Read The Story of Psychology Online
Authors: Morton Hunt
Earlier, Freud had held that the development of the superego takes place in girls in a fashion exactly analogous to that in boys. Later, he came to think that the girl, lacking castration anxiety, has a less intense Oedipal crisis and therefore a less developed superego and moral sense throughout life.
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(Curiously, the paper in which he stated these patriarchal views was, at his request, read on his behalf at the 1925 International Psycho-Analytical Congress by his beloved daughter, the psychoanalyst Anna Freud.)
The individual’s behavior is thus the outcome of an interplay among the three agencies of the psyche. The id seeks immediate gratification of its desires; the ego, using reality-principle thinking, seeks to restrain the impulse and find acceptable forms of gratification; and the superego exerts control by means of parental values absorbed into the unconscious. When the id is too strong for the ego and superego, the person’s behavior is either pathological or criminal; when the superego is too strong for the ego, the person is guilt-ridden and frustrated or moralistic and persecutory of others.
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In the healthy individual, the ego controls the system, finding ways to permit sufficient gratification of the id but not at the cost of bringing about overwhelming guilt feelings from the outraged superego.
Instinct theory:
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By “instinct” Freud did not mean what biologists mean: specific forms of behavior coded into the genes—web spinning by spiders, nest building by birds—forms of behavior he referred to by the German word
Instinkt.
But the German word translated in the Standard Edition as “instinct” is
Trieb
, which denotes “impulse,” “moving force,” or “drive.”
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In his early work Freud had assumed that the sexual instincts associated with the mouth, anus, and sex organs made up the sum total of psychic energy. But his later research on “repetition compulsions” (tendencies to repeat self-defeating or painful acts) plus the horrendous events of World War I broadened his thinking; he became convinced that there is also an instinct to destroy. When directed outward, it takes the form of aggression, but if blocked, it may turn inward, as seen in repetition compulsions.
He thus propounded a two-instinct theory: The life instinct, or Eros,
comprises all life-preserving impulses, among them the sexual drive; and the death instinct, or Thanatos, embraces all impulses toward hostility, sadism, and aggression—and even, he tentatively suggested, a mysterious drive toward one’s own death.
Anxiety, symptoms, defenses:
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Originally Freud held that neurotic anxiety and its symptoms—as distinguished from the realistic anxiety one feels when facing a real-world danger—arise from the blocked energy of the repressed sexual instinct: unrelieved sexual tension generates anxiety. But as he accumulated clinical data, he developed the more sophisticated explanation on which he based the theory of the Oedipus complex and its resolution, and extended it to account for other forms of neurotic anxiety. An instinctual desire reaching consciousness either as a fantasy or overt action creates an anticipation of harm. This causes the child to feel intolerable anxiety; the ego, to defend itself, represses the instinctual desire, whereupon the anxiety disappears.
But what does the psyche do with the bottled-up energy, the tension-producing unpleasure of the unfulfilled instinctual demand? How does the psyche keep it from breaking through into consciousness? One solution—the defective, pathogenic one Freud saw in his neurotic patients—was the formation of symptoms:
A symptom arises from an instinctual impulse which has been detrimentally affected by repression… The instinctual impulse has found a substitute in spite of repression, but a substitute which is very much reduced, displaced, and inhibited and which is no longer recognizable as a satisfaction. And when the substitutive impulse is carried out there is no sensation of pleasure; its carrying-out has, instead, the quality of a compulsion.
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He illustrated the process by citing one of his most famous case histories, that of Little Hans.
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At the Oedipal stage of childhood the boy developed a phobia that prevented him from going out to the street; he was afraid of horses (the streets were full of them in that era), which he thought would bite him. His inability to go out was, Freud says, “a restriction which his ego had imposed on itself so as not to arouse the anxiety-symptom.” But where had the fear of being bitten by horses come from? Analysis traced it back to Little Hans’s Oedipal desires, his wish to do away with his father, and the resultant fear that his father
would harm him. Instead of resolving it in a healthy fashion, he had displaced it to horses (significantly, his father used to play the part of the horse and let Hans ride on him) and transformed his fear of castration into a fear of being bitten.
In short, an impermissible wish, repressed but maladaptively dealt with, becomes a neurotic symptom. The symptom is costly to the sufferer, but not as costly as the anxiety it allays:
An agoraphobic patient may start his illness with an attack of anxiety in the street. This would be repeated every time he went into the street again. He will now develop the symptom of agoraphobia; this may also be described as an inhibition, a restriction of the ego’s functioning, and by means of it he spares himself anxiety attacks. We can witness the converse of this if we interfere in the formation of symptoms, as is possible, for instance, with obsessions. If we prevent a patient from carrying out a washing ceremonial, he falls into a state of anxiety which he finds hard to tolerate and from which he had evidently been protected by his symptom.
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Repression is thus the fundamental defense against all anxiety-producing wishes, memories, or feelings, and the very bedrock of the psychological structure.
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It works unconsciously; the child who has repressed the wish that a little sibling would die does not know that he harbors such a wish and will react with scorn or rage to any suggestion that he does. (Suppression, a different mental act, is the conscious control of an impermissible desire; one wills oneself to avoid acting on the desire, but this does not get rid of the anxiety.)
As with the Oedipal conflict, repression can result in neurosis but normally does not; the psyche finds adaptive ways to handle the repressed material. It does so by means of a number of other defenses— again, all unconscious—that transmute the unacceptable into the acceptable. Freud named several and referred readers to a more complete treatment of the defense mechanisms by his daughter, Anna Freud.
