SIGMUND FREUD

1856 - 1939

Dr. C. George Boeree

It is a mistake to believe that a science consists in nothing but

conclusively proved propositions, and it is unjust to demand that it
should. It is a demand only made by those who feel a craving for
authority in some form and a need to replace the religious catechism by
something else, even if it be a scientific one. Science in its catechism has
but few apodictic precepts; it consists mainly of statements which it has
developed to varying degrees of probability. The capacity to be content
with these approximations to certainty and the ability to carry on
constructive work despite the lack of final confirmation are actually a
mark of the scientific habit of mind. -- Freud

Freud's story, like most people's stories, begins with others. In

his case those others were his mentor and friend, Dr. Joseph
Breuer, and Breuer's patient, called Anna O.

Anna O. was Joseph Breuer's patient from 1880 through 1882.

Twenty one years old, Anna spent most of her time nursing her
ailing father. She developed a bad cough that proved to have no
physical basis. She developed some speech difficulties, then
became mute, and then began speaking only in English, rather
than her usual German.

When her father died she began to refuse food, and developed an unusual set of
problems. She lost the feeling in her hands and feet, developed some paralysis, and
began to have involuntary spasms. She also had visual hallucinations and tunnel
vision. But when specialists were consulted, no physical causes for these problems
could be found.

If all this weren't enough, she had fairy-tale fantasies, dramatic mood swings, and
made several suicide attempts. Breuer's diagnosis was that she was suffering from
what was then called hysteria (now called conversion disorder), which meant she
had symptoms that appeared to be physical, but were not.
In the evenings, Anna would sink into states of what Breuer called "spontaneous
hypnosis," or what Anna herself called "clouds." Breuer found that, during these
trance-like states, she could explain her day-time fantasies and other experiences,
and she felt better afterwards. Anna called these episodes "chimney sweeping" and
"the talking cure."

Sometimes during "chimney sweeping," some emotional event was recalled that
gave meaning to some particular symptom. The first example came soon after she
had refused to drink for a while: She recalled seeing a woman drink from a glass
that a dog had just drunk from. While recalling this, she experienced strong
feelings of disgust...and then had a drink of water! In other words, her symptom --
an avoidance of water -- disappeared as soon as she remembered its root event, and
experienced the strong emotion that would be appropriate to that event. Breuer
called this catharsis, from the Greek word for cleansing.

It was eleven years later that Breuer and his assistant, Sigmund Freud, wrote a
book on hysteria. In it they explained their theory: Every hysteria is the result of a
traumatic experience, one that cannot be integrated into the person's
understanding of the world. The emotions appropriate to the trauma are not
expressed in any direct fashion, but do not simply evaporate: They express
themselves in behaviors that in a weak, vague way offer a response to the trauma.
These symptoms are, in other words, meaningful. When the client can be made
aware of the meanings of his or her symptoms (through hypnosis, for example)
then the unexpressed emotions are released and so no longer need to express
themselves as symptoms. It is analogous to lancing a boil or draining an infection.

In this way, Anna got rid of symptom after symptom. But it must be noted that she
needed Breuer to do this: Whenever she was in one of her hypnotic states, she had
to feel his hands to make sure it was him before talking! And sadly, new problems
continued to arise.

According to Freud, Breuer recognized that she had fallen in love with him, and
that he was falling in love with her. Plus, she was telling everyone she was
pregnant with his child. You might say she wanted it so badly that her mind told
her body it was true, and she developed an hysterical pregnancy. Breuer, a married
man in a Victorian era, abruptly ended their sessions together, and lost all interest
in hysteria.

It was Freud who would later add what Breuer did not acknowledge publicly -- that
secret sexual desires lay at the bottom of all these hysterical neuroses.
To finish her story, Anna spent time in a sanatorium. Later, she became a well-
respected and active figure -- the first social worker in Germany -- under her true
name, Bertha Pappenheim. She died in 1936. She will be remembered, not only for
her own accomplishments, but as the inspiration for the most influential
personality theory we have ever had.

Biography

Sigmund Freud was born May 6, 1856, in a small

town -- Freiberg -- in Moravia. His father was a wool
merchant with a keen mind and a good sense of
humor. His mother was a lively woman, her
husband's second wife and 20 years younger. She
was 21 years old when she gave birth to her first
son, her darling, Sigmund. Sigmund had two older
half-brothers and six younger siblings. When he
was four or five -- he wasn't sure -- the family
moved to Vienna, where he lived most of his life.

