Erich Fromm - Political Psychophilosopher

Erich Fromm - Political Psychophilosopher

Erich Fromm was born in Germany in 1900.  He grew up a Jew in a country full of anti-Semitism.  He witnessed World War I when he was an early teen and the rise of the Nazi party fifteen years later.  His interest in war and politics grew from these experiences and much of his theories were derived as a result of his desire to understand why individuals followed leaders into acts of destruction.

His initial book, and likely his most influential work, was called Escape From Freedom, published near the beginning of World War II.  In it he described freedom as the greatest problem for most individuals.  With freedom, according to Fromm, comes an overwhelming sense of aloneness and an inability to exert individual power.  He argued that we use several different techniques to alleviate the anxiety associated with our perception of freedom, including automaton, conformity, authoritarianism, destructiveness, and individuation.

The most common of these is automaton conformity.  Fromm argued that with the anxiety associated with our inability to express power and our fear of aloneness, we conform ourselves to a larger society.  By acting like everyone else, holding the same values, purchasing the same products, and believing in the same morals, we gain a sense of power.  This power of the masses assists us in not feeling alone and helpless.  Unfortunately, according to Fromm, it also removes our individuality and prevents us from truly being ourselves.

Authoritarianism is a technique that others use to ward off the anxiety.  Following an entity outside of the self and perceived greater than the self is the main feature of authoritarianism.  As the individual feels alone and powerless, he gains strength from the belief that there is a greater power beyond himself.  This entity could be a religious figure, a political leader, or social belief.  By giving up power to the powerful, we become the powerful and no longer feel alone.  In this sense authoritarianism is two sided or what Fromm describes as sadism/masochism, where we submit to our leader (such as Adolph Hitler) and demand power over our perceived enemies (Jews).

Others use the technique Fromm called destructiveness, which refers to an attempt to destroy those we perceive as having the power.  Because of our desire for power, we may feel that this finite resource must be taken from those who possess it.  There are many ways to attempt this destruction, including the alignment with hate groups, religious extremism, or even patriotism.  While our actions are often antisocial, cruel, and misguided, we rationalize them by claiming a sense of duty, a god given order, or the love of country.

Fromm believed that all three of these techniques used to overcome our anxiety associated with freedom are unhealthy.  The only healthy technique is to embrace this freedom and express our true selves rather than what we perceive as giving us power.  He argued that true power comes from individuality and freedom and doing what you want to do rather than what you are suppose to do is the only way to achieve individuation; the ability to be yourself and embrace the power associated with true freedom.

Erik Erikson (1902 - 1994) - Brief Summary

Erik Erikson (1902 - 1994)

Born in Germany, Erik Erikson had no university education there and went to art school in Italy. During the 1920s, he got to know the Freud family and was accepted as a co-worker at the Vienna Psychoanalytical Institute. In 1934, he moved to Boston and became the first child analyst in New England. During his long career, which included appointments at the universities of Yale and Harvard, his primary concern was the interaction of social norms and biological drives in generating self and identity (Erikson, 1950a).

His original training as a teacher freed him from the 19th-century heritage of neurological psychiatry that bedeviled the psychoanalysts of the first post-Freudian generation. His well-known description of eight developmental stages covering the lifespan (Erikson, 1950b) was based on biological events that disturb the equilibrium between drives and social adjustment. Personality would be arrested if the developmental challenge was not mastered through the evolution of new skills and attitudes. This would compromise later developmental stages. Erikson was remarkable amongst psychoanalysts for his attention to cultural and family factors, and his extension of the developmental model to the entire lifecycle. His theory introduced plasticity to the psychoanalytical developmental model, as well as stressing the need for a coherent self-concept fulfilled in a supportive social milieu.

The drive expression model binds understanding of social interaction to the gratification of biological needs. Erikson showed us how a person might find that a means of gratification, originally associated with a particular phase or erogenous zone, offers a useful way of expressing later wishes and conflicts. This enabled him to introduce a whole series of constructs, including identity, generatively, and basic trust. He expanded the drive model while remaining in a biological framework. His description of libido theory as tragedies and comedies taking place around the orifices of the body aptly summarizes Erikson's widening perspective enriched by anthropology and developmental study.

For Erikson, basic trust was the mode of functioning of the oral stage. He stressed that these processes established interpersonal patterns that were centered on the social modality of taking, and holding onto, objects, physical and psychic. Erikson (1950a) defined basic trust as a capacity to give and to receive and accept what is given.  (p. 58).

By emphasizing the interactional psychosocial aspects of development, Erikson quietly altered the central position assigned to excitement in Freud's theory of psychosexual development. Although he accepted the libidinal phase model and its timings as givens, his formulation was one of the first to shift the emphasis from a mechanistic drive theory view to the inherently interpersonal and transactional nature of the child-caregiver dyad as these are currently understood, related to the child's development of a sense of self.

