Although psychologists now think that Sigmund Freud was wrong about many things, there is no denying that he had a huge influence on Western culture, as have many psychoanalysts who followed him. Without Freud, we might still be living in the buttoned-up world of Victorian values.
Over the past twenty years, scientific psychology has established beyond doubt the key importance of the brain’s unconscious processing. We know that conscious experience rests on a base of unconscious processes in perception, memory, and emotion. But today’s ideas are a long way from Freud’s. In the words of neuropsychologist John Kihlstrom, Freud’s model of the unconscious was ‘hot and wet; it seethed with lust and anger; it was hallucinatory, primitive and irrational. None of these characteristics is evident in the unconscious of scientific psychology today.
Evaluating Freud
Should we, then, cast Freud into the waste – bin’ Are his ideas hopelessly outdated? Many have dismissed his work on the grounds that his methods were suspect and his hypotheses were vague and undesirable. And he was notoriously selective in what he chose to include in his published work. But Freud deserves a more subtle evaluation; he gave us a way of viewing our selves that goes beyond consideration of verifiable facts. Freud was a key figure in changing society, and we probably would not want to turn the clock back to the pre-Freudian world of Victorian propriety. He opened the way to us being more conscious of ourselves and exploring our minds. Without Freud, it is unlikely that the concept of openness, so central to psychotherapy, would have taken such root in our culture.
Freud was also factually correct in regarding the unconscious as much more extensive than consciousness. His view that unconscious mental activity deals with multiple meanings of words or images is quite consistent with modern experimental findings. Indeed, psychologists agree that what differentiates unconscious from conscious activity is the ability of the former to operate in parallel mode rather than in a serial fashion.
So, where was Freud wrong? In a word – sex. There is, for example, no good evidence for the existence of anything remotely like the Oedipus complex. Moreover, feminists have correctly argued that his theories are hopelessly male-orientated. Freud’s supposed female eguivalent of the Oedipus complex – the Electra complex – is poorly thought out and, again, lacks any reasonable evidence. All one can say in Freud’s defense is that he so shocked society that he forced a change towards a liberal stance in which sexual matters could at least be aired.
Evaluating Jung
Jung, too, exerted a powerful influence on society, especially in the area of religion. Jung felt that the religion of his day had become sterile and largely divorced from people’s real experiences. Through his concept of individuation, he revitalized what it means to embark on a spiritual journey, but at the cost of ‘psychologizing’ religion. For Jung, God could be understood only as a reality of the psyche – the God within. This is hardly the traditional God that inspires the devotions of the faithful, and some have therefore criticized Jung for creating a self-centered form of religion – religion for the ‘me- generation. ‘
Like Freud, Jung’s claims of the scientific validity of his theories are also doubtful, and there is little evidence to back up many of his ideas. For example, the existence of a collective unconscious is claimed from the unifornuty of most people’s experience with hallucinogenic drugs. Medicine men from a tribe in South America use hallucinogenic plants to enter a visionary world in which they encounter powerful animals, especially snakes and birds of prey. When the drug is given to Westerners with no knowledge of the tribe’s customs and expectations, they may experience similar animal hallucinations – evidence, 1y Jungi researchers, that the images spring from a collective source. Evidence like this is, at best, equivocal and hardly a sufficient basis for the theory it is said to support.
Cultural catalyst
Freud’s most important work, The Interpretation of Dreams, was published in 1900, the same year that a crucial paper appeared by the physicist Max Planck, which in turn led Einstein to develop his theories. The word ‘relativity’ could be said to capture the essence of the early 20th century. Freud should be credited with the important role he played in ushering in the new perspective, which allowed ideas of absolute, God-given morality to be challenged and the rigid roles occupied by men and women in society to be displaced. Although moves in these directions preceded Freud, his view of the mind encouraged their growth.
