Sigmund Freud: Life and Theories

Sigmund Freud: Theorist Overview

• Freud was born in Moravia (now Fribor, Czech Republic) in 1856, spending most of his life in Vienna.
• Freud was the eldest child, with his father having two sons from a previous marriage, and his parents having seven more children after him.
• He enrolled in medical school at the University of Vienna.
• He was influenced by mechanism, the idea that natural science explains physical and human behavior as well as thought
• Abandoned a neurology research career for financial reasons, becoming a physician instead.
• Plagued by depression and anxiety after his father's death in 1897
• He sought relief through self-analysis, leading to his psychoanalysis development.
• He used hypnosis and free association to find psychological causes to patients' problems.
• Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900.
• He developed the theory about the basic structures and working principles of the human psyche.
• Views were initially ridiculed, and medical institutions boycotted his teachings.
• He gradually achieved recognition, and lectures in the US in 1909 increased his profile outside Europe.
• The International Psychoanalytic Association was founded in 1910.
• By his September 23, 1939 death in London, he was an international celebrity.

Freud's View of the Person: Energy System

• The mind is a system directing instinctual drives.
• He viewed mental energy with three core ideas: a limited amount of energy, energy can be blocked and expressed in another manner, and the mind functions to achieve a state of quiescence
• The major scientific problem is explaining how mental energy flows, gets sidetracked, and gets dammed up.
• In "The case of Anna O," Anna experienced bizarre symptoms with undetermined biological causes, such as partial paralysis, blurred vision, persistent cough, and difficulty conversing in her native language (German).
• Anna O. experienced relief from symptoms when tracing them to past events.
• Catharsis is the release of emotions by talking about problems.
• Two implications of catharsis are that the mind is an energy system and it has more than one part.

Hysteria and the Brain

• Some of Freud's peers considered hysterics to be fakers
• Voon et al.'s 2010 study used brain imaging techniques on 16 people with conversion disorder.
• These individuals exhibited tremors, tics, and abnormal movements when walking.
• The patient group was compared to 16 psychologically and biologically healthy volunteers.
• Both groups had fMRI scans while viewing faces displays displayed varying emotions.
• Differences in brain activation between conversation disorder patients and healthy volunteers when emotional faces were displayed occurred.
• Within the brains of patients there were stronger connections between regions of the brain associated with emotion and those associated with motor movement.
• These connections could generate the symptoms of the disorder.

Freud's View on the Individual in Society

• Society was believed to corrupt people that are essentially born good.
• Sexual and aggressive drives are inborn in psychoanalysis.
• Individuals function according to the pleasure principle, seeking gratification of those drives.
• Society teaches children that biological drives are socially unacceptable, and maintains social norms and taboos.

Levels of Consciousness

• The conscious level includes thoughts of which one is aware.
• The preconscious is where mental contents that we easily could become aware are.
• The unconscious includes parts of the mind we cannot become aware of except under special circumstances.
• Freud attempted to understand the unconscious by analyzing slips of the tongue, neuroses, psychoses, works of art, rituals, and dreams.
• The manifest content is the storyline of a dream.
• The latent content consists of unconscious ideas, emotions, and drives manifested in a dream's storyline
• The latent content of dreams concerns unconscious wishes achieved through manifest content of wish fulfillment.
• Symbolism represents unconscious wishes impossible to fulfill in reality and can satisfy hostile or sexual wishes safely.
• In dream interpretation, each dream element offers a clue to the dream's underlying wish.
• The unconscious disregards time and space and is alogical, bizarre, and deals in a world of symbols.

The Motivated Unconscious

• Mental contents enter the unconscious for motivated reasons
• The unconscious stores traumatic ideas that would psychological pain.
• People are motivated to banish such thoughts from awareness
• Freud's fundamental message includes that thoughts in the unconscious influence ongoing conscious experience.
• Thoughts, feelings, and actions are determined by mental contents that one is unaware.

Research on the Unconscious

• Clinical observations suggested to Freud that the unconscious includes memories and wishes "deliberately buried."
• Using hypnosis patients can recall things they previously could not.
• Patients often become aware of memories and wishes previously buried.
• The 1960s and 1970s experimental research focused on perception without awareness with a subliminal perception
• In a 1966 Eagle, Wolitzky and Klein experiment one group viewed a picture with a duck image shaped by branches of a tree and one group seen a similar picture but without duck image using a tachistoscope.
• Subjects then closed their eyes, imagined a nature scene, drew the scene, and labeled the parts.
• Subjects viewing the "duck" picture had significantly more duck-related images in their drawings.
• These subjects did not report seeing the duck during the experiment, and the majority had trouble finding it.
• The stimuli were not consciously perceived but still influenced imagery and thoughts.
• McGinnies's (1949) research concerns perceptual defense, the process defending against anxiety that accompanies actual recognition of a stimulus.
• Subjects were shown neutral and emotionally-toned words in a tachistoscope. First at fast then slower speeds.
• A record was made of the point at which the subjects were able to identify each of the words.
• Sweat gland activity was also measured in response to each word.
• Subjects took longer to recognize the emotionally toned than the neutral words and showed signs of emotional response.
• Subliminal psychodynamic activation stimulates unconscious wishes without conscious awareness using threatening or anxiety-alleviating material, then observes reactions.
• The material is shown long enough to activate but too short to recognize consciously.
• Silverman and colleagues subliminally presented conflict-intensifying ("Loving Daddy Is Wrong") and conflict-reducing ("Loving Daddy Is OK") to female undergraduates.
• For conflict-prone subjects over sexual urges, conflict-intensifying material disrupted memory for passages after subliminal activation.
• This did not apply to conflict-reducing material or subjects not prone to conflict over sexual urges.
• Patton's (1992) eating disorders research compared healthy college-age women and women with signs of eating disorders of how many crackers they would eat following subliminal presentation of three messages: Mama Is Leaving Me, Mama Is Loaning It, Mona Is Loaning It
• Eating disordered subjects that received the abandonment stimulus ate more crackers than those without an eating disorder or eating disorder subjects exposed to the stimulus.