Erikson's (1950a) brilliant insight, far ahead of his time, was that seemingly insignificant experiences would eventually become aggregated, and firmly create the establishment of enduring patterns for the balance of basic trust over basic mistrust.

 [the] amount of trust derived from earliest infantile experience does not seem to depend on absolute quantities of food or demonstrations of love, but rather on the quality of the maternal relationships (Erikson, 1959, p. 63). While many of his ideas have been so generally adopted that they are rare nowadays linked with his name (e.g., the crisis of identity in adolescence), his imperative to make psychodynamic theory socially relevant is as pertinent now as it was at the time of its publication.

PETER FONAGY

 © Cambridge University Press 2005

Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Child Development

Cambridge University Press

http://www.credoreference.com/entry/cupchilddev/erik_erikson_1902_1994

Another Summary of my notes on Freud

These are a collection of notes that I have gathered from a variety of sources and put together. Last edited on October 22, 2012.

 

Freud

“As all aggression among men is not due to unequal property relations or political injustice, which can be ratified bylaws, but rather to the death instinct redirected outwardly.”  - Taken from Civilization & Its Discontent

Freud showed that human emotional development could as well be studied by scientific observation and explanation. He also exposed that denial, “the escape,” by the various defense mechanisms that are developed and form the ego which serves as a defensive shield from the various internal unconscious conflicts. Freud discovered that in the efforts of neurotics to secure pleasure (hedonism) took them out of real life, ‘alienating them from reality” as they find it unbearable, either in whole or in parts. There-in lays the endless ability to dismiss, deny and rationalize those distressing experiences. The most extreme cases of overuse of these defense mechanisms are towards the psychotic end of mental illnesses. To turn towards reality is always in protest as in early life the child accurately sees it as hostile to his infantile needs. Against all the forces, which demand that he grow up, a child’s aggression is mobilized to support, his primary wishes, which he has no desire to forgo. In the young child when deprived of the needs he has, this weakens his self-esteem, and the effects are long-lasting. Recovery from all the various, regressive defenses and one has to mobilize and engages one’s instinctual and basic aggression impulses.

 

Freud teaches us that throughout all of human history and culture, they continue to be mediated by basic human drives and that no matter how high we reach into abstraction; our thoughts remain rooted in primitive psychic mechanisms.

A healthy person is one where the three components are balanced: the Id, Ego, and Superego. When in balanced, one has integration.

In Freud’s view, all psychopathology ultimately rests on unconscious self-deception. Behavior is actually under the control of hidden meanings that are hidden because they are too painful to the conscious mind to be acknowledged and known. For Freud, these hidden meanings revolve around primitive sexual and aggressive impulses. As part of this self-deception, we must of necessity distort external reality also, via mechanisms such as projections and displacement. This then is the obscuring by shadows by our self-deception of the objective, external Real. These shadows are the defenses created in early life to distort reality. These shadows also distort our inner world, the reality of feelings, thoughts, and motives. We live then in a world of our construction, contrived to protect us from painful, true self-knowledge. Therefore none of us live fully in touch with external or internal reality. For some of us, these distortions are compatible enough with a society that we are generally functional, for others these distortions are discrepant enough with the resulting behavior deviant enough, that our behavior becomes dysfunctional enough and in need of treatment.

He discovered repression, containing the various hatred at the root of love, and their repressed hatred of one’s father or Mother as a normal inheritance.

Some of the other basic Freudian concepts are the influences of the subconscious (unconscious), the existence and importance of infantile sexuality, the function of dreams, the Oedipus complex, resistance, and transference. He also worked out the relationships between unpleasant memories and fantasies, defense mechanisms and repression.

His main clinical work was with the treatment of repression and the conflicts of the neurotic. He believed that that maladjusted individual was but a symptom of the economic, social and cultural dysfunction of the contemporary world.

He compared the unconscious mind to an iceberg, nine-tenths submerged. The entire mind is almost entirely hidden in the unconscious.

Beneath the surface, there are motives, feelings, instinctual drives, which the individual conceals not only from others but also from him. For Freud, the unconscious is supreme, and the conscious mind/activity is reduced to a subordinate position. Most of our thinking is unconscious and only occasionally becomes conscious. Neuroses occur because the individual tried to banish to the unconscious all of his disagreeable memories and frustrated wishes, but this only succeeds in storing them up by the process of repression, going forward into the future, as neurotic focuses of repressed material, as unresolved conflicts that only generate internal anxiety from the resultant ambivalence. Psychiatrist Karen Horney is a good place to go for one of the best descriptions of the Neurotic.

The Id, Ego and Super Ego

The Id is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality, the center of primitive instincts and impulses, reaching back into man’s evolutionary beginning, everything that is inherited that is present at birth, factory installed, that is fixed in the personal constitution, the hard drive. The Id is blind and ruthless; it is solely interested in the gratification of its desires and pleasures without consideration of others or the consequences. “It knows no values, no good or evil, no morality.” It is guided simply by the pleasure/pain principle.

