chapter 2

• Psychoanalysis


  Freud's most famous personality theory
• Levels of Mental Life

  • Unconscious
  • Preconscious
  • Conscious
• Provinces of the Mind

  • The Id
  • The Ego
  • The Superego
• Drives

  • Sex
  • Aggression
  • Anxiety
• Defense Mechanisms

  • Repression
  • Reaction Formation
  • Displacement
  • Fixation
  • Regression
  • Projection
  • Introjection
  • Sublimation
• Stages of Development

  • Infantile Period
  • Oral Phase
  • Anal Phase
  • Phallic Phase
  • Male Oedipus Complex
  • Female Oedipus Complex
  • Latency Period
  • Genital Period
  • Maturity
• Applications of Psychoanalytic Theory

  • Freud's Early Therapeutic Technique
  • Freud's Later Therapeutic Technique
  • Dream Analysis
  • Freudian Slips
• Related Research

  • Unconscious Mental Processing
  • Pleasure and the Id, Inhibition and the Ego
  • Repression, Inhibition, and Defense Mechanisms
  • Research on Dreams
• Critique of Freud


  • Did Freud Understand Women, Gender, and Sexuality?
  • Was Freud a Scientist?
• Concept of Humanity


  Freud's view of human nature
• Key Terms and Concepts


  • Freud's key ideas and concepts
• Henri Ellenberger: 'This period in Freud's life was a time of "creative illness," a condition characterized by depression, neurosis, psychosomatic ailments, and an intense preoccupation with some form of creative activity'
• At midlife, Freud was suffering from self-doubts, depression, and an obsession with his own death
• Despite these difficulties, Freud completed his greatest work, Interpretation of Dreams, during this period
• Interpretation of Dreams was an outgrowth of his self-analysis, much of which he had revealed to his friend Wilhelm Fliess
• The book contained many of Freud's own dreams, some disguised behind fictitious names
• After the publication of Interpretation of Dreams


  Freud's friendship with Fliess began to cool, eventually to rupture in 1903
• The breakup with Fliess


  Paralleled Freud's earlier estrangement from Breuer
• The breakup with Fliess


  Was a harbinger of his breaks with Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, and several other close associates
• Freud's explanation for why he had difficulties with so many former friends

  It is not the scientific differences that are so important; it is usually some other kind of animosity, jealousy or revenge, that gives the impulse to enmity. The scientific differences come later
• Interpretation of Dreams did not create the instant international stir Freud had hoped, but it eventually gained for him the fame and recognition he had sought
• Important works Freud wrote in the 5-year period following the publication of Interpretation of Dreams

  • On Dreams
  • Psychopathology of Everyday Life
  • Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
  • Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
• These publications helped Freud attain some local prominence in scientific and medical circles
• Formation of the Wednesday Psychological Society

  1. Freud invited a small group of somewhat younger Viennese physicians to meet in his home to discuss psychological issues

  2. In the fall of 1902, these five men - Freud, Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, Max Kahane, and Rudolf Reitler - formed the Wednesday Psychological Society, with Freud as discussion leader

  3. In 1908, this organization adopted a more formal name - the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society
• Founding of the International Psychoanalytic Association

  1. In 1910, Freud and his followers founded the International Psychoanalytic Association with Carl Jung of Zürich as president

  2. Freud was attracted to Jung because of his keen intellect and also because he was neither Jewish nor Viennese

  3. Between 1902 and 1906, all 17 of Freud's disciples had been Jewish, and Freud was interested in giving psychoanalysis a more cosmopolitan flavor

  4. Jung was a welcome addition to the Freudian circle and had been designated as the "Crown Prince" and "the man of the future"

  5. Jung, like Adler and Stekel before him, eventually quarreled bitterly with Freud and left the psychoanalytic movement

  
• The seeds of disagreement between Jung and Freud were probably sown when the two men, along with Sandor Ferenczi, traveled to the United States in 1909 to deliver a series of lectures at Clark University near Boston
• The years of World War I were difficult for Freud. He was cut off from communication with his faithful followers, his psychoanalytic practice dwindled, his home was sometimes without heat, and he and his family had little food
• After the war, despite advancing years and pain suffered from 33 operations for cancer of the mouth, Freud made important revisions in his theory
• Freud's most significant revisions

  • The elevation of aggression to a level equal to that of the sexual drive
  • The inclusion of repression as one of the defenses of the ego
  • His attempt to clarify the female Oedipus complex, which he was never able to completely accomplish
• Freud's emotional life


  He always insisted that he should have an intimate friend and a hated enemy. He was always able to provide himself afresh with both
• Until he was well past 50, all Freud's relationships were with men
• Freud, the man who seemed to be constantly thinking of sex, had a very infrequent sex life himself. After Anna, his youngest child, was born in 1895, Freud, not yet 40 years old, had no sexual intercourse for several years
• Freud's reasons for sexual abstinence

  He believed that use of a condom, coitus interruptus, as well as masturbation were unhealthy sexual practices. Because Freud wanted no more children after Anna was born, sexual abstinence was his only alternative
• Freud's personal qualities


  • He was a sensitive, passionate person who had the capacity for intimate, almost secretive friendships
  • He seemed to have needed both types of relationship - an intimate friend and a hated enemy
  • He was a master of the German tongue and knew several other languages
  • He possessed intense intellectual curiosity; unusual moral courage; extremely ambivalent feelings toward his father and other father figures; a tendency to hold grudges disproportionate to the alleged offense; a burning ambition, especially during his earlier years; strong feelings of isolation even while surrounded by many followers; and an intense and somewhat irrational dislike of America and Americans
• Freud rightly believed Americans would trivialize psychoanalysis by trying to make it popular
• Freud's unpleasant experiences during his trip to the United States in 1909

  • His name was misspelled as "Freund" on the passenger list
  • He experienced chronic indigestion and diarrhea throughout his visit, probably because the drinking water did not agree with him
  • He found it peculiar and problematic that American cities did not provide public restrooms on street corners
  • Several Americans addressed him as Doc or Sigmund while challenging him to defend his theories
  • One person tried unsuccessfully to prevent him from smoking a cigar in a nonsmoking area
  • When Freud, Ferenczi, and Jung went to a private camp in western Massachusetts, they were greeted by a barrage of flags of Imperial Germany, despite the fact that none of them was German and each had reasons to dislike Germany
  • At the camp, Freud, along with the others, sat on the ground while the host grilled steaks over charcoal, a custom Freud deemed to be both savage and uncouth
• Levels of mental life in Freudian psychology

  • Unconscious
  • Preconscious
  • Conscious
• Unconscious


  Contains all those drives, urges, or instincts that are beyond our awareness but that nevertheless motivate most of our words, feelings, and actions
• Freud's explanation for the existence of the unconscious

  Its existence could be proved only indirectly, through the meaning behind dreams, slips of the tongue, and certain kinds of forgetting, called repression
• Unconscious processes


  Often enter into consciousness but only after being disguised or distorted enough to elude censorship