Psychoanalytic Theory

Key Terms:

Libido Eros Thanatos
Id Ego Superego
Conscious Unconscious Anxiety
Repression Denial Ego-Defense mechanisms
Projection Displacement Reaction Formation
Rationalization Sublimation Regression
Introjection Identification Compensation
Ritual and Undoing Oral Stage Anal Stage
Phallic Stage Latency Stage Genital Stage
Oedipus Complex Electra Complex Castration anxiety
Penis envy Transference Countertransference
Free Association Interpretation Latent content
Manifest content Separation/individuation Psychosocial
Object-relations

Thought Questions

1. What is the goal of life?

2. Do you accept the Freudian view of human beings as being driven by aggressive and sexual instincts? Do you believe human behavior is influenced by irrational and unconscious forces?

3. Early childhood development is seen as having a critical impact on later personality development. Do you think that if a person had a very traumatic psycho-sexual(social) development period that this necessarily means that he or she will have personality disturbances later in life? Do you think that people's behavior is determined by the events of the first five years of life?

4. Do you see the adolescent years as being crucial to the same extent as the early childhood years?

5. Is it essential to explore the client's past if present change is desired? Why or why not?

6. Do you think that people can improve their level of personal functioning and make behavioral changes without gaining insight into the causes of their problems? How crucial do you see insight as being?

7. Discuss the concepts: transference and countertransference. While these concepts are basic to psychoanalytic therapy, some models of therapy eliminate such notions. Do you think that these concepts have relevance to a counselor or therapist, regardless of one's theoretical orientation? Why?

8. Think about Freud’s theory in terms of causality. Which of the four causes does Freud’s theory assume?

9. Think about epistemology. Is Freud Kantian, Lockean, or both?

10. Think in terms of agency. Does Freud allow for agency in his theory?

11. Think in terms of individualism and/or relativism. Is Freud’s theory demonstrate either? If so, how, and if not, what is your evidence?

12. Think in terms of meaning. Do our feelings, thoughts, desires mean what we think they do, or are they epiphenomenal to what’s really going on?Introduction to Freud and Psychoanalysis

The nature of humanity:
People are motivated by the pleasure principle
1. This motivation to find pleasure is called the libido
2. Later - Freud also talked about the motivation to die or to destroy others, which he called thanatos, which is programmed into our very being by evolution. This allows the perpetuation of the species and organic constancy
3. People are also motivated to live, and to perpetuate life. He called this motivation Eros and it is an evolutionary drive
4. The reason people are motivated by libido was based on Freud’s medical observations about homeostasis. Homeostasis means we have certain instincts in the body, instincts regarding eating and reproduction, for example. When we feel these instincts and imbalance occurs in the body, and we must do what we can to restore that balance. In other words, we must constantly be in the process of sating our libido, or we will be out of whack homoeostatically speaking, and there will be problems.

Three core constructs make up our psyche are
1. Id - animalistic, hedonistic, entirely amoral and incapable of making judgments about good/evil, right/wrong. This is the lair of raw instinct, the animal seeking pleasure and inflicting pain, permanently and completely out of our awareness
A. This existing out of our awareness Freud called the unconscious. It exists as the unknown and mostly unknowable content that drives our lives. The Id is too chaotic and too primal to be known, so we keep in safely hidden as the constant background to our reality. Id thinking is called primary process thinking. Primary because it is the most primitive, the form of thinking that came first.
2. Superego - the moralizer, the conscience, the voice of parent and of society. This is the voice of the “shouldn’t” and the “must not” and “you’re so bad”. It is the “ego ideal” giving us a constant standard by which to live, often unrealistic. Unlike the Id, we can have a great deal of awareness of our superego tendencies. The superego is formed out of fear - fear of destruction or castration by the same-sex parent.
3. Ego - the great compromiser, the conscious mind. The ego is the part of us that we think we think with. It is the part of us that can learn from the world, approach issues realistically. The ego acknowledges the needs arising from the Id (I’m hungry, I’m horny, gosh I need a hug).
A. The ego is our awareness, our conscious mind. It is the part of us that does the thinking we’re aware of, the part of us that does the explicit thinking we’re in tune with.
B. The ego serves three masters. First, it must meet the demands of the Id in some way. Second, it must meet the demands of external reality (you can’t kill your lousy neighbor because society frowns on that). Third, it must try to meet the standards of the ideal self, the superego. The ego can’t do it all, so it often fails. If it fails reality there are immediate reality consequences - jail. If it fails the Id, then the consequence is dammed libido which results in neuroses. If it fails the superego, the consequence is also neuroses, usually in the form of shame and guilt.