Freud’s ideas fell on the ground already prepared, which is why they spread like wildfire in the early years of the new century. Artists and writers were strongly influenced by Freud and the ‘discovery’ of the unconscious. In his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, Andre Breton praised him for shirting a light into what is to be regarded as the most important part of the mind, the unconscious. Surrealism rejected logic and rationalism. Of the conscious, preferring to explore the irrational world legitimized by Freud. Freud himself was skeptical of the surrealist movement but was impressed by Salvador Dali, whose technical mastery he respected. There is no mistaking the Freudian ideas of dreamwork in Dali’s pictures, with their distortion of images, condensation of ideas, and blurring of meaning.
The idea of an unconscious hopelessly dominated by base and self centered needs appears in many literary works of a similar time. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness aligns the disturbing colonial world in the African Congo with the evil and corrupting unconscious of man, showing not so much the direct influence of Freud as the effect of his ideas filtering through the cultural world. D.H. Lawrence drew more explicitly on psychoanalytic ideas in his work; his classic novel Sons and Lovers explores the Oedipal attraction between son and mother.
Therapy after Freud
Despite Freud’s great influence, his approach to therapy was considered too narrow by many of his followers. First, Jung, then the Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler, felt that Freud’s insistence on sexual theory was detrimental to analysis. Adler believed that the will to power was a central motive for our actions, and his therapy was directed at understanding how our feelings of inferiority could be overcome. The German-born psycho analyst and social philosopher Erich Fromm emphasized the social origin of inner conflicts. They felt that understanding the way in which we establish relationships should be a central theme of therapy.
Similar ideas are found in the influential ‘object relations’ school, which stresses the importance of early relationships. Someone who experiences a problematic childhood, in which secure bonds to early carers are not well established, will suffer not only in their later interactions with other people but also in their involvement with ‘objects’ in their environment. To cite one example, they may be more likely to become entangled with drug abuse because the object – the drug – is imbued with the character of a relationship: it is rewarding and damaging at the same time.
Over the recent few years, therapy and counseling have developed into a huge industry. Freud has been interpreted less rigidly, sometimes with only token adherence to his key notion that unconscious meanings developed in the past t can exert critical effects on the present. And the image of the rapist as the sole wise interpreter of hidden motives has waned. In the influential client-centered therapy developed by American psychologist Carl Rogers, the rapist concentrates on creating an aura of trust in which the ‘client’ can move towards solving his or her problems. The therapist does not interrupt and rarely offers advice. While this move away from the authoritarian character of Freudian analysis is generally accepted as an improvement, perhaps a sense of plumbing the full depths of the mind has been lost along the way.
Archetypal Popstars
The Beatles were loved for their music. But perhaps – just perhaps – their appeal also drew on the archetypes of Jungian theory. Some Jungians maintain that The Beatles represented four archetypes – the philosopher-king, the eternal youth, the mystic, and the trickster. By this theory, the Beatles tapped the collective unconscious, releasing its energy to creative effect and empowering us through our psyches. Or maybe they just wrote good tunes!
Hollywood And The Unconscious
In 1 957, America was gripped by the case of EdGein, a farmer who had murdered some twenty women. Gein dragged their dead bodies home to keep his mother company – his dead mother, that is, whose body he had propped up in a chair in the farmhouse so that he could talk to her. The story inspired Alfred Hitchcock to create Psycho. The director also knew his Freud and emphasized the Oedipal aspect of the son-mother relationship. Hitchcock drew on
Freud again for the dream sequence in Spellbound, which was designed with Salvador Dali’s help. George Lucas 1977 began the blockbuster Star Wars series, shaping characters with Jungian archetypes. For the hero Luke, the shadow archetype is represented by Darth Vader. The fact that he is Luke’s father adds an extra emphasis to Luke’s battle to overcome his shadow. Princess Leia is an anima figure (the female aspect), and the integration of this archetype occurs when Luke realizes that she is his twin sister. And the wise old man archetype is portrayed by Yoda, the Jedi master.