A brilliant child, always at the head of his class, he

went to medical school, one of the few viable
options for a bright Jewish boy in Vienna those
days. There, he became involved in research under
the direction of a physiology professor named Ernst
Brücke. Brücke believed in what was then a popular, if radical, notion, which we
now call reductionism: "No other forces than the common physical-chemical ones
are active within the organism." Freud would spend many years trying to "reduce"
personality to neurology, a cause he later gave up on.

Freud was very good at his research, concentrating on neurophysiology, even

inventing a special cell-staining technique. But only a limited number of positions
were available, and there were others ahead of him. Brücke helped him to get a
grant to study, first with the great psychiatrist Charcot in Paris, then with his rival
Bernheim in Nancy. Both these gentlemen were investigating the use of hypnosis
with hysterics.

After spending a short time as a resident in neurology and director of a children's

ward in Berlin, he came back to Vienna, married his fiancée of many years Martha
Bernays, and set up a practice in neuropsychiatry, with the help of Joseph Breuer.

Freud's books and lectures brought him both fame and ostracism from the
mainstream of the medical community. He drew around him a number of very
bright sympathizers who became the core of the psychoanalytic movement.
Unfortunately, Freud had a penchant for rejecting people who did not totally agree
with him. Some separated from him on friendly terms; others did not, and went on
to found competing schools of thought.

Freud emigrated to England just before World War II when Vienna became an
increasing dangerous place for Jews, especially ones as famous as Freud. Not long
afterward, he died of the cancer of the mouth and jaw that he had suffered from for
the last 20 years of his life.

Theory

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 put 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
be 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 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 of its characteristics a 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 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 a point where you can't think of
anything else. This is the wish or drive breaking into consciousness.

Luckily for the organism, there is that small portion of the mind we discussed
before, the conscious, that 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 by
means of its consciousness, and it searches for objects to satisfy the wishes that id
creates to represent the organisms 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 actually
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 lively 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 easily, 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 actually 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, feel 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 kind of anxieties: The first is realistic anxiety,
which you and I would call fear. Actually 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," lose control, your
temper, your rationality, or even your mind, you have felt neurotic anxiety.
Neurotic is actually the Latin word for nervous, so this is nervous anxiety. It is this
kind of anxiety that intrigued Freud most, and we usually just 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.

I was once reading while my five year old daughter was watching a cartoon (The
Smurfs, I think). She was, as was her habit, quite close to the television, when a
commercial came on. Apparently, no-one at the television station was paying much
attention, because this was a commercial for a horror movie, complete with bloody
knife, hockey mask, and screams of terror. Now I wasn't able to save my child from
this horror, so I did what any good psychologist father would do: I talked about it. I
said to her "Boy, that was a scary commercial, wasn't it?" She said "Huh?" I said
"That commercial...it sure was scary wasn't it?" She said "What commercial?" I said
"The commercial that was just on, with the blood and the mask and the
screaming...!" She had apparently shut out the whole thing.

Since then, I've noticed little kids sort of glazing over when confronted by things
they'd rather not be confronted by. I've also seen people faint at autopsies, people
deny the reality of the death of a loved one, and students fail to pick up their test
results. That's denial.

Anna Freud also mentions denial in fantasy: This is when children, in their
imaginations, transform an "evil" father into a loving teddy bear, or a helpless child
into a powerful superhero.

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.

As an adolescent, I developed a rather strong fear of spiders, especially long-legged

ones. I didn't know where it came from, but it was starting to get rather
embarrassing by the time I entered college. At college, a counselor helped me to get
over it (with a technique called systematic desensitization), but I still had no idea
where it came from. Years later, I had a dream, a particularly clear one, that
involved getting locked up by my cousin in a shed behind my grandparents' house
when I was very young. The shed was small, dark, and had a dirt floor covered with
-- you guessed it! -- long-legged spiders.

The Freudian understanding of this phobia is pretty simple: I repressed a traumatic

event -- the shed incident -- but seeing spiders aroused the anxiety of the event
without arousing the memory.

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 boy-
friend'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 when
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 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 kind of ascetic (monk-like)
lifestyle wherein they renounce their interest in what other people enjoy.