Already we can begin to see the source of some problems
1. Anxiety - there are three forms of anxiety.
A. Realistic - there’s a mugger holding a gun to your face
B. Neurotic - leftover id-wishes that have not been met or adequately forced from consciousness threaten to re-surface. “I wish my mother was dead”. The closer that gets to conscious thought, the more intense the anxiety and the more intense the symptoms
C. Moral - when we feel we’ve screwed up. This comes about due to castration anxiety which forms the template for our sense of morals. The form this anxiety takes is usually shame/guilt
1. Note that it’s the poor ego that has to feel the neurotic anxiety coming from the demands of the id, and the moral anxiety coming from the demands of the superego

Freud had some ideas about how the ego might protect itself against the unreasoning demands of the id and superego. He called these Ego Defense Mechanisms.
1. Denial - very common. The ego senses certain urges arising from the id, and it merely denies that they exist. This ranges from obvious (a man in an unhappy marriage thinking to himself, “I’d never kill my wife”, to subtle: People at a PETA rally in Austin protesting the eating of meat and the killing of animals while they wear their expensive leather shoes and jackets)
2. Repression - more subtle. This is not a defense mechanism per se, in Freudian jargon, but it is important for the ongoing functioning of the ego. Repression is the process by which the superego and the ego keep ugly things (rape, murder) in the unconscious. The closer the id can get can get to pushing that material into the conscious realm, the more likely there will be neurotic anxiety and symptomology.
3. Projection - putting your unconscious feelings onto someone else. The id prompts us to feel hostility towards a certain person, but the superego denies that we should do that, so the compromise is to assume that they feel that way about us. Same thing can work for attraction, aggression, etc.
4. Displacement - We put the true (unconscious) feelings about a person on a different person, creature, or event. I may hate my brother in law, but in my dream I will be a hunter chasing a bobcat I want to kill. You may be unconsciously feeling extreme anger at a professor, but you go home and take it out on friend or family.
5. Reaction Formation - Arguing for or showing favor towards an action or view that you’re unconsciously opposed to. Pregnant woman unconsciously feels terror about the prospect of having a child will profess out loud “I love my baby very much.”
6. Rationalization - The fact that a person often finds an acceptable reason to justify some action that is really prompted by a completely different (unconscious) motive. Woman avoids another woman in her social circle. Unconsciously, she wishes to kill this woman, but what she thinks to herself is “I’m too busy to talk to her”.
7. Sublimation - Changing the nature of the unconscious wish or desire, as well as the object that will fulfill the unconscious wish or desire so it’s more socially acceptable. A young man is fighting the temptation to fornicate (“dirty!” screams the superego), so he turns to art and becomes a very successful painter, and derives a great deal of satisfaction from that.

This is why Freud’s theory is called psycho-dynamic - the clash and compromise model of our psyche
Freud posited how as we grow our needs for libido fulfillment change. This is called psychosexual stages of development

1. The oral stage - birth to 1 year. The oral stage is one characterized by oral eroticism, and the infant lives in terms only of the pleasure principle. The source of pleasure is oral driven (the breast) as well as relieving itself through urination and defecation. The baby has an imagination that allows it wish fulfillment - the process of visualizing what it wants. This process is identical to the process of dreams.
A. The identification process starts here. This is the process by which we take in the behavioral styles, attitudes and belief systems of other people. It’s not completed until the phallic phase.
2. The anal stage - 1 year to 3 years. The anal stage is characterized by the beginning of a lifelong process of having to put up with privations and trying to live up to the prohibitions of elders who ultimately represent the values of the broader culture.
A. Central to this is bodily control - particularly control of the sphincter of the body and waste disposal. You screw up in self-control, punishments often follow
B. This stage is more aggressive and assaultive, with a distinct clash of wills between the child and the care giver going on
1. Anal personalities - aggressively up-tight
3. The phallic stage - 3 - 6. Heterosexuality begins to emerge. Both males and females discover the phallus as the source of libidinal pleasure, moving their attention away from the mouth and anus. Little girls deny or disavow their lack of a penis, and their psychology is irrevocably influenced by this fact. They suffer from penis envy, or the process by which they neurotically seek out ways to have power or have a phallus for themselves (including marriage). They already feel inadequate and castrated due to their lack of a phallus. It is their desire to have a phallus which manifests also in childbirth and rearing.
A. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: The life cycle of the individual represents and is a microcosm for the evolution of the species. Long ago in the first family, some boys got angry with dad, killed him, and ate him, desiring mom and other family females for mates. They had to do this, because if they stood up to dad, he would kill them or castrate them. They then ate him to absorb his power. But, they realized that the cycle couldn’t continue (or their kids would kill them) so they developed the ideas of chastity (only mating with their own wives) and exogamy (only seeking mates outside the family)
B. Male Oedipus Complex: In the third year of life we find the boys doing just what the primitive boys did in the first family: They lust after mom. But, if he seeks to become mom’s lover, then father will castrate him, because father has the instinct to protect what’s his (law of retribution, talion). This creates a great deal of castration anxiety in the son, keeping him in line with the father’s commands. Freud did not posit a parallel for women, and was quite puzzled about female sexuality. The “Electra Complex” wherein the little girl, desiring a penis, covets her father and feels aggression towards her mother was a later invention.
C. Introjection - the process by which people take in other people’s standards as their own, beginning with their introjecting of their father’s values to avoid being castrated by him
4. Latency Stage - 6 to as late as 14. Both sexes repress their parental Oedipal attractions, and their intense sexual interests gradually decline.