The Ego develops out of the Id, as the child grows older. The Ego is governed by the reality principle. The Ego is aware of the world around it, recognizing the lawless tendencies of the Id must be curbed to prevent conflict with the rules in place in the outer world, including the family, society, culture, etc. The Ego is the mediator “between the reckless claims of the Id and the checks of the outer world”. The Ego acts as a censor of the Id’s urges, adapting them to outer reality only consists primarily of avoiding punishment, what feels like to the child in their early years is like life or death.  The child moved to the pleasing position which sets up the various defenses mechanisms to maximize that fit with outer reality which most importantly first consists of the child’s parents, (the first outer reality is known by the child)

Out of the conflicts between the Id and the Ego, neuroses develop. The Super-Ego consists of all the prohibitions, all the rules of conduct, which are imposed often through coercion upon the child by the parents and all the parental substitutes, all other adults. It becomes what is often referred to as one’s conscience.  Like the Id the Super-Ego is unconscious, and the two are in, a perpetual conflict with each other with the Ego acting as the referee.

Oedipus impulses are usually outgrown. Those individuals who never succeed in outgrowing and breaking the parental attachment will thus lead to a series of neuroses. Freud says neurosis is without exception a disturbance of the sex complexes towards both parents.

Having to suppress and repressed many of these urges towards his parents, the person begins to use denial and repression and other such defenses to ward off these unacceptable urges. The dark unconscious forces are repressed from ever emerging again. Censorship kicks in. Because of the painful nature of the repressed material, the patient usually tires to prevent the uncovering of his repressions. These efforts are called ‘resistance’ which are the defensive shield the analysis must overcome.

Pascal, Hobbes, and Edgar Allen Poe were just three of the men this who had the idea that the self-has a double a mysterious and half hidden “other” that somehow exerts an influence over the person’s behavior and feelings. Christian August Heinroth 1773-1843 argued that the main cause of mental illness was a sin. (I agree with the statement, that all psychopathology are characterologically originating from sin. I will write on this seminal issue at another time.)

Schopenhauer viewed consciousnesses, the mere surface of the mind as like a globe of the earth, we only know the surface it’s crossed and know nothing of its interior.

Herbart pictured the mind is dualistic, in constant conflict between the conscious and the unconscious processes. Fechner built on this likening the mind to an iceberg which is 9/10 of an underwater and whose course is determined not only by the wind that plays over the surface but also the currents beneath it of the deep.

He believes that during the very early periods of sexual awareness a son was drawn to the mother and saw himself as a rival to the father, or vice versa with the daughter drawn to the father with the mother as the rival, the Electra complex. By extension, Freud said this early triangle of conflict that forms a triad, of always wanting something you can’t ever completely have, as there is always rival was a basic dynamic truth that lasted throughout a person’s entire lifetime. That all relationships were contaminated in a way by this triad throughout our lives.

The discovery and the illumination of the unconscious were considered by many people to be the most influential idea of the 20^th century. Freud’s seduction theory and by extension the Oedipus and the Electra complexes are perhaps the most influential aspect of Freudianism and one of the most important ideas of the century. With the advent of the discovery of the unconscious, it had a profound effect on thought, particularly in the arts. Out of this discovery of the unconscious by Freud was born modernism and later postmodernism. Underneath it all, modernism may be seen as the aesthetic equivalent to Freud’s unconscious. Modernism is the aesthetic attempt to go beyond the surface of things in a non-representational, highly self-conscious and intuitive approach. The kinds of works of in modernism have a high degree of self-signature.

Mourning and Melancholia - by Freud 1917

In 1917, Freud began searching for the seeds of depression in a
landmark essay, "Mourning and Melancholia," which distinguished
between normal grieving at the loss of a loved one and a sustained
sickness in which anger at the loved one is redirected toward the
Self. Thirty years later, John Bowlby observed the pain of children
separated from their mothers and developed his "attachment theory,"
which held that the loss of the affectionate infant-mother
the relationship is the cause of most adult mental illness.

Freud Notes - My own writings

Freud Notes
Freud didn't exactly invent the idea of the conscious versus unconscious mind, but he certainly was responsible for making it popular. The conscious mind is what you are aware of at any particular moment, your present perceptions, memories, thoughts, fantasies, feelings, what have you. Working closely with the conscious mind is what Freud called the preconscious, what we might today call "available memory:" anything that can easily be made conscious, the memories you are not at the moment thinking about but can readily bring to mind. Now no-one has a problem with these two layers of mind. But Freud suggested that these are the smallest parts!
The largest part by far is the unconscious. It includes all the things that are not easily available to awareness, including many things that have their origins there, such as our drives or instincts, and things that are out there because we can't bear to look at them, such as the memories and emotions associated with trauma.
According to Freud, the unconscious is the source of our motivations, whether they are simple desires for food or sex, neurotic compulsions, or the motives of an artist or scientist. And yet, we are often driven to deny or resist becoming conscious of these motives, and they are often available to us only in disguised form. We will come back to this.