Political Judgments

• Westen et al. (2006) presented threatening information about a political candidate the subject favored, the opposing candidate, or a neutral figure.
• Brain activity was recorded using fMRI.
• When thinking about information threatening to their favored candidate, participants judged it as a bad light on the opposing candidate but no implications for theirs.
• When participants were making judgments about threatening information to their preferred candidates, regions of the brain associated with emotional response were active.
• Emotional reactions then appeared to drive defensive information processing, thus supporting psychoanalytic motivated unconscious processing.

Models of the Mind

• In 1923, Freud developed a model of the id, ego, and superego.
• Distinctions among conscious, preconscious, and unconscious proved to be inadequate because they ignored the unitary psychological ego.
• Another tool to distinguish among three systems was needed.

Id

• The source of all drive energy, the "great reservoir" of mental energies from Freud's 1923 work
• Seeks the release of excitation or tension
• The pleasure principle, to pursue pleasure and to avoid pain, drives it.
• It does not devise plans/strategies to obtain pleasure, wait patiently for pleasing objects, or concern itself with social norms/rules.
• It seeks satisfaction through action or merely by imagining that it has gotten what it wants.
• It functions entirely outside of conscious awareness.

Superego

• Functions involve moral aspects of social behavior
• Contains ideals for which we strive and ethical standards that will cause one to feel guilt if violated.
• Is an internal representation of the moral rules of the external social world.
• It controls behavior in accord with its rules, offering rewards for "good" behavior and punishments for "bad" behavior.
• Is relatively incapable of reality testing and can also be understanding/flexible.

Ego

• Seeks reality.
• It functions to express and satisfy the desires of the id in accordance with the opportunities, constraints, and demands of the superego.
• Operates according to the reality principle which delays instinct gratification enabling one to obtain maximum pleasure.
• Can distinguish fantasy from reality, tolerate tension, and create compromises through rational thought.
• Changes overtime with complex ego functions developing.

Psychoanalytic Process

• It concerns motivational dynamics involving mental energy.
• The source of all psychic energy lies in states of excitation within the body that seeks expression and tension reduction.
• The life instinct (libido) includes drives associated previously with both the earlier ego and sexual instincts and impels people toward the preservation and reproduction of the organism.
• Opposite of life instinct
• Death instinct that refers the aim of the organism to die or return to inorganic state is a controversial part of psychoanalytic theory
• The death instinct is often turned away from oneself and directed at others in acts of aggression or as referred to by some as an aggressive instinct.
• Instincts can be blocked from expression, expressed in a modified way, or expressed without modification.
• Sexual instincts can become affection, and aggressive instincts, sarcasm.
• Love of one's mother can displace to a wife, children, or dog.
• Combined, sexual and aggressive instincts can be football.
• Dynamics of functioning concern interplay between expression and inhibition of instincts in psychoanalytic theory
• Key concept of anxiety is the painful emotional experience representing a threat or danger.
• It alerts the ego to danger, relates to an earlier trauma, and is associated with similar later trauma.
• Anxiety develops from conflict between id and threat of punishment by superego.
• Individuals develop defense mechanisms to avoid anxiety and distort reality to exclude feelings from awareness.
• Defensive functions carried out by the ego cope with the impulses of the id.
• Denial, in conscious thought, is used to deny the existence of a traumatic or otherwise unacceptable socially fact.
• Such facts are so "terrible" that one denies that it is "true".
• Avoidance may be conscious initially, but later becomes automatic.
• Psychoanalysts doubt that distortions about oneself and others can have adaptive value.
• The answer to depends on the extent of distortion, how pervasive it is, and the circumstances under which it occurs.
• Social cognitive analysis concerns people defending against own negative qualities by projecting them on others.
• People tend to dwell on those features of themselves.
• Whenever one dwells on a topic, it becomes "chronically accessible."
• Whenever on interprets the actions of other people, it draws concepts from one's own mind.
• One ends up projecting chronically accessible, negative features onto others.
• Projection in an experimental research study of new and colleagues involved participants that were exposed to bogus negative feedback on two traits to try suppress thoughts of one and viewed an anxious looking individual on tape, then rated the person on traits.
• Participants projected their suppressed negative trait onto the target.
• In isolation impulse, thought, or act is not denied access to consciousness , but its normal emotion is.
  • For example, a may experience the thought or fantasy of strangling her child without any associated feelings of anger
• Result of mechanism of isolation is intellectualization where emphasis on thought over emotion and feeling, where individual undoes one act or wish another as seen compulsions, religious rituals, and children's sayings.
• Rationalization, a "mature" defence, reinterprets behavior to appear reasonable/acceptable.
• The ego constructs rational motives to explain action that is actually caused by irrational impulses of the id.
• Sublimation replaces original object of gratification with a higher cultural goal that is far removed from a direct expression of the instinct
  • daVinci's Madonna was a sublimation of his longing for his mother.
• Repression describes a major defense mechanisms where a traumatic, threatening thought, idea, or wish is buried in the unconscious.

Overview of Sigmund Freud's life, influences, and the development of his psychoanalytic theories. Freud, born in 1856, significantly impacted psychology with his exploration of the human psyche. His work includes the Interpretation of Dreams.