Freud did not invent the idea of the unconscious mind, but he certainly gave it substance and brought it to wide attention. His work had a profound effect on society, and there is no doubting his status as an intellectual giant of the 20th century. But what was it that led Freud to his revolutionary theories?
Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in the small town of Freiberg, Moravia, which today lies within the C Czech Republic. His father, Jacob, was a wool merchant, and his mother, Amalia,-was Jacob’s second wife and nearly 20 years his junior. Freud grew up with seven younger siblings; he also had two half brothers, almost the same age as his mother. As a child, Freud was a voracious reader and was precociously intelligent: ‘ My Sigmund has more intelligence in his little toe than I have in my whole head,’ said his father. Freud was driven to make his mark in the world not only by his innate intelligence but also by his status as one of a few attempting to forge a path into the European intellectual world. His early interest in science led him to medical school in Vienna, where he developed a passion for neurology and physiology, traveling to France to work with some of the foremost psychiatrists of the day.
Freud’s early life provides some clues as to how he arrived at his theories of the mind. Freud’s interest in family dynamics, which lies at the heart of his revolutionary ideas, was certainly triggered by observations of his own extended family and his genius for connecting diverse sources of information and so reveal Rudden’s connections were strongly influenced by methods, including dream analysis, used in Judaism to interpret the scriptures. Freud was initially fascinated by the use of hypnosis to treat hysteria and neurosis, and when he returned to Vienna from. During his studies with Charcot in Paris and Bernheim in Nancy, he opened a private practice in neuro psychiatry with the help of his friend and collaborator, Josef Breuer.
Studies of hysteria
The seeds of Freud’s understanding of the mind are seen in the case of ‘Anna O, a woman treated by Brener in the 1880s. Anna O presented a variety of hysterical symptoms, from minor headaches and lapses of concentration to hallucinations and paralysis of neck muscles. At one point in her treatment, she displayed a fear of water and would not drink from a glass for some six weeks. When encouraged by Breuer to enter a hypnotic state, she recalled an incident in which an acquaintance allowed her dog to drink from a glass, an event Anna found disgusting. Immediately on coming round from the hypnotic state, she was fully able to drink normally. Evidently, the memory of the dog episode had remained barred from normal consciousness yet was responsible for her fear of drinking water. Merely recalling the memory was sufficient to let her overcome her fear. The ‘ talking cure’ – psychoanalysis – was born.
Yet Freud felt there was something m.issi ng. Anna O’s cure was piece meal – there seemed more to her case than superficial symptoms, such as her inability to drink. Indeed, at the time that Breuer finished treating Anna, she began writhing ·with abdominal pain, displaying symptoms of false pregnancy and declaring,’ Nov, comes Dr Breuer’s child! ‘ Freud surmised that Anna O’s symptoms were caused by her sexual fantasies and frustrations, and this idea became the lynchpin of his later theories.
Sex and development
Freud saw all human behavior as being motivated by unconscious drives to seek out food, water, principally, and sex. The motivational energy for these instincts he called libido (from the Latin for ‘ [ desire’). He asserted (much to the disgust of contemporary society) that children go through several distinct stages of sexual development and that adult neuroses are linked to repressed memories of these stages.
Freud noted that different parts of our bodies are the focus of tactile and sexual pleasure at different times of life. From birth to about 18 months, the mouth is the focus; from 18 months to 3 years, it is the anus; from 3 to 6 years, it is the genitalia. Freud named these stages oral, anal, and phallic and recognized that each one included difficult transitions that could become the root of anxieties in later life.
A boy in the phallic stage, for example, seeks an external object for his phallic sexual desire. The obvious choice is his mother, but there is one big obstacle to his plans – a sexual rival in the form of his father. The boy becomes jealous of his father and wishes him dead, but he feels sure that his father knows about his hostility. He believes that his father hates him and will punish him by cutting off his penis. The boy’s hatred and fear of his father escalate until. Eventually, he gives up on his mother as an object of desire. He begins to identify with his father, knowing that if he becomes like him, he too will one day enjoy a similar sexual partnership. Freud called this whole process the Oedipus complex after the character in Greek myth who murders his father and marries his mother.
According to Freud, unacceptable or taboo thoughts, memories, and wishes (mainly about childhood sexual desires) are repressed or forced out of consciousness but remain lodged in the unconscious. External events can trigger this material to emerge once more, causing the subject to relive the original anxiety. The thoughts are once again pushed back into the unconscious, resulting in constant conflict at the unconscious level.
Freud’s structure of the mind
For Freud, the conflict is played out between three distinct aspects of the personality or foci of the mind – the id, ego, and superego. These were famously described in his book The Ego and the ld (1925). The id is the source of our instinctive gratification king drives. The ego is our general sense of identity, the I, that interacts with the world. The superego is a type of conscience, an internal reproduction of authority figures, especially our parents. The ego seeks to balance the demands of the id and the superego while maintaining a healthy orientation to the real world.
In addition to these three foci, the mind comprises three regions: the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. The Freudian unconscious is distinct from the conscious mind because of its sexual content and its illogicality. The preconscious includes material of which we are not currently conscious but that can enter consciousness with no limitations. Unconscious material is repressed – that is, it is actively barred from consciousness, and hence, the ego may experience such material only in disguised form.
The talking cure
Perhaps the most important of Freud’s assertions was that everything we think, say, or do is driven by the unconscious; nothing occurs by chance. Psychoanalysis is a therapy that helps to uncover the hidden causes of our conscious thoughts and behavior and so always helps us to deal with the problems associated with repression. Its goal – according to Freud – is to make the unconscious conscious. For example, when Anna O recalled the repressed memory of a dog drinking from a glass, it unblocked her resistance to drinking.
Initially, Freud used hypnosis to examine his patients’ unconscious material. Still, he gradually abandoned the technique because he felt that hypnosis was incapable of penetrating to the deepest – the sexual – aspects of a problem. He favored the technique of free association, in which the patient would be in a relaxed position on the famous couch and say whatever came into his or her head. Freud would then analyze what the patient had remembered – paying particular attention to symbols and fragments of dreams, which he considered being ‘the royal road to the unconscious. The analyst – and only the analyst – could then determine what events in the patient’s past had caused his or her current suffering.
Freud And Religion
Freud saw psychoanalysis as a substitute for the self-cleansing imperative of religion. He referred to religion dismissively as ‘the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity’. He considered its rituals to be akin to the acts of someone who has not come to terms with an unconscious block.
To Freud, people of religious faith demonstrated a primitive form of thinking in which everything becomes submitted before a knowing father figure. He believed that men who had not resolved their Oedipus complex (by accepting the authority of their real father) were more susceptible to the acceptance of a ‘super-father’ – by which he meant God.