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Among the more commonly used defenses named by Freud or discussed by Anna Freud are these:
Denial
is a relatively primitive defense in which the individual simply fails to perceive or acknowledge an anxiety-producing reality. A woman who is forced to care for a dying husband may tell herself (contrary to all the evidence) that he will recover shortly, or she may say, “I want to keep
him alive as long as possible,” when unconsciously she wishes the ordeal were over.
Rationalization
is a more sophisticated version of denial. The individual acts out of one motive but justifies the act in terms of another that is more acceptable. A battered woman whose low self-esteem makes her too dependent to be alone tells herself that she stays with her abusive lover or husband because she loves him.
Reaction formation
goes a step further, exaggerating and displaying for all to see a trait exactly opposite to the repressed one. The man repressing homosexual wishes may behave in a macho fashion or physically assault gays. The would-be sybarite may become a born-again Christian or an implacable foe of erotic art and literature.
Displacement
directs repressed feelings toward an acceptable substitute. A woman with an unduly strong attachment to her father may choose a man his age as a husband. A man who has buried his fierce anger at his controlling father may become a chronic rebel, fighting with all sorts of authority figures.
Intellectualization
fends off anxiety by taking an ostensibly intellectual interest in an impermissible desire, a painful loss, or the like. A person with repressed sadistic impulses may become a social scientist specializing in the study of sadists or torturers. Freud’s contemporary Havelock Ellis, though sexually inhibited during most of his life, wrote a mass of scholarly studies of normal and abnormal forms of sexual behavior.
Projection
, a very common defense mechanism, is the attributing of one’s own unacceptable impulses to the object of those impulses. People who deny feeling racial hatred may believe that persons of the other race hate them, or attribute to the others the impulses they deny in themselves, as in the case of Ku Klux Klan members who see blacks as vicious and sexually animalistic.
Sublimation
, finally, is the most prosocial of the defense mechanisms; by means of it, superego and ego transmute the instinctual demand into some socially valuable related activity. Painting is often a sublimation of the childish impulse to smear or handle feces; writing or performing, sublimations of the impulse to exhibit oneself; surgery, a noble transformation
of the urge to do harm; and most athletic games (and such nonathletic ones as chess), acceptable and enjoyable sublimations of aggression.
Ever since Freud began publishing his ideas, his psychology has been fiercely attacked on one ground or another. At first and for some decades many physicians and psychologists called it dirty and perverted; by the 1930s communist theorists were castigating it as decadent and bourgeois; and in the same decade the Nazis condemned it as Jewish filth and burned Freud’s books.
Psychoanalysis outlived these assaults, but for many years it has been under attack of a more thoughtful kind: A number of psychologists and philosophers of science have asserted that it is not scientific. Their chief argument is that psychoanalytic research is not experimental; the psychoanalyst does not construct a situation in which he or she can control variables and manipulate them one at a time to measure their impact and so establish causal connections.
Experimentation, however, is not the only way to do science; induction from observation is another. Having perceived a pattern in a mass of data, the scientist hypothesizes about its cause, then tests the supposition by looking at more examples. If they too fit the hypothesis, it is strengthened; if they fail to, it is weakened. It is this method that is the basis of psychoanalytic research.
But the evidence so gathered, says the philosopher Adolf Grünbaum, is weak. For one thing, the observations that reveal a pattern have a “shared contaminant”—the analyst’s influence. After the analyst offers an interpretation of some piece of behavior, for instance, the patient may dutifully come up with a confirming memory (which may in fact be imaginary).
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For another, when free association is used to investigate such different areas as neurotic symptoms, dreams, and parapraxes, the agreement among the data may be the result of using a single method to explore different phenomena rather than a genuine concurrence of the findings.
Grünbaum says that this does not warrant the conclusion that psychoanalysis is unverifiable; rather, it indicates that verification of its theories must come from well-designed
extra
clinical studies, either epidemiological or even experimental.
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Many efforts toward that end have, in fact, been made. Some have involved laboratory experiments in which volunteers are subjected to a stimulus that, according to Freudian theory, should yield a particular result. Others, relying on tests to measure certain character traits among which there is supposed to be a psychodynamic connection, have sought the statistical correlations among those traits that would support the supposition. Still others have taken a developmental approach, observing and measuring the personality traits and behavior of children as they grow up to see whether character development proceeds according to Freudian theory or requires other explanations.
By now a large body of such studies has accumulated. They vary greatly in methodological soundness, and range widely in scope, testing everything from overarching theory to small and specialized subtheories. This makes it difficult to weigh the cumulative outcome, but a few hardy scholars have sought to do so.
One review of such studies, made some years ago by the psychologists Seymour Fisher and Roger P. Greenberg, focused more on results than on methodological adequacy, and rendered a split decision. Fisher and Greenberg named the following Freudian theories as being well supported: his concepts of the oral and anal character; the etiology of male homosexuality (Freud postulated that a hostile, rejecting father and a close, binding mother so intensify Oedipal rivalry as to inhibit the choice of a female partner); the origin of paranoia as a defense against homosexual impulses; several aspects of Oedipal theory; and as much of dream theory as concerns the dream’s function as an outlet for psychological tension.
They cited as those found faulty the thesis that the dream is a camouflaged unconscious wish, the claim that psychoanalysis is superior to other therapies in the treatment of neurosis, some parts of the Oedipal theory, and many of Freud’s ideas about the female character.
Their summation:
When we add up the totals resulting from our search, balancing the positive against the negative, we find that Freud has fared rather well. But like all theorists, he has proved in the long run to have far from a perfect score. He seems to have been right about a respectable number of issues, but he was also wrong about some important things. If one considers only his formulations concerning men and if, further, one considers only his theoretical propositions…, his record of correct hits is excellent.
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