.
• People are motivated to seek pleasure and to reduce tension and anxiety.
• This motivation is derived from psychical and physical energy that springs from the basic drives.
• Drives operate as a constant motivational force and differ from external stimuli in that they cannot be avoided through flight.
• According to Freud, the various drives can all be grouped under two major headings: sex or Eros and aggression, distraction, or Thanatos.
• These drives originate in the id, but they come under the control of the ego.

Sexual Drives

• The aim of the sexual drive is pleasure but pleasure is not limited to genital satisfaction.
• The entire body is invested with libido.
• Erogenous zones = the mouth and anus also capable of producing sexual pleasure
• All pleasurable activity is traceable to the sexual drive.
• Sex can take many forms, including narcissism, love, sadism, and masochism.
• The latter two also possess generous components of the aggressive drive.
• Infants are primarily self-centered, their libido invested on their own ego; also known as primary narcissism.
• As the ego develops, children usually give up much of their primary narcissism and develop a greater interest in other people. During puberty, however, adolescents often redirect their libido back to the ego and become preoccupied with personal appearance.
• This is pronounced secondary narcissism
• Secondary narcissism is not universal.
• A moderate degree of self-love is common to nearly everyone.

Aggression

• The aim of the destructive drive is to return the organism to an inorganic state.
• The ultimate inorganic condition is death, the final aim of the aggressive drive is self-destruction.
• Can take many forms, such as teasing, gossip, sarcasm, humiliation, humor, and the enjoyment of other people's suffering.
• The aggressive tendency is present in everyone.

Anxiety

• A felt, affective, unpleasant state accompanied by a physical sensation that warns the person against impending danger.
• The unpleasantness is often vague and hard to pinpoint, but the anxiety itself is always felt.
• Only the ego can produce or feel anxiety; but the id, superego, and external world each are involved in one of three kinds of anxiety: neurotic, moral, and realistic.
• The ego's dependence on the id results in neurotic anxiety.
• Its dependence on the superego produces moral anxiety.
• Its dependence on the outer world leads to realistic anxiety.

Neurotic Anxiety

• An apprehension about an unknown danger.
• An emotional response to the threat that id impulses will become conscious
• Exists in the ego, but it originates from id impulses.
• During childhood, feelings of hostility are often accompanied by fear of punishment, and this fear becomes generalized into unconscious neurotic anxiety.

Moral Anxiety

• Stems from the conflict between the ego and the superego.
• When the ego is threatened by punishment from the superego
• It occurs whenever the id strives toward active expression of immoral thoughts or acts and the superego responds with feelings of shame, guilt, and self-condemnation.
• After children establish a superego (usually by the age of 5 or 6), they may experience anxiety as an outgrowth of the conflict between realistic needs and the dictates of their superego.

Realistic Anxiety

• The emotional response to threat and/or perception of real dangers in the external environment (snakes, wild animals, earthquakes, final exams).
• An unpleasant, nonspecific feeling involving a possible danger.
• But realistic anxiety is different from fear in that it does not involve a specific fearful object.

Ego Defence Mechanisms

• Freud defined an ego defense mechanism as a strategy used by the individual to defend against open expression of id impulses and opposing superego pressures.
• All defense mechanisms share two common features:
  • They operate at an unconscious level and are therefore self-deceptive
  • They distort one's perception of reality, so as to make anxiety less threatening to the individual

Repression

• The primary ego defense.
• Whenever the ego is threatened by undesirable id impulses, it protects itself by repressing those impulses; that is, it forces threatening feelings into the unconscious.
• For example, a young girl may permanently repress her hostility for a younger sister because her hateful feelings create too much anxiety.
• A person who has suffered a terrifying personal failure may through repression become unable to recount the experience.
• The impulses may remain unchanged in the unconscious.
• They can force their way into consciousness in an unaltered form, in which case they would create more anxiety.
• They are expressed in displaced or disguised forms.
• Repressed drives may also find an outlet in dreams, slips of the tongue, or one of the other defense mechanisms.

