What is Freudian psychology?

Introduction

Freudian psychology refers to the psychological system that was developed by Austrian neurologist

Sigmund Freud between 1900 and 1939 and continues to be used by psychoanalysts who look to the Freudian tradition. Basically, Freudian psychology holds that personality results from the clash between instinctual drives such as sex and aggression (the id) and internalized self-imposed controls (superego). These conflicting motives may be unconscious, and they are transformed through the stages of childhood experience. Such unconscious intrapsychic conflicts, unresolved in childhood, can result in painful anxiety. The conscious self (ego) temporarily tries to reduce this anxiety by using defense mechanisms, misconstruing the situation in a way that keeps the conflict out of conscious awareness. This sequence can be understood by first looking at Freud’s ideas about personality structure, the system of motives within a person. Second, the Freudian view of dynamics, the adjustments that occur when an individual deals with stress, must be examined. According to Freud, both structure and dynamics are much influenced by childhood experiences.

Personality Structure and Dynamics

Freud divided the structure of personality into three parts: the ego, the id, and the superego. The ego, or conscious self, is what people recognize as themselves and would describe to others. It is the consciousness that people know and can summon to mind to see events realistically and solve problems logically. The id and the superego are mostly unconscious in the sense that people are unaware of their contents. The id is the locus of instincts, such as sex and aggression, which demand immediate and total release. In its rawest form, the id is entirely unconscious. Socialized residues of these impulses arise into consciousness in a modified form, allowing them to be expressed appropriately. The superego consists of the moralistic ideals and restraints of conscience that are internalized from parental figures during maturation. Pressures from the superego can block spontaneous impulses in an arbitrary way. The individual may feel pressure from unrealistic ideals or be afflicted with irrational guilt. In a well-adjusted adult, the ego should be sufficiently strong to counter irrational superego and id pressures and to permit realistic decisions. When functioning is optimal, both id impulses (“I want sex now”) and superego restraints (“Sexual thoughts are bad”) may never become conscious. An ego-dominated, socially acceptable compromise usually prevails (“Let’s get together for dinner tonight”).

Conflicts that persist can lead to anxiety, a painful state of physiological arousal that feels similar to fear. To Freud, anxiety is unlike fear because it lacks an object. The anxious person does not know the reason for the anxiety because the conflict is unconscious. The individual may try to keep the conflict unconscious or defend the ego by the use of defense mechanisms. These are ways of interpreting events that allow the person to deny the unacceptable impulse or conflict. One important defense mechanism is repression, simply keeping the conflict out of awareness. To help keep the conflict out of awareness, more complicated strategies may be used. One such strategy is reaction formation, or acting in a direction that is the opposite of the disowned feeling. Denied sexual feelings, for example, may be reacted against by joining a religious order demanding celibacy. Alternatively, the conflict may be handled by projection, or attributing the unacceptable feeling and blame to another. An individual might project sexual interest by thinking, “This person is trying to seduce me.” Any pointless behavior that emerges as the result of an inner conflict may also be rationalized by giving a seemingly sensible reason for an irrational behavior. Such defense mechanisms temporarily reduce anxiety but at the price of distorting perception and keeping people from dealing with a persisting conflict.

Neurosis and Its Origins

Everyone is vulnerable to anxiety, as conflict is inevitable. The most persistent conflicts, however, are those that replay the unresolved conflicts of childhood. Freud saw
development as occurring in a series of stages, each defined by the part of the body yielding sensual (psychosexual) pleasure. In the oral stage, the nursing infant is totally dependent on a mothering person for security. In the anal stage, the toddler being toilet trained first experiences the demands of others and explores independence from their control. In the phallic stage, the three- or four-year-old first experiences pleasure from the genitals. Freud paid great attention to the conflicts of the phallic stage. He concluded that the child’s emerging genital sensitivity became linked to an eroticized love for the opposite-sex parent, jealousy of the same-sex parent, and fears of retaliation from the same-sex parent. This Oedipal conflict is resolved only, Freud speculated, by the process of identifying with the same-sex parent, imagining oneself as that parent, and thereby incorporating the ideals of the parent and of the culture. According to Freud, the child also acquires appropriate gender-related behavior through identification with the same-sex parent.

Freud theorized that neurosis occurs when a person becomes arrested in one of these immature stages. A neurotic man might, for example, seek to relive Oedipal fantasies by seeking out a mother-like mate. Neurosis develops when an adult faces a too-strong impulse or conscience and a too-weak ego. Vulnerable to continual conflict and anxiety, as well as defense mechanisms that distort the real situation, neurotics suffer further complications in their lives. Neurotics can gain insight into these unconscious conflicts through psychoanalytic therapy. A truly well-integrated person, in contrast, is one who works through developmental crises successfully and can perceive the real world accurately, unimpeded by childish conflicts and the consequent anxiety.

