L4 - Psychodynamic 2

• Neuroses: originate in childhood, symptoms may be later

  Triggered by stress or crisis (usually sexual)
• Healthy development:

  • Passing through stages successfully without major fixations/ regressions
  • Development of ‘successful’ ego and super-ego
  • Evolving adequate defence mechanisms
• Neurotic development:

  • Frustration of sexual impulses or inhibition of sexual instincts by ego - repression
  • Transforming frustrated sexual impulses into neurotic symptoms
  • Evolving inadequate defence mechanisms
• Neuroses perpetuate because repressions are unconscious -> Ego does not have access, so conflict cannot be resolved
• OCD:

  • Fear id impulses; use of defence mechanisms
  • ‘Battle’ between opposing force involves explicit thoughts and actions
  • Undoing and reaction formation
  • Fixation at anal stage
• Depression:

  • Similar to grieving – regression to oral stage
  • Imagined/symbolic loss
  • Introjection of negative feelings
• Neuroses are acquired during childhood, but are maintained because the ‘cause’ of the issues has been repressed - unconscious
• Goals of therapy

  1. Make unconscious conscious
  2. Strengthen ego – strengthening of reality-based ego functioning, widening its perceptions so that it approves more of the id
  3. Make super-ego more humane
• Who is it suitable for?

  Mostly concerned with neurotic disorders

  According to Freud:

  • Not individuals with psychosis
  • Not individuals ‘near or above the age of 50’
  • Reasonable degree of education, reliable character
• least 4 sessions/week; at least 45 mins each
• Free association:

  • Allow the mind to wander and report everything that comes to mind even if unpleasant or seemingly meaningless - the fundamental rule.
  • Lift repressions by making the unconscious conscious.
• Resistance

  • Anything that works against the process of therapy.
  • Not adhering to the fundamental rule.
  • Ego protects itself from repressed Id.
• Transference:

  • Clients perceive analysts as ‘reincarnations’ of key figures from life (especially parents).
  • Transfer onto them emotions and feelings associated with past relationship.
  • Allows therapist to learn more about important relationships and impact on adult behaviour.
• Interpretation:

  • Constructions or explanations.
  • What has happened to clients and been forgotten and what is happening now without their understanding.
  • Repressed unconscious material becomes conscious
  • Understand id impulses.
  • Help clients gain insight into defence mechanisms and resistances.
  • Sources: free association, transferences, dreams
• Dream analysis:

  • The “royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind” (Freud, 1900)
  • Function of dreams – wish fulfilment, ‘guardians’ of sleep
  • Disguised hallucinatory fulfilments of repressed sexual infantile wishes
  • Manifest vs. latent content
  • Dream work – complex mental process of disguise involving condensation, displacement, symbolism
• Wolf man

  ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’

  Sergei Pankejeff – Russian aristocrat

  Treated by Freud 1910

  1914-Freud considered him to be ‘cured’
• [Wolf man]

  symptoms: Obsessional, constipation, depression, animal phobia, panic attacks, complete dependence on others
• [Wolf man]

  Dream on the night before his 4th birthday -> Wolves in a walnut tree
• [Wolf man]

  • Current symptoms due to unconscious repressed material that must be worked through
  • Dreams give insight into repressed wishes/desires based on a previous experience
  • At age 1 ½ years, Sergei had witnessed the ‘primal scene’ – his parents having sexual intercourse•
  • Desires the same gratification but fears castration
• [Wolf man]

  Dream Analysis

  Distortions through dream work:

  • Reversals – rest/motion, watched/watching
  • Condensation – white colour
  • Symbolism – tails: castration
• [Wolf man]

  Free Association – ‘Christmas Tree’

  Wish fulfilment – presents; sexual satisfaction from father
• Evaluation of psychoanalysis

  • Psychoanalysis as a ‘science’
  • Hypothesis testing
  • Karl Popper - falsification
  • Very limited sample
• Breuer: ‘Freud is a man given to absolute and exclusive 

                 formulation…this is a psychical need which, in my

                 opinion, leads to excessive generalization.’
• [Evaluation]

  • Changed how we think about human nature
  • Paved the way for an understanding and treatment of mental disorder based on a psychogenic approach
  • Some of his ideas not well suited to testing with traditional ‘scientific method’ – does this mean we should dismiss them?
• Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961)

  • Born in Northeast Switzerland
  • Medical school thesis on psychology of the occult
• [Jung]

  • 1907: travelled to Vienna to meet Freud
  • 1912: friendship ended
• [Jung]

  Two of Freud’s key assumptions unacceptable to him:

  1. That human motivation is exclusively sexual
  2. That the unconscious mind is entirely personal and peculiar to an individual
• [Jung] Levels of consciousness

  • Consciousness: known and available to the individual. Ego at its centre.
  • Personal Unconscious: memories and experiences that have been forgotten or repressed.
  • Collective unconscious: inherited from our ancestors
• Collective unconscious

  • Images, potentialities, predispositions that have been inherited from our ancestors – never been in consciousness
  • A ‘blueprint’ for life

  Made up of archetypes (‘primordial images/thoughts’)

  • An inherited mode of functioning
  • Instinctive patterns for mental activity

  e.g. fairytale motifs (hero, redeemer, mother)

  • Predispose us to approach life and experience it in certain ways
• [archetypes]

  Persona - A public personality (i.e. an actor’s mask)
• [Archetypes]

  Anima - Feminine side in male personality.
• [Achetypes]

  Animus - Masculine side in female personality.
• [Archetypes]

  Shadow - The ‘dark side’ of personality.
• [Archetypes]

  Self - Personality as a whole, spans conscious and unconscious.
• Jungian psychodynamics

  • Psychic energy – Libido (spiritual) and other motivating forces
  • Compensation – Balance or adjust energy distributed through the psyche
  • Transcendent function – Synthesising process which can remove some of the separation between conscious and unconscious
• [Jung] The stages of life

  • Complete contrast to prevailing Behaviourist view of development – ‘Tabula Rasa’
  • Humans born with a ‘programme’ for life –Incorporated into the Self

  1. Childhood (birth – puberty)
  2. Youth (puberty – 35/40 years)
  3. Middle Age (35/40 years to Extreme Old Age)
  4. Extreme Old Age
• Individuation of the self

  • Person becomes differentiated as separate psychological individual, distinct from collective psychology
  • Integration of unconscious and conscious into whole Self
  • Like Humanistic –  ‘Self-Actualisation