Reaction Formation

• Adopting a disguise that is directly opposite its original form.
• First, the unacceptable impulse is repressed, next the opposite is expressed on a conscious level
• Reactive behavior can be identified by its exaggerated character and by its obsessive and compulsive form.

Displacement

• Reaction formations are limited to a single object.
• The expression of an instinctual impulse is redirected from a more threatening person or object to a less threatening one.
• People can redirect their unacceptable urges onto a variety of people or objects so that the original impulse is disguised.
• For example, a woman who is angry at her roommate may displace her anger onto her employees, her pet cat, or a stuffed animal.

Fixation

• Psychical growth versus Psychological growth
• When the prospect of taking the next step becomes too anxiety provoking, the ego may resort to the strategy of remaining at the present, more comfortable psychological stage.
• Remaining at an early psychosexual stage. Fixations reveal inadequately resolved problems in the developmental stage during which they occur.
• People who continually derive pleasure from eating, smoking, or talking may have an oral fixation.

Regression

• Regression is a special case of fixation and occurs when the libido has passed a developmental stage.
• During times of stress and anxiety it may then revert back to that earlier stage.
• This means reverting to an earlier stage of psychosexual development, displaying the childish behavior appropriate to that period.
• For example, a completely weaned child may regress to demanding a bottle or nipple when a baby brother or sister is born.
• Under extreme stress one adult may adopt the fetal position, another may return home to mother, and still another may react by remaining all day in bed, well covered from the cold and threatening world.

Projection

• Next to repression, it is the second most important defense mechanism.
• Refers to unconsciously attributing one's own unacceptable impulses, attitudes, and behaviors to other people or to the environment.
• When an internal impulse provokes too much anxiety, the ego may reduce that anxiety by attributing the unwanted impulse to an external object, usually another person.
• Enables people to blame someone or something else for our own shortcomings.
• e.g. The student who inadequately prepares for an examination, and then attributes his/her failing grade to an unfair test, the cheating of others, or a professor who failed to explain the points at issue.

Introjection

• Incorporating positive qualities of another person into their own ego.
• For example, an adolescent may introject or adopt the mannerisms, values, or lifestyle of a movie star.
• Such an introjection gives the adolescent an inflated sense of self-worth and keeps feelings of inferiority to a minimum.
• Resolves the Oedipus complex as the prototype of introjection

Sublimation

• The repression of the genital aim of Eros by substituting a cultural or social aim.
• Sublimation helps both the individual and the social group.
• Expressed most obviously in creative cultural accomplishments such as art, music, and literature.
• More subtly, it is part of all human relationships and all social pursuits.
• One with a great deal of unrecognized hostility may become a butcher.

Rationalization

• Misinterpretation of irrational behavior in order to make it appear rational and thus justifiable to oneself and others.
• One's mistakes, poor judgements, and failures can be explained away through the magic of rationalization.
• A student who is refused a date by a female classmate and consoles himself by concluding that she wasn't very attractive anyway.

Stages of Development

• Theory of development is based on two premises:
  • the adult personality is shaped by various types of early childhood experiences.
  • a certain amount of sexual energy (libido) is present at birth and thereafter progresses through a series of psychosexual stages that are rooted in the instinctual processes of the organism.
• Each stage is marked by a primary erogenous zone. The term psychosexual emphasizes that the major underlying human development is the sexual instinct as it progresses through the erogenous zoned during the early developmental levels.
• Social experiences at each stage supposedly leave some permanent residue in the form of attitudes, traits, and values acquired at that stage.
• In the case of frustration, the child's psychosexual needs (sucking, biting, or chewing) are thwarted by the mothering one and thus fail to be optimally gratified.
• In overindulgence, the parents provide little or no challenge for the child to master internal functions and thus instigate feelings of dependence and incompetence.
• The Oral Stage
• The Anal Stage
• The Phallic Stage
• The Latency Stage
• The Genital Stage

