Sigmund Freud Biography

Biography of Freud

• Sigmund Freud was born either March 6 or May 6, 1856, in Freiberg, Moravia, part of the Czech Republic.
• Freud did not have close friendships with his younger siblings.
• He had a warm, indulgent relationship with his mother, which later led him to believe the mother/son relationship is the most perfect in the world.
• When Freud was about a year and a half old, his mother had a second son, Julius, which significantly impacted Freud's psychic development.
• Freud was filled with hostility toward his younger brother and harbored an unconscious wish for his death.
• When Julius died at 6 months of age, Freud felt guilt for his brother's death.
• Freud was an excellent student from a very early age.
• Despite limited financial resources, Freud had his own room and oil lamp for study.
• He had a classical education, studying Greek and Latin and reading the classics.
• Freud had a superb command of German, earned a prize for literary skills, and had fluency in French, English, Spanish, and Italian.
• Freud initially dreamed of becoming a great Austrian general or minister.
• As a Jewish man, professional careers besides medicine and law were close to him.
• He reluctantly chose a medical career, entering the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Vienna in 1873.
• In 1885, he studied in Paris with Jean-Martin Charcot and learned hypnotic techniques for treating hysteria.
• Hysteria is characterized by paralysis or improper body functioning.
• As a medical student, Freud developed a close association with Josef Breuer.
• Breuer taught Freud about catharsis, removing hysterical symptoms through "talking them out."
• Using catharsis, Freud discovered the free association technique, which replaced hypnosis as his primary therapeutic technique.
• During the late 1890s, Freud experienced professional isolation and personal crises.
• He began analyzing his dreams and himself daily after his father's death in 1896.
• Freud completed his major work, Interpretation of Dreams (1900/1953) in 1899.
• The book grew from his self-analysis and included many of his dreams disguised by fictitious names, which he revealed to his friend Wilhelm Fliess.
• World War I was difficult for Freud as he was cut off from followers, without heat at home, and had little food.
• After the war, despite advancing years and pain, he underwent 33 operations for mouth cancer and made important revisions to his theory.
• In forty years of active writing and clinical practice, Freud developed the first comprehensive personality theory.
• He also developed clinical observations based on his therapeutic experience and self-analysis.
• Freud created a compelling method for treating mental/behavioral disorders.
• Freud developed a procedure for investigating mental processes that are almost inaccessible.

Albert's Case

• An 18-year-old male, Albert, was referred to a psychoanalyst.
• Albert experienced headaches, dizziness, heart palpitations, extreme anxiety, and fear of death of one year.
• Albert thought he had a brain tumor and would die but medical tests found no physical basis.
• A physician concluded that the symptoms are psychologically based.
• Albert is accompanied by his parents and he reports his relationships with them are "rosy."
• Albert feels his father is "a little on the strict side," because he makes him come home by 11 P.M. on Saturday, and broke off Albert's relationship with a girl one year ago.
• Albert describes the situation in unemotional matter-of-fact fashion .

Levels of Mental life

• People are motivated primarily by drives of which they have little or no awareness.
• A mental "map" describes the degree to which mental events, thoughts, and fantasies vary in accessibility to awareness.
• Mental life divides into three levels: the unconscious, the preconscious, and the conscious.
• This division is known as the Topographical Model.

Unconscious

• Involves drives, urges, or instincts that are beyond awareness, but motivate words, feelings, and actions.
• Existence is proved only indirectly with the meaning of dreams, slips of the tongue, and forgetting, called repression.
• Significant aspects of human behavior are shaped by impulses and drives outside awareness.
• Unconscious forces are resistant to becoming conscious.
• Psychoanalysis emphasizes interpreting fantasies and dreams for understanding.

Preconscious

• Is called "available memory" and involves not conscious elements that can become conscious.
• This includes memories of last week, ID number, towns lived in, and favorite foods.
• It bridges the unconscious and conscious regions of the mind.

Conscious

• Includes all sensations and experiences that we are aware of now.
• This 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 consciousness.

Structural Model

• The concept of unconscious mental processes was central to Freud's early description of personality organization.
• In the early 1920's, Freud revised his conceptual model of mental life and introduced id, ego, and superego, in the anatomy of personality.
• The structural model of mental life is a tripartite division of personality.
• Freud felt the divisions should be understood as hypothetical processes rather than structures of personality.

Provinces of the Mind

• The provinces or regions have not territorial existence and they are merely hypothetical constructs.
• They interact with the three levels of mental life.
• The ego cuts across various topographic levels and has conscious, preconscious, and unconscious components.
• The superego is preconscious and unconscious, while the id is completely unconscious.