The id, the ego, and the superego
Freudian psychological reality begins with the world, full of objects. Among them is a very special object, the individual themselves, as an  organism. The organism is special in that it acts to survive and reproduce, and it is guided toward those ends by its needs -- hunger, thirst, the avoidance of pain, and sex.
A part -- a very important part -- of the organism is the nervous system, which has as one its characteristics sensitivity to the organism's needs. At birth, that nervous system is little more than that of any other animal, an "it" or id. The nervous system, as id, translates the organism's needs into motivational forces called, in German, Triebe, which has been translated as instincts or drives. Freud also called them wishes. This translation from the need to wish is called the primary process.
The id works in keeping with the pleasure principle, which can be understood as a demand to take care of needs immediately. Just picture the hungry infant, screaming itself blue. It doesn't "know" what it wants in any adult sense; it just knows that it wants it and it wants it now. The infant, in the Freudian view, is pure or nearly pure Id. And the id is nothing if not the psychic representative of biology.
Unfortunately, although a wish for food, such as the image of a juicy steak, might be enough to satisfy the id, it isn't enough to satisfy the organism. The need only gets stronger, and the wishes just keep coming. You may have noticed that, when you haven't satisfied some need, such as the need for food, it begins to demand more and more of your attention, until there comes the point where you can't think of anything else. This is the wish or drives breaking into consciousness.
Luckily for the organism, there is that small portion of the mind we discussed before, the conscious, which is hooked up to the world through the senses. Around this little bit of consciousness, during the first year of a child's life, some of the "it" becomes "I," some of the id becomes ego. The ego relates the organism to reality using its consciousness, and it searches for objects to satisfy the wishes that it creates to represent the organism’s needs. This problem-solving activity is called the secondary process.
The ego, unlike the id, functions according to the reality principle, which says "take care of a need as soon as an appropriate object is found." It represents reality and, to a considerable extent, reason.
However, as the ego struggles to keep the id (and, ultimately, the organism) happy, it meets with obstacles in the world. It occasionally meets with objects that assist it in attaining its goals. And it keeps a record of these obstacles and aides. In particular, it keeps track of the rewards and punishments meted out by two of the most influential objects in the world of the child -- mom and dad. This record of things to avoid and strategies to take becomes the superego. It is not completed until about seven years of age. In some people, it never is completed.
There are two aspects to the superego: One is the conscience, which is an internalization of punishments and warnings. The other is called the ego ideal. It derives from rewards and positive models presented to the child. The conscience and ego ideal communicate their requirements to the ego with feelings like pride, shame, and guilt.
It is as if we acquired, in childhood, a new set of needs and accompanying wishes, this time of social rather than biological origins. Unfortunately, these new wishes can easily conflict with the ones from the id. You see, the superego represents society, and society often wants nothing better than to have you never satisfy your needs at all!
Life instincts and the death instinct
Freud saw all human behavior as motivated by the drives or instincts, which in turn are the neurological representations of physical needs. At first, he referred to them as the life instincts. These instincts perpetuate (a) the life of the individual, by motivating him or her to seek food and water, and (b) the life of the species, by motivating him or her to have sex. The motivational energy of these life instincts, the "oomph" that powers our psyches, he called libido, from the Latin word for "I desire."
Freud's clinical experience led him to view sex as much more important in the dynamics of the psyche than other needs. We are, after all, social creatures, and sex is the most social of needs. Plus, we have to remember that Freud included much more than intercourse in the term sex! Anyway, libido has come to mean, not any old drive, but the sex drive.
Later in his life, Freud began to believe that the life instincts didn't tell the whole story. Libido is a living thing; the pleasure principle keeps us in perpetual motion. And yet the goal of all this motion is to be still, to be satisfied, to be at peace, to have no more needs. The goal of life, you might say, is death! Freud began to believe that "under" and "beside" the life instincts there was a death instinct. He began to believe that every person has an unconscious wish to die.
This seems like a strange idea at first, and it was rejected by many of his students, but I think it has some basis in experience: Life can be a painful and exhausting process. There is easy, for the great majority of people in the world, more pain than pleasure in life -- something we are extremely reluctant to admit! Death promises release from the struggle.
Freud referred to a nirvana principle. Nirvana is a Buddhist idea, often translated as heaven, but meaning "blowing out," as in the blowing out of a candle. It refers to non-existence, nothingness, the void, which is the goal of all life in Buddhist philosophy.
The day-to-day evidence of the death instinct and its nirvana principle is in our desire for peace, for escape from stimulation, our attraction to alcohol and narcotics, our penchant for escapist activity, such as losing ourselves in books or movies, our craving for rest and sleep. Sometimes it presents itself openly as suicide and suicidal wishes. And, Freud theorized, sometimes we direct it out away from ourselves, in the form of aggression, cruelty, murder, and destructiveness.
Anxiety
Freud once said, "Life is not easy!"
The ego -- the "I" -- sits at the center of some pretty powerful forces: reality; society, as represented by the superego; biology, as represented by the id. When these make conflicting demands upon the poor ego, it is understandable if it -- if you -- feel threatened, fell overwhelmed, feel as if it were about to collapse under the weight of it all. This feeling is called anxiety, and it serves as a signal to the ego that its survival, and with it the survival of the whole organism, is in jeopardy.
Freud mentions three different kinds of anxieties: The first is realistic anxiety, which you and I would call fear. Freud did, too, in German. But his translators thought "fear" too mundane! Nevertheless, if I throw you into a pit of poisonous snakes, you might experience realistic anxiety.
The second is moral anxiety. This is what we feel when the threat comes not from the outer, physical world, but from the internalized social world of the superego. It is, in fact, just another word for feelings like shame and guilt and the fear of punishment.
The last is neurotic anxiety. This is the fear of being overwhelmed by impulses from the id. If you have ever felt like you were about to "lose it," losing control, your temper, your rationality, or even your mind, you have felt neurotic anxiety. Neurotic is the Latin word for nervous, so this is nervous anxiety. It is this kind of anxiety that intrigued Freud most, and we usually call it anxiety, plain and simple.
The defense mechanisms
The ego deals with the demands of reality, the id, and the superego as best as it can. But when the anxiety becomes overwhelming, the ego must defend itself. It does so by unconsciously blocking the impulses or distorting them into a more acceptable, less threatening form. The techniques are called the ego defense mechanisms, and Freud, his daughter Anna, and other disciples have discovered quite a few.
Denial involves blocking external events from awareness. If some situation is just too much to handle, the person just refuses to experience it. As you might imagine, this is a primitive and dangerous defense -- no one disregards reality and gets away with it for long! It can operate by itself or, more commonly, in combination with other, more subtle mechanisms that support it.
Repression, which Anna Freud also called "motivated forgetting," is just that: not being able to recall a threatening situation, person, or event. This, too, is dangerous and is a part of most other defenses.

