Freud- the reading

Freud

In 1985 Freud published work on hysteria which presented an original analysis of mental illness. He used hypnosis as a method of treatment and replaced it with a new form of therapy known as psychoanalysis which consisted as nothing more than a exchange of words between patient and doctor.  The patient lying on the couch was told to talk about whatever came to their mind. Freud was convinced that the relevant psychological traumas dated back to infancy and had a sexual content. I think this type of analysis could be successful to find out peoples problems and try and find a way to solve them. To some extent it is still used today for things such as counselling where people are asked to discuss problems and what is on their mind. However I don’t agree that the content is all based on infancy and has sexual content as many peoples worries and problems are based on their lifestyle etc.

In 1900 Freud produced the most important of his works  ‘The interpretation of Dreams’ in which he argued that dreams are no less than neurotic symptoms that were a coded expression of repressed sexual desires.  In his lectures delivered between 1915 and 1917 he summed up his psychoanalytic theory in two fundamental ways. He decided that the greater part of our mental life whether of feeling, thought or volition is unconscious. The second is that sexual impulses are important as the potential cause of mental illness.

He then went on to say that the Infantile sexuality begins with oral stage in which pleasure is focused on the mouth. I agree with this idea as it is obvious that babies breast feed as a baby or suckle milk from bottle. This is then followed by the anal stage between the ages of 1 and 3  and a ‘phallic stage’ in which the child focuses on its own penis or clitoris. This is also correct and is found out by observation which Freud did a lot of. Children start to be toilet trained around the age of one and three which is why it would be acceptable to say they are in a period of an anal stage. It is then also true that as babies start to grow and turn to toddlers they start to experience their own body.

However Freud said that during this stage the boy is sexually attracted to its mother and resents his father’s possession of her. He is filled with fear that his father will retaliate by castrating him and then the son identifies with his father. I think this period would be best explained by the child bonding and depending on his mother as the mother and baby bond is always strongest and then as the child starts to grow he starts to recognise and rely on his father as well. He described this stage as the Oedipus complex and is a crucial stage emotionally for the development of every boy.

It is safe to say that Freud has had an enormous influence on society in relation to understanding mental illnesses, our appreciation of art and literature and on interpersonal relationships of many kinds.  For example painters and sculptors have taken Freudian symbols out of a dream world and given them concrete form. However some of his ideas were not shared by everyone, such as Augustine who wrote in his Confessions: ‘What is innocent is not the infants mind but the feebleness of his limbs. I have myself watched and studied a jealous baby turn pale and glare with jealousy at his brother who was sharing his mother’s milk. ‘ I think this idea can only be interpreted and it may not have been this factor at all.

All of us directly or indirectly have had a great deal of psychoanalysis. When we all discuss our relationships with friends and family we talk unself- consciously of repression and sublimation. No philosopher since Aristotle has made a greater contribution to the everyday vocabulary of psychology and morality.

The Freudian Unconscious

Freud stated that one of the greater parts of our mental life through feeling, thought, or volition is unconscious. Aristotle came up with a distinction between knowledge and its exercise, first and second actuality. He used learning Greek as an actuality in comparison with the simple ability to learn languages with which all humans are endowed.

There are in fact three levels of the Freudian unconscious. He uses the fact that we all make slips of the tongue occasionally such as when we fail to recall names. He used the name ‘parapraxes’ to describe this as he doesn’t think that they are accidental and do contain some sort of hidden motif. He said it isn’t just when we speak we can make these mistakes it can also happen in writing.

He then used a second method of tapping into the unconscious: the analysis of dream reports. He claimed that dreams are almost always the fulfilment in fantasy of a repressed wish. The true content of the dream is given a symbolic form by the dreamer this is known as the ‘dream work’.  Once stripped of its symbolic form the latent content of the dream can commonly be revealed as sexual. However Freud said that every dream can be given a sexual significance but you need to find out from the dreamer what they associate with certain items. He didn’t think it was possible to create a universal dictionary linking symbols to what they signified.

The third method Freud used to explore the unconscious was by the examination of neurotic symptoms. There is a certain circularity in Freud’s procedure for discovering the deeper levels of the unconscious. For a cure to be affective the patient has to acknowledge the alleged latent desire.

The theory of the Id, Ego and Superego have been explained in the previous blog on Freud but I think it is interesting to link this theory with that of Plato. The Id corresponds to what Plato calls appetite the desire for food and sex. The ego has much in common with Plato’s reasoning power it is the part of the soul most in touch with reality and controls the instinctual desire. Whereas the superego resembles Plato’s temper; both are non-rational punitive forces, the source of shame and self-directed anger.