Oral Stage

• Mouth is the first organ that can provide pleasure.
• Life-sustaining nourishment through the oral activity.
• Pleasure through the act of sucking and swallowing.
• Infants are reliant upon others for survival; with the mother's breast or the bottle being the first pleasure-producing objects.
• During this oral-receptive phase, the infants feel no ambivalence and their needs are usually satisfied.
• Growth
  • more frustration and anxiety due to sequence of events that end up as weaning.
  • Ambivalence toward their love object (mother) + increased ability of their ego (as a defence against the environment anxiety) emergence of teeth
  • Is followed by a second oral phase (the oral-sadistic period).
  • Responses: biting, cooing, closing their mouth, smiling, and crying
  • First autoerotic experience is thumb sucking (a defense against anxiety that satisfies their sexual but not their nutritional needs)
• A central task of the infant during this oral dependent period is to establish general attitudes of dependence, independence, trust and reliance in regard to other people.
• The infant is unable to distinguish between its own body and the mother's breast is the source of nourishment.

Oral Passive

• The infant is given both excessive or insufficient amount of stimulation.
• A person has an optimistic view of the world, established trusting dependent relationships with others and seek approval at the expense of evertyhing else.
• Gullibility, passivity, immaturity and excessive dependence result.

Oral Aggressive or Sadistic

• When the infant acquires teeth, biting and chewing become important means of expressing frustration caused by the mother's absence or delay of gratification.
• Those fixated at the oral sadistic stage exhibit argumentative, pessimistic, bitingly sarcastic and often cynical personalities.
• Can frequently exploit and dominate others as long as their own needs exist.

Anal Phase

• Anal phase occurs as reaches fuller emergence of erogenous zones.
• Emerges as a sexually pleasurable zone when the anus emerges in the second year.
• Can derive considerable pleasure from both retention and expulsion of feces and gradually learn to enhance this pleasure by delaying bowel movements.
• With the onset of toilet training, the child must learn to distinguish between the demands of id and the social restraints imposed by the parents.
• Freud claimed that all later forms of self-control and mastery have their origin in the anal stage.

Anal Retentive

• If the parent is harsh and repressive, children may withhold their feces and become constipated which leads to an anal-retentive personality.
• Obstinancy, stinginess, orderliness, punctuality, extreme cleanliness or extreme messiness results as well as an inability to make fine distinctions or to tolerate confusion and ambiguity.

Anal Agressive

• If the parent pleads with the child to have regular bowel movements and showers the child with praise for so doing, the child will develop anal-aggressive character sturucture
• One fixated at this level will show traits of cruelty, destructiveness, disorderliness, and hostility.
• Can perceive others as objects to be possessed with respect to adult love relationships.

Phallic Stage

• This ensues when the genital area becomes the leading erogenous zone (3-4 years of age)
• Dichotomy between male and female development, due to the anatomical differences between the sexes
• Physical differences between males and females account for important psychological differences
• Children repress conscious desire to masturbate because parents suppress masturbation,.
• The child also now faces a battle between an id impulse and the demands of society as reflected in parental expectations
• Those in this area enjoy interest in exploring and manipulating genitals.
• Pleasure is derived from the genital region not only through masturbation but also desires.
• The child becomes curious about birth, why boys have penises and girls do not, and may talk about wanting to marry the parent of opposite sex.
• The basic conflict centers on the unconscious desire of the child for the parent of opposite sex with an attempt to replace/destroy the parent of the same sex.