Other examples abound. Anna Freud provides one that now strikes us as quaint: A young girl, guilty about her rather strong sexual desires, tends to forget her boyfriend's name, even when trying to introduce him to her relations! Or an alcoholic can't remember his suicide attempt, claiming he must have "blacked out." Or a someone almost drowns as a child, but can't remember the event even when people try to remind him --, but he does have this fear of open water!
Note that, to be a true example of a defense, it should function unconsciously. My brother had a fear of dogs as a child, but there was no defense involved: He had been bitten by one, and wanted very badly never to repeat the experience! Usually, it is the irrational fears we call phobias that derive from the repression of traumas.
Asceticism, or the renunciation of needs, is one most people haven't heard of, but it has become relevant again today with the emergence of the disorder called anorexia. Preadolescents, when they feel threatened by their emerging sexual desires, may unconsciously try to protect themselves by denying, not only their sexual desires but all desires. They get involved in some ascetic (monk-like) lifestyle wherein they renounce their interest in what other people enjoy.
Unfortunately, girls in our society often develop a great deal of interest in attaining an excessively and artificially thin standard of beauty. In Freudian theory, their denial of their need for food is a cover for their denial of their sexual development. Our society conspires with them: After all, what most societies consider a normal figure for a mature woman is in ours considered 20 pounds overweight!
Isolation (sometimes called intellectualization) involves stripping the emotion from a difficult memory or threatening impulse. A person may, in a very cavalier manner, acknowledge that they had been abused as a child or my show a purely intellectual curiosity in their newly discovered sexual orientation. Something that should be a big deal is treated as if it were not.
Displacement is the redirection of an impulse onto a substitute target. If the impulse, the desire, is okay with you, but the person you direct that desire towards is too threatening, you can displace to someone or something that can serve as a symbolic substitute.
Someone who hates his or her mother may repress that hatred, but direct it instead towards, say, women in general. Someone who has not had the chance to love someone may substitute cats or dogs for human beings. Someone who feels uncomfortable with their sexual desire for a real person may substitute a fetish. Someone who is frustrated by his or her superiors may go home and kick the dog, beat up a family member, or engage in cross-burnings.
Turning against the self is a very special form of displacement, where the person becomes their substitute target. It is normally used about hatred, anger, and aggression, rather than more positive impulses, and it is the Freudian explanation for many of our feelings of inferiority, guilt, and depression. The idea that depression is often the result of the anger we refuse to acknowledge is accepted by many people, Freudians and non-Freudians alike.
Projection, which Anna Freud also called displacement outward, is almost the complete opposite of turning against the self. It involves the tendency to see your unacceptable desires in other people. In other words, the desires are still there, but they're not your desires anymore. I confess that whenever I hear someone going on and on about how aggressive everybody is, or how perverted they all are, I tend to wonder if this person doesn't have an aggressive or sexual streak in themselves that they'd rather not acknowledge.
Let me give you a couple of examples: A husband, a good and faithful one, finds himself attracted to the charming and flirtatious lady next door. But rather than acknowledge his own, hardly abnormal, lusts, he becomes increasingly jealous of his wife, constantly worried about her faithfulness, and so on. Or a woman finds herself having vaguely sexual feelings about her girlfriends. Instead of acknowledging those feelings as quite normal, she becomes increasingly concerned with the presence of lesbians in her community.
An altruistic surrender is a form of projection that at first glance looks like its opposite: Here, the person attempts to fulfill his or her own needs vicariously, through other people.
A common example of this is the friend (we've all had one) who, while not seeking any relationship himself, is constantly pushing other people into them, and is particularly curious as to "what happened last night" and "how are things going?" The extreme example of altruistic surrender is the person who lives their whole life for and through another.
Reaction formation, which Anna Freud called "believing the opposite," is changing an unacceptable impulse into its opposite. So a child, angry at his or her mother, may become overly concerned with her and rather dramatically shower her with affection. An abused child may run to the abusing parent. Or someone who can't accept a homosexual impulse may claim to despise homosexuals.