The ID

• The id contains instinctive drives and is the only personality structure present at birth.
• It is primitive, chaotic, unchangeable, amoral, illogical, unorganized, filled with energy received from basic drives, and discharges for satisfying the pleasure principle.
• It is completely unconscious.
• The id lacks contact with reality but strives to reduce tension by satisfying basic desires.
• Pleasure principle is the sole function of the id to seek pleasure and avoid pain.
• The id functions according to the purely instinctive primary process.
• Primary process ignores time, recognizing no past or future, only the present moment.
• It demands immediate gratification and plan.
• If reality does not satisfy its urges, it may have hallucinatory wish fulfillment.

The Ego

• The ego resolves conflict and operates according to the reality principle, adapting to real world constraints.
• The ego delays gratification.
• The ego’s abilities are termed as Secondary Process, characterized by logical thought.
• This is the only region of the mind in contact with reality.
• The ego grows out of the id during infancy and becomes communication with the external world.
• The it is governed by the reality principle, which tries to substitute for the pleasure principle of the id.
• As contact with the external world, the ego becomes the decision-making or executive branch of personality.
• The ego can make decisions at all three levels of consciousness.
• A woman's ego consciously motivates her to choose well-tailored clothes because she feels comfortable.
• Simultaneously, she may be dimly aware of being rewarded for choosing nice clothes by her parents.
• Unconsciously, she may be neat from childhood toilet training, so her decision to is in all three levels of mental life.
• When performing cognitive and intellectual functions, the ego must consider the demands of the id and the superego.
• The ego tries to reconcile the irrational claims of the id and superego with the realistic demands.
• The ego is surrounded on three sides by forces so it becomes anxious.
• The ego uses repression and other defense mechanism to defend itself against anxiety.

The Superego

• As children experience rewards/punishments, they learn what to do in order to gain pleasure and avoid pain.
• Children have not yet developed a conscience and ego-ideal because pleasure and pain are ego functions.
• As children reach age 5/6, they identify with their parents and begin to learn what they should and should not do, the origin of the superego.
• The superego has two subsystems: the conscience and the ego-ideal.
• The conscience is from experiences with punishments for behavior and tells us is what we should not do.
• The ego ideal develops from experiences with rewards for proper behavior and tells us what we should do.
• The superego represents the moral and ideal aspects of personality and is guided by moralistic principles.
• Neither concerned with happiness of the ego nor practicality, the superego is unrealistic in demands for perfection.
• A well-developed superego controls sexual and aggressive impulses through repression, it cannot produce repressions itself.
• The superego watches and judges the ego's actions and intentions.
• Guilt is when the ego plans to act contrary to the moral standards of the superego.
• Feelings of inferiority, when the ego cannot meet the superego's standards.
• Guilt is a function of the conscience, whereas inferiority feelings stem from the ego-ideal.
• The development of divisions of the superego varies between individuals.

Personality Dynamics

• Levels of mental life and provinces of the mind refer to the structure of personality, personalities also do something.
• People are motivated to look for pleasure and to reduce tension and anxiety.
• Psychical and physical energy from basic drives are the motivation.

Drives

• Drives operate as a constant, motivational force.
• Internal stimuli cannot be avoided through flight instead of external stimuli.
• The various drives can all be grouped under sex or Eros and aggression, distraction, or Thanatos.
• Drives originate in the id, and come under the control of the ego.
• The sexual drive aims for pleasure, but not limited to genital satisfaction.
• The entire body is invested with libido.
• Erogenous zones are the mouth and anus also capable of producing pleasure.
• All pleasurable activity was considered traceable to the sexual drive.
• Sex can take different forms that includes narcissism, love, sadism and masochism.
• Infants are primarily self-centered with libido invested in their own ego, known as primary narcissism.
• As ego develops, children give up primary narcissism with greater interest in other people.
• During puberty adolescents redirect libido back to the ego, preoccupied appearance and other self interests or secondary narcissism.
• Secondary narcissism is not universal.
• Moderate degree of self love is common to nearly.

Aggression

• The aim of the destructive drive is to return the organism to an inorganic state
• Death is the inorganic condition, the aggressive drive aims for self destruction
• This drive takes many forms like teasing, gossip, sarcasm, humiliation, humor, and the enjoyment of other suffering
• Aggressive tendencies are present in everyone.