5. Genital Stage - Puberty onward. The sexes come together for monogamous and heterosexual satisfaction of their erotic needs. Any other forms of sexual preference or promiscuity were viewed as signs of neuroses.

Note that Freud’s theory is stage-based, and that we must pass through these stages, getting certain instinctual needs met in order to pass on to the next stage. If we do not get these needs met, the libido is then dammed up, trapping energy at the spot where our needs were unmet. This trapping of libido is called fixation. A little bit of fixation at each psychosexual stage is assumed, but if it is too much, problems will result. This leads to a repetition compulsion, or the ongoing desire to meet that need (unconsciously, of course). Personality is called back to the point of fixation, and a repetition compulsion is seen. A child who was frustrated in their oral stage would have oral compulsions (overeating, smoking, drinking too much), a child frustrated at the anal stage would be either very up-tight (‘anal’) or very destructively impulsive (setting fires, urinating in public, etc), a child frustrated at the phallic phase would be promiscuous, or suffer from a paraphilia. Someone fixated at the latency stage would be overly passive, potentially asexual. Fixations happen to everyone, period. The more the fixations and the greater the amount of fixation, the worse the problems.

Regression occurs when people’s libidos are frustrated as adults. They then begin to behave as they did during the phase of life when their libidinal needs were also frustrated. A co-worker gets yelled at by the boss, goes home and stuffs herself with twinkies - regressed to the oral stage, a time when mom didn’t meet her needs either.

Object relations are the internal memories of wishes involving other people. They can be unfulfilled wishes (“bad objects”) or fulfilled wishes (“good objects”). These internalized people form the client’s memories of when their needs were met or not, and what sorts of messages came with them (“No, I’m not going to give you a hug you terrible child”). Informs their view of themselves as an object. They may see themselves and the world as positive negative, or combinations of both based on their object relations.

So, we have all of these pent-up libidinal needs and the neuroses that come when they are fixated. Freud also offered explicitly ways we might treat these.
1. Transference - this is the process by which a client views the therapist in terms of the people they’re fixated on (those people who they wanted to meet their libidinal needs but did not). The process of transference allows the therapist to see where their fixations are, as well as the overall quality of their object relations. This only works if the therapist takes the blank screen approach, not doing anything to provoke certain reactions from the client.
2. Free Association - this is a technique where the therapist says a word or a phrase, and instructs the client to say the first thing that comes to mind. In this way, the therapist hopes to bypass the editing of the ego and superego to get a sense as to where the libido is frustrated - one argument for why the Rorschach and TAT work as projective measures.
3. The use of dream interpretation. Dreams have two levels of content. First, is the manifest content, or the content as it appears to be without interpretation. Back to the example earlier, when Frank is dreaming about hunting bobcats. That is the manifest content. The latent content is what the dream actually means, or what the id wishes or the superego edits. For example, Frank hates his brother-in-law but can’t admit it to himself due to family pressure to like this new addition. So, what the dream actually means is that Frank wants to kill his brother-in-law.
4. Countertransference - this is an identical process to transference, only it is the therapist projecting points of fixation (either erotic or aggressive) onto the client. This is why psychoanalysts need many years of analysis before they become analysts themselves.
2. Interpretation - this is the process by which the therapist, after long and careful deliberation, offers the latent content, points out the fixation of the client, or intervenes in their object relational structure. Once the ego is confronted with this information, the fixation is broken and the client is better. (De-cathexis, the process of all of that cathected (trapped) libido giving loose at once comes with a huge outpouring of emotion, and the client is no longer fixated on that point.)

GROUP WORK!

Group 1:
Analyze psychoanalytic theory in terms of causality. What forms of causality to you find, and what is your justification?

Group 2:
Analyze psychoanalytic theory in terms of epistemology. Which forms of epistemology do you find? What is your justification?

Group 3:
Analyze psychoanalytic theory in terms of moral and ethical assumptions. What assumed morals and ethics did you find? What is your justification?