Perhaps the most common and clearest example of reaction formation is found in children between seven and eleven or so: Most boys will tell you in no uncertain terms how disgusting girls are, and girls will tell you with equal vigor how gross boys are. Adults are watching their interactions, however, can tell quite easily what their true feelings are!
Undoing involves "magical" gestures or rituals that are meant to cancel out unpleasant thoughts or feelings after they've already occurred. Anna Freud mentions, for example, a boy who would recite the alphabet backward whenever he had a sexual thought, or turn around and spit whenever meeting another boy who shared his passion for masturbation.
In "normal" people, the undoing is, of course, more conscious, and we might engage in the act of atonement for some behavior, or formally ask for forgiveness. But in some people, the act of atonement isn't conscious at all. Consider the alcoholic father who, after a year of verbal and perhaps physical abuse, puts on the best and biggest Christmas ever for his kids. When the season is over, and the kids haven't quite been fooled by his magical gesture, he returns to his bartender with complaints about how ungrateful his family is, and how they drive him to drink.
One of the classic examples of undoing concerns personal hygiene following sex: It is perfectly reasonable to wash up after sex. After all, it can get messy! But if you feel the need to take three or four complete showers using gritty soap -- perhaps sex doesn't quite agree with you.
Introjection, sometimes called identification, involves taking into your personality characteristics of someone else because doing so solves some emotional difficulty. For example, a child who is left alone frequently, may in some way try to become "mom" to lessen his or her fears. You can sometimes catch them telling their dolls or animals not to be afraid. And we find the older child or teenager imitating his or her favorite star, musician, or sports hero to establish an identity.
I must add here that identification is very important to Freudian theory as the mechanism by which we develop our superegos.
Identification with the aggressor is a version of introjections that focuses on the adoption, not of general or positive traits, but of negative or feared traits. If you are afraid of someone, you can partially conquer that fear by becoming more like them.
A more dramatic example is one called the Stockholm syndrome. After a hostage crisis in Stockholm, psychologists were surprised to find that the hostages were not only not terribly angry at their captors, but often downright sympathetic. A more recent case involved a young woman named Patty Hearst, of the wealthy and influential Hearst family. She was captured by a very small group of self-proclaimed revolutionaries called the Symbionese Liberation Army. She was kept in closets, raped, and otherwise mistreated. She decided to join them, making little propaganda videos for them and even waving a machine gun around during a bank robbery. When she was later tried, psychologists strongly suggested she was a victim, not a criminal. She was nevertheless convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to 7 years in prison. Her sentence was commuted by President Carter after two years.
Regression is a movement back in psychological time when one is faced with stress. When we are troubled or frightened, our behaviors often become more childish or primitive. A child may begin to suck their thumb again or wet the bed when they need to spend some time in the hospital. Teenagers may giggle uncontrollably when introduced into a social situation involving the opposite sex. A freshman college student may need to bring an old toy from home. A gathering of civilized people may become a violent mob when they are led to believe their livelihoods are at stake. Or an older man, after spending twenty years at a company and now finding himself laid off, may retire to his recliner and become childishly dependent on his wife.
Where do we retreat when faced with stress? For the last time in life when we felt safe and secure, according to Freudian theory.
Rationalization is the cognitive distortion of "the facts" to make an event or an impulse less threatening. We do it often enough on a fairly conscious level when we provide ourselves with excuses. But for many people, with sensitive egos, making excuses comes so easy that they never are truly aware of it. In other words, many of us are quite prepared to believe our lies.
A useful way of understanding the defenses is to see them as a combination of denial or repression with various kinds of rationalizations.
All defenses are, of course, lies, even if we are not conscious of making them. But that doesn't make them less dangerous -- it makes them more so. As your grandma may have told you, "Oh what a tangled web we weave..." Lies breed lies, and take us further and further from the truth, from reality. After a while, the ego can no longer take care of the id's demands, or pay attention to the superego's. The anxieties come rushing back and you break down.