Origin and History

Although such concepts as unconscious conflicts and human instincts had been suggested by earlier writers, Freudian psychology—as a theory applied to the dynamics and treatment of emotional disturbance—came from the observations and speculation of one man, Sigmund Freud. Freud began an innovative treatment program by applying
hypnosis (a technique of using powerful suggestion to create disconnected states of mind) to patients who experienced severe physical distress without signs of concomitant physical disease. He had some success in getting patients to talk about deep and forbidden subjects. He soon learned that it was not hypnosis alone but talking about painful memories that helped the patient. He found that the release of painful memories could be facilitated in other ways, including eliciting spontaneous associations, paying attention to seemingly accidental behavior, and discussing the dreams of his patients. Freud was struck by how often such dreams involved sexual themes, with recurring accounts of the seduction of the patient in childhood by the child’s opposite-sex parent, a theme he summarized as the Oedipus complex. By the time Freud wrote
Die Traumdeutung (1900; The Interpretation of Dreams, 1913), much of psychoanalysis was already in place: the significance of the unconscious, the power of sexual energy (the libido), the pervasiveness of the Oedipal complex, and psychoanalytic techniques of exploring the unconscious.

Freud’s early writings were sometimes denounced as bizarre or immoral. Nevertheless, he began attracting physician followers, formed a local analytic society, and was invited to address eminent American psychologists at Clark University in 1909. His ideas gradually became respectable.

At the same time, professional criticism arose among the ranks of his psychoanalytic followers, who questioned the basis of his theory. Critics of Freud within the psychoanalytic community especially objected to the emphasis Freud placed on the libido, or sexual energy. Austrian psychoanalyst Alfred Adler, once one of Freud’s followers, viewed the basic source of internal conflict as compensation for inferiority rather than libido; Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank viewed as fundamental the struggle between the fear of independence and separation from stable relationships (the life fear) and the fear of losing one’s independence in relationships (the death fear). Freud argued that the analyses of these critics were superficial.

In his later writings, Freud broadened his concept of instincts to include that of destructive aggression, which he termed the death instinct, and revised his concept of libido as a more general life instinct. He also extended the implications of psychoanalysis to human society, which he saw as forever doomed by the unstable repression of the impulses of sex and blind aggression.

After World War II, psychoanalysis reached a new pinnacle in the number and enthusiasm of followers in the United States. Many psychoanalysts who had fled Nazi Germany came to the United States. American psychiatrists sought psychoanalytic training as never before. Some of these psychoanalysts accepted the writings of Freud without question. However, the main stream of Freudian psychology shifted in two ways to expand the Freudian concept of motivation. First, some psychoanalysts reemphasized the ego as itself a source of motivation. They thought that motives related to ego development—such as curiosity and the desire to exercise one’s talents—were as ingrained as sex and aggression. A second expansion of the motivation concept was championed by psychoanalysts known as object-relations theorists. By objects, these analysts meant significant relationships. They emphasized the importance of relationships, especially relationships with the significant people of childhood such as mother and father figures. For example, the American psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson argued that the important feature of the oral stage of early infancy was not the sexual sucking pleasure but rather the existence of consistent, stable, warm mothering that encouraged a basic trust in the benevolence of the world. Many analysts in the latter part of the twentieth century expanded the Freudian concept of motivation to include both such positive ego motives such as self-development and a built-in desire for relationships. To these analysts, conflicts related to the desire for autonomy as opposed to the desire for close relationships were as basic as those concerning sex or aggression.

A Little Perspective

Freud was privy to lengthy, detailed spontaneous ruminations of patients, the like of which had seldom before been heard. He was a brilliant and creative observer. Nevertheless, Freud’s concepts, imprecisely stated and obviously subject to possible observer biases, required validation from the experience of other psychotherapists and from the objective methods of experimental science. Several decades of such research since Freud’s death offer some perspective on his ideas.

It has become clear that Freud’s original motivational theory based on sex and aggression was far too narrow. These motives and their control pose major developmental tasks, but the child’s moving from an immature dependent state to a mature interdependent state is even more basic. Almost all observers agree that sexual conflicts, important as they are, were overemphasized by Freud, probably because he observed mostly middle-class female patients in early twentieth century Vienna, where sexual taboos were unusually prevalent. Especially criticized is Freud’s concept ofpenis envy, the suggestion that female jealousy of male privileges is biologically rooted and universal because of female jealousy of the supposedly superior male organ. That unconscious female jealousy of male privileges detected by Freud was culturally rooted in the subordinate social position of women in Vienna in the 1900s. Psychoanalytic descendants of Freud pay explicit attention to issues of affection, dependence, and autonomy, a welcome expansion of Freud’s view.