Male Oedipus Complex

• Identification with his father = he wants to be his father.
• Develops sexual desire for his mother which then becomes a love object for the young boy.
• Exhibits sexual longings through overt behavior or fantasy.
• The boy sees the father as an obstacle and regards him as a rival/threat.
• He percieves that the father has relationship with the mother that excludes him.
• Hostile and jealous of his father.
• Accompanying his desire to replace his father is the fear of retaliation including a threat of harm (castration).
• Castration anxiety results, becoming fearful that his father will cut off his penis. So strong is the boy's fear that he is forced to repress his sexual desire for the mother.
• The boy replaces the sexual longing with an acceptable affection and develops a strong identification with the father.
• During the complex, affection and hostility coexist in an unconscious state.
• Once dissolved or repressed, the boy changes desires to feelings of tender love, giving way to what is known as a primitive superego
• He may identify with either the father or the mother, depending on the strength of feminine disposition.
• The boy no longer desires to become the father.
• He now uses his father as a model for determining right and wrong behavior, incorporating his authority into his own ego a mature superego.
• The budding superego takes over his father's prohibitions against incest and ensures the continued repression of the complex

Female Oedipus Complex

• The first object of love is the mother and then the father during phallic stage.
• It is is assume that all have the same genitals, but discovery shows that boys not only possess different genitals, but genitals that are something extra.
• Girls become envious of what the "something extra penis" and then that results in a desire to have a penis.
• Penis envy may last for a lifetime in some form while others attempt to wish to be or find a man, giving way to also desire to have a baby, and that desire is expressed through childbirth.
• The girl blames her mother and comes to love her less.
• She hates the mother for what she imagines to have done to her. She then envies her father for highly valued sex organ.
• A girl develops penis envy with belief that boys "possess it all"

Resolution

• Occurs when a girl gives up her desires.
• The castration complex takes the form of penis envy.
• Penis envy precedes the is opposite of boys, where the "following of action" follows.
• The women's event is less traumatic with girls not experiencing anxiety and the complex is slowly and incompletely dissolved.

Phallic Types

• Adult males fixated are brash, vain, boastful, and ambitious and also strive to assert their masculinity and convince others they are real men.
• In women the phallic fixation results in flirtatiousness, seductiveness, and promiscuity in addition strive to be superior to men by becoming assertive.

Latency Period

• From the 4th or 5th year until puberty, both boys and girls usually, but not always.
• Partly brought by the punishments to suppress or discourage sexual behaviors and activity in children.
• In order to curb activities, suppression must come into effect in order to influence them as the conscious thought would then suppress.
• That is followed by reinforcement via shame, and other concepts (morality) must be presented.
• But the desires can be sublimated during other activities.

5) Genital Period

• Puberty which reawakes sexual aim and to establish a sexual relationship of the reproductive system and the hormones in that zone.
• Also in this period is to direct pleasure outwards from themselves.
• Also reproduction is key.

Freud's Later Technique

• Neurotic symptoms relate to childhood fantasies are core.
• Therapy aims to uncover repressed memories through free association and dream analysis which leads to a transformation that frees and transforms.
• Important to verbalize the stream of thoughts. Goal is to understand it in the train analysis and use this for better interpretation. Need to come relaxed to do that
• This will later lead to collection and understanding at an older age/stage through dreams and other analysis
• • It refers to that collection of memories and the interpretation of this will allow a better understanding through interoperation and analysis
• Skills is very important.

Analyst and Transference

• Important or aggression can exist.
• That relates heavily to their experiences
• Negative has to be understood
• To be well informed and understand is important!
• Very similar to the patterns they had with their parents.

Interpretation

• There may be times where they don't recall thoughts for the reason. Those reasons are interpreted. Understanding the importance there.
• Resistance is important if they are unable to do it.

Dreams

• It is important to distinguish
• The surface vs what we see as a hidden code or what it really means or wants
• There are multiple factors that come into it.

Final thoughts

• Deeply reconsenting his father
• Unconscious self-punishment by his wish.

Freudian Slips

• Are not accidents or chance/ by accident.
• Reveals the inner most intensions.

Critiques of Freud

• The understanding of Women in a time where time is dominated by men
• Women are often treated as second and seen as only for domestic help
• He would only be able to see it that way due to upbringing.
• All is mirror and similar
• However eventually it changed where the "little girls" were seen as failures of the males He continued stand and held as very rigid in thinking.