And yet Freud saw defenses as necessary. You can hardly expect a person, especially a child, to take the pain and sorrow of life full on! While some of his followers suggested that all of the defenses could be used positively, Freud himself suggested that there was one positive defense, which he called sublimation.
Character
Your experiences as you grow up contribute to your personality, or character, as an adult. Freud felt that traumatic experiences had an especially strong effect. Of course, each specific trauma would have its unique impact on a person, which can only be explored and understood on an individual basis. But traumas associated with stage development, since we all have to go through them, should have more consistency.
If you have difficulties in any of the tasks associated with the stages -- weaning, potty training, or finding your sexual identity -- you will tend to retain certain infantile or childish habits. This is called fixation. Fixation gives each problem at each stage a long-term effect regarding our personality or character.
If you, in the first eight months of your life, are often frustrated in your need to suckle, perhaps because the mother is uncomfortable or even rough with you, or tries to wean you too early, then you may develop an oral-passive character. An oral-passive personality tends to be rather dependent on others. They often retain an interest in "oral gratifications" such as eating, drinking, and smoking. It is as if they were seeking the pleasures they missed in infancy.
When we are between five and eight months old, we begin teething. One satisfying thing to do when you are teething is to bite on something, like mommy's nipple. If this causes a great deal of upset and precipitates early weaning, you may develop an oral-aggressive personality. These people retain a life-long desire to bite on things, such as pencils, gum, and other people. They tend to be verbally aggressive, argumentative, sarcastic, and so on.
In the anal stage, we are fascinated with our "bodily functions." At first, we can go whenever and wherever we like. Then, out of the blue and for no reason you can understand, the powers that be want you to do it only at certain times and in certain places. And parents seem to value the end product of all this effort!
Some parents put themselves at the child's mercy in the process of toilet training. They beg they cajole, they show great joy when you do it right, they act as though their hearts were broken when you don't. The child is the king of the house and knows it. This child will grow up to be an anal expulsive (a.k.a. anal aggressive) personality. These people tend to be sloppy, disorganized, and generous to a fault. They may be cruel, destructive, and given to vandalism and graffiti. The Oscar Madison character in The Odd Couple is a nice example.
Other parents are strict. They may be competing with their neighbors and relatives as to who can potty train their child first (early potty training being associated in many people's minds with great intelligence). They may use punishment or humiliation. This child will likely become constipated as he or she tries desperately to hold it in at all times, and will grow up to be an anal retentive personality. He or she will tend to be especially clean, perfectionist, dictatorial, very stubborn, and stingy. In other words, the anal retentive is tight in all ways. The Felix Unger character in The Odd Couple is a perfect example.
There are also two phallic personalities, although no-one has given them names. If the boy is harshly rejected by his mother, and rather threatened by his very masculine father, he is likely to have a poor sense of self-worth when it comes to his sexuality. He may deal with this by either withdrawing from heterosexual interaction, perhaps becoming a book-worm, or by putting on a rather macho act and playing the ladies' man. A girl rejected by her father and threatened by her very feminine mother is also likely to feel poorly about herself, and may become a wall-flower or a hyper-feminine "belle."
But if a boy is not rejected by his mother, but rather favored over his weak, milquetoast father, he may develop quite an opinion of himself (which may suffer greatly when he gets into the real world, where nobody loves him as his mother did), and may appear rather effeminate. After all, he has no cause to identify with his father. Likewise, if a girl is daddy's little princess and best buddy, and mommy has been relegated to a sort of servant role, then she may become quite vain and self-centered, or possibly rather masculine.
These various phallic characters demonstrate an important point in Freudian characterology: Extremes lead to extremes. If you are frustrated in some way or overindulged in some way, you have problems. And, although each problem tends to lead to certain characteristics, these characteristics can also easily be reversed. So an anal retentive person may suddenly become exceedingly generous or may have some part of their life where they are messy. This is frustrating to scientists, but it may reflect the reality of personality!