Anxiety

• A felt, affective, unpleasant state accompanied by a physical sensation that warns the person against impending danger.
• The unpleasantness is usually vague but the anxiety itseld is always felt.
• The ego produces/feels anxety, while the id, superego, and external world are involved in the 3 kinds oof anxiety.
• They are the neurotic, moral, and realistic.
• The ego's dependence on the id results in neurotic anxiety and on the superego produces moral anxiety, and its dependence on the outer world leads to realistic anxiety.

Neurotic Anxiety

• Apprehension about an unknown danger.
• Emotional response to the threat that id impulses will become conscious.
• It exists in the ego and originates from id impulses.
• Hostility are often accompanied by the fear of punishment leading to generalized neurotic anxiety.

Moral Anxiety

• Arises from the conflict between the ego and the superego.
• The ego is threatened by punishment from the superego.
• Occurs when the id strives towards immoral thoughts/acts and the superego responds with shame, guilt, and self-condemnation.
• Those 5 or w years have anxiety if realistic needs and dictates with the superego are in conflict.

Realistic Anxiety

• The emotional response to a threat and/or perception of real dangers in the external environment (snakes earthquakes).
• It is an unpleasant, nonspecific feeling involving a possible danger.
• It is different that a specific fearful object.
• An ego defense mechanism is a strategy used by the individual to defend against open expression of id impulses and opposing pressures.
• Defense mechanisms share two common feature with both operating at an unconscious levels making it self deceptive.
• These distort realithy so anxiety i less threatening

Defense Mechanisms

• Ego defense mechanism is a strategy to defend against instincts and external pressure.
• They all share the features operating unconsciously making them self deceptive.
• These defenses distort ones perception of reality to lessen anxiety

Repression

• Freud regarded repression as the primary defense.
• The ego is threatened by undesirable impulses, it protects itself by repressing them into the unconscious.
• A young girl repress hostility for her sister because her feels create too much anxiety.
• A traumatized person cannot recount the event.
• Impulses remain unchanged and express in displayed form they can force to unaltered make moreanxiety

Reaction Formation

• Is a disguise that is directly opposite ts original form.
• The unaceptable is repressed the oppostie is expressed on a conscious level
• Identified by its exaggeted character and by its obsessive and compulsive form.
• Is when there is hatred and love.

Displacement

• Reactions are limited to single objects
• Instinctual impise are redirected form the threatening person or object to a less threatening one
• unacceptable unges onto a variety of pleole is disguiesd for example

Fixation

• Has a psychial growth vs a phsycological growth
• The ego may resort to remaining at present provoking
• At inaddwatedly resolved psycho sexual.
• Fixative people continually derive pleasure of talking or may have an Oral fixation.
• Regression is a spwcial case.

Regression

• Once the libido has passed a developmental stage, it may, during times of stress and anxiety, revert back to that earlier stage.
• Reverting to an earlier stage of psycho sexual development and displaying the childlike behaviour there.
• A weaned child will ask for the bottle.

Projection

• Projection is next to repression in theoretical importance
• It is the process of unconsciously attributing unacceptable and behavipors for other people.
• When a impluse provokes too much anxiety reduced unwanted impuse usually

Introjection

• Is incorpirating qualities of another into for example and idol who is is an inflated self wort hand minimizates the level intro.

Sublimation

• The repression is Eros genital substituted with cultural, sublimated help to make group.
• Expressed creative most art or hum relashionchip and a with large

Rationalization

• Mistakes or failures that are explainable due to this.

Stages of Development

• The psychoanatic theory of development based on two premises one id the genetic is shaped by early child hood.
• The of sexual energy is persernt.
• Each stage is marked by a primary erogenous zone.term which are progresses zone,
• Point one a the body seeks out activites or objects.
• All expeirences leave residue in value are quired in all states.
• And of which optimal are the need is the case of frustation of the mother.
• The parents in are too for

Oral stage

• Oral stage marks the the mouth.
• The is through through the to sucking.
• The 1oral phase feel as are usally
• The central task of the and trust in ragard to other people the body nourishment.
• • Personality of amount person all others approval
• to the the aquires

Anal Stage

• Anal anal is fuller developed at the secound year.
• Are of to parents are of.
• If the if the parents are hold their child will
• Will be , orderliness, exteme cleanliness

Phalic Stage

• the in genital in (3-4 years)
• dichotomy anatomical difference The 4th annual to

Applications of psychoanalytic theory

• It will be all the for all into.

Freud's later therapeutic technique

• The uncover of the and only is

Freudians Slips

• Not but a a a to