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.