Therapy Issues of Transference, catharsis, and insight - Own Notes

Therapy
Transference, catharsis, and insight
Transference occurs when a client projects feelings toward the therapist that more legitimately belong with certain important others. Freud felt that transference was necessary in therapy to bring the repressed emotions that have been plaguing the client for so long, to the surface. You can't feel angry, for example, without a real person to be angry at. The relationship between the client and the therapist, contrary to popular images, is very close to Freudian therapy, although it is understood that it can't get out of hand.
Catharsis is the sudden and dramatic outpouring of emotion that occurs when the trauma is resurrected. The box of tissues on the end table is not there for decoration.
Insight is being aware of the source of the emotion, of the original traumatic event. The major portion of the therapy is completed when catharsis and insight are experienced. What should have happened many years ago -- because you were too young to deal with it, or under too many conflicting pressures -- has now happened, and you are on your way to becoming a happier person.
Freud said that the goal of therapy is simply “to make the unconscious conscious."

The Broken Connection - Notes from the book by Robert J. Lifton

The Broken Connection         by Robert J. Lifton

In early childhood death images consisting of “death equivalents” come from separation, disintegration, and stasis. The opposites or counterpoints of these death equivalents are vitality and affirmation. Connection vs. separation, integrity vs. disintegration and movement vs. stasis.

Connection and Separation is the fundamental of all there is in human life.

John Bowlby’s work, that separation anxiety has a primal quality to it, and that separation from loved ones or the threat of separation is the principal source of anxiety and distress. It is not reducible to other terms.

Otto Rank spoke about the birth fear, the trauma of separation and the loss of the Mother, which he spoke of as the primal fear. Those fears later become what we generally call the fears of life whereas the background was the fears of death. This primal fear, Rank thought was the loss of connection with the greater whole, in the last analysis with the ‘all’. This primal fear has both elements of life and death in it. As with birth, there is the death of a previous life in this case inside the womb.       

What Erickson calls “basic trust” can be understood as the infant’s earliest “feeling’ that life is reliable: that goal-directed behavior engenders a response that satisfies and vitalizes. Although there are always flaws in the fit between what the infant anticipates and what he experiences which results by mistrust.

John Bowlby’s work on Protest, Despair, and Detachment is basic to an understanding of early infant bonding and disruptions in this bonding, which affects the infant.

Therapeutic conditions of Change. - My own notes

Therapeutic conditions of Change.

Due to repression, affect is strangulated in the unconscious. The discharge of this material is called the “emotional catharsis.” It is to be thought of as energy or charge attached to it. Psychopathology then comes from this emotion-charged repressed material that remains active in the personality, and overt behavioral systems result from it.

The knowledge that is purely intellectual, abstract, and hypothetical and not affect-laden will always stay that way. Everyone hates their Mother and Father, but in adult life, this stays as intellectual knowledge not “experientially knowing” it is thereby keeping it out of the conscious mind. To acquire therapeutic insight is to relieve the emotion of hating. To remember your personal experience of the feeling will be to experience them in a therapeutic context. Clients must learn how derivatives of early childhood feelings based on traumas have been woven into the fabric of their whole life.

Resistance to change comes from the unconscious as no matter how much the conscious mind and the pain it is in is driving the person to change, to change is to undo the repression that protects them from painful unconscious memories, and therefore they will unconsciously resist treatment.

Depression – The Static Protest - My own notes

Depression – The Static Protest

Crucial to psychic functioning are feelings of vitality. Psychiatric disorders occur when these feeling are impaired.

Winnicott referred to traumatic neurosis as the break in the lifeline. What is broken, shattered is the experience of life, the construction of vitality. Psychic trauma is an event in which the individual is threatened with death or destruction of a part of the body including the mind and soul. All mental disturbances are thought to occur from these events that then lead to a numbing, constriction or dissociation of feelings to diminish psychic tension. The dissociated material is split-off, abandoned.

If the person resists feelings, then they can say “If I feel nothing, then death and its equivalents do not exist for me, or can at least be fended off through psychic numbing. Emotional numbing and overall constriction is similar to death. Many survivors in Hiroshima underwent an extreme form of numbing, of symbolic death to avoid a permanent physical or psychic death. Another example was the walking-corpse of the death camps. The divine spark within them is dead, already too empty to suffer.

Depression creates a static apprehension and negation of those feelings of separation and disintegration.

Freud described melancholia as a culture of the death instinct. It often succeeds in driving the ego into death if the tyrant super-ego doesn’t get to it first. Every neurotic state of depression contains a tendency to deny life. People become depressed following disappointments in love because “with their lost love, they lose their very existence if one attempts to love again.” Narcissistic gratification develops from these repeated loses rather than explore any further ramifications of the sense of losing one’s very existence. Freud’s classical study of Mourning and Melancholia was written in 1915, on Narcissism written in 1914 explore the association of depression with the development of narcissism. Freud thought that the lost-object becomes incorporated into the ego so an object loss becomes an ego-loss.              

One acts depressed to avoid the feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. One behaves statically to avoid experiencing the full actuality of one’s stasis. This numbing towards one’s numbing again closely resembles patterns in survivors of the Holocaust. The depressed person's psychic energy is locked in, insistent negativism. Hence the major element of his entrapment. It is as if they have the impulse to act, but something shuts them down and prohibits them from taking action (Will-power).

There then becomes a vicious circle around energy impairment: diminished psychic energy towards the outside, a negativistic assertion of the unavailability of vital energy to do something and hence a retreat backs into static negativism.