According to one view, Freudian psychoanalysis is a sort of archaeological expedition into the distant past of the patient, and this past is revealed with pristine clarity in recovered memories. The view that accurate, detailed infantile memories are recovered in therapy is based on a theory of memory as a sort of mental photograph album of the past. Most modern memory research suggests an alternative view. This research suggests that memory is a reconstructive process in which fragments of the past are incorporated into present themes influenced by one’s present values and concerns. American psychologist Elizabeth F. Loftus demonstrated in experiments that memories of early childhood experiences accepted as valid can actually be implanted by recent suggestions. Memories are notoriously fragmentary and vulnerable to suggestion. Apparent memories of childhood experiences dredged from psychotherapy can reveal ongoing conflicts and concerns, but such memories cannot be trusted to reveal accurate factual information about a person’s childhood.

Time-Tested Concepts

Major Freudian concepts have endured the test of time and have been validated by research and the experience of practicing psychologists. Specifically, concepts of Freud that continue to inform psychological science include talking therapy, with the goal of attaining insight; continuities between patterns of behavior in childhood and corresponding patterns in adulthood; the importance of inner conflict; the ego’s mechanisms of defense; and the unconscious.

Talking therapy, with the goal of attaining insight, has become a major enterprise of psychology. Psychoanalytic therapy is not as popular as it was in the 1950s because of the widespread use of effective pharmacological treatments for mental illness. However, more than ten thousand therapists within the United States still view their major therapeutic approach as psychoanalytic. Multitudes of other therapists who use eclectic approaches borrow on occasion from Freud’s uncovering techniques to penetrate defensive postures or to understand at a deeper level the meaning of symptoms. Talking therapy itself began with Freud.

Freud’s belief in the importance of the nature and quality of the relationship between the child and the primary caretakers—his hypothesis that stable, warm mothering encourages basic trust in the benevolence of the world—remains viable. If caretakers are rejecting or inconsistent, such trust may never be established. Modern researchers in child psychology explore patterns of attachment between children and caretakers. These researchers find secure and insecure attachment styles continue to influence subsequent relationships even into adulthood, much as Freud predicted.

Inner conflict, to Freud, is both pervasive and important. People can both love and hate the same person. People want the freedom to explore new horizons and grow, yet they also yearn to return to the security of home and stable relationships. Ambivalence is an inevitable part of close human relationships and is an inevitable part of all decisions. From conflict comes anxiety. Studies in the twentieth century and beyond have found that the degree of stress people experience is highly correlated with the abruptness and extent of life transitions. Also correlated with degrees of stress is vulnerability to physical and mental disease. Such research attests to the continuing importance of research based on hypotheses about conflict.

The concept of defense mechanisms is another example of an idea originating in the writings of Freud that has become important in several areas of psychology. Such mechanisms are often listed in general articles on how people deal with stress. In abnormal psychology texts, the thought patterns that define categories of abnormality are described in terms of the exaggerated use of particular defense mechanisms. Paranoia, for example, is viewed as the exaggerated use of projection. Irrational strategies researched by social psychologists as social cognition are highly similar to defense mechanisms. Studies of cognitive dissonance, for example, document instances of people who have made a foolish decision expending a great deal of energy in the pursuit of a mistaken goal, simply to avoid admitting their mistake to themselves. People speak of winning at any cost or throwing good money after bad. Most examples of cognitive dissonance could as well be considered examples of the defense mechanism of rationalization.

The unconscious is another Freudian concept that continues to be important to psychology. Freud’s unconscious is a motivated unconscious. Freudian therapists feel that the relief experienced by patients who have achieved insights in therapy validates their theory. Experimental psychologists have explored the unconscious in well-controlled experiments. Several researchers have implanted unconscious motivation by conditioning words, pictures, or phrases to emotional states. It has been shown that these stimuli can later bring back the emotional state without the awareness of the conditioned person. Other psychologists have demonstrated that fantasy productions such as imaginative stories rated for power themes can predict such specified criteria as attention-seeking behavior. Also, cognitive psychologists have expanded the range of what they call the cognitive unconscious to include the many skills and procedures that are performed automatically by people who cannot explain the skill to themselves or to others. Beginning in the 1990s, the exploration of areas of thought unavailable to introspective analysis has become a major topic within psychology. The existence of unconscious processes is seldom doubted.

Although not all Freud’s ideas have withstood the test of time, psychoanalysis still flourishes in the early twenty-first century. Important ideas first given serious attention by Freud have become part of mainstream psychology. Most of all, the notion that human life is riddled with conflict, that human passions and hatreds are often irrational, subtle, and unrecognized, has become the prevailing wisdom. This view of human existence was pioneered by Freud.

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