In boys nowadays, there is a great deal of interest in the self-discipline of the

martial arts. Fortunately, the martial arts not only don't hurt you (much), they may
actually help you. 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 actually 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!

Anna Freud also discusses a milder version of this called restriction of ego. Here,
a person loses interest in some aspect of life and focuses it elsewhere, in order to
avoid facing reality. A young girl who has been rejected by the object of her
affections may turn away from feminine things and become a "sex-less
intellectual," or a boy who is afraid that he may be humiliated on the football team
may unaccountably become deeply interested in poetry.

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 may 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.

In emergency situations, many people find themselves completely calm and

collected until the emergency is over, at which point they fall to pieces. Something
tells you that, during the emergency, you can't afford to fall apart. It is common to
find someone totally immersed in the social obligations surrounding the death of a
loved one. Doctors and nurses must learn to separate their natural reactions to
blood, wounds, needles, and scalpels, and treat the patient, temporarily, as
something less than a warm, wonderful human being with friends and family.
Adolescents often go through a stage where they are obsessed with horror movies,
perhaps to come to grips with their own fears. Nothing demonstrates isolation
more clearly than a theater full of people laughing hysterically while someone is
shown being dismembered.
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 own substitute target. It is normally used in reference to 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.

Once upon a time, at a time when I was not feeling my best, my daughter, five years
old, spilled an entire glass of chocolate milk in the living room. I lashed out at her
verbally, telling her she was clumsy and had to learn to be more careful and how
often hadn't I told her and...well, you know. She stood there stiffly with a sort of
smoldering look in her eyes, and, of all things, pounded herself on her own head
several times! Obviously, she would rather have pounded my head, but, well, you
just don't do that, do you? Needless to say, I've felt guilty ever since.

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
own 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 terribly 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.
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 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 backwards 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 an 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 own

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" in order 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 in an
effort to establish an identity.

A more unusual example is a woman who lived next to my grandparents. Her

husband had died and she began to dress in his clothes, albeit neatly tailored to her
figure. She began to take up various of his habits, such as smoking a pipe. Although
the neighbors found it strange and referred to her as "the man-woman," she was
not suffering from any confusion about her sexual identity. In fact, she later
remarried, retaining to the end her men's suits and pipe!

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 introjection 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.
Two of my daughters, growing up with a particularly moody cat, could often be
seen meowing, hissing, spitting, and arching their backs in an effort to keep that cat
from springing out of a closet or dark corner and trying to eat their ankles.

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. Yet she
apparently 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 2 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? To 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 -- in fact 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.

Sublimation is the transforming of an unacceptable impulse, whether it be sex,

anger, fear, or whatever, into a socially acceptable, even productive form. So
someone with a great deal of hostility may become a hunter, a butcher, a football
player, or a mercenary. Someone suffering from a great deal of anxiety in a
confusing world may become an organizer, a businessperson, or a scientist.
Someone with powerful sexual desires may become an artist, a photographer, or a
novelist, and so on. For Freud, in fact, all positive, creative activities were
sublimations, and predominantly of the sex drive.

The stages
As I said earlier, for Freud, the sex drive is the most important motivating force. In
fact, Freud felt it was the primary motivating force not only for adults but for
children and even infants. When he introduced his ideas about infantile sexuality
to the Viennese public of his day, they were hardly prepared to talk about sexuality
in adults, much less in infants!

It is true that the capacity for orgasm is there neurologically from birth. But Freud
was not just talking about orgasm. Sexuality meant not only intercourse, but all
pleasurable sensation from the skin. It is clear even to the most prudish among us
that babies, children, and, of course, adults, enjoy tactile experiences such as
caresses, kisses, and so on.

Freud noted that, at different times in our lives, different parts of our skin give us
greatest pleasure. Later theorists would call these areas erogenous zones. It
appeared to Freud that the infant found its greatest pleasure in sucking, especially
at the breast. In fact, babies have a penchant for bringing nearly everything in their
environment into contact with their mouths. A bit later in life, the child focuses on
the anal pleasures of holding it in and letting go. By three or four, the child may
have discovered the pleasure of touching or rubbing against his or her genitalia.
Only later, in our sexual maturity, do we find our greatest pleasure in sexual
intercourse. In these observations, Freud had the makings of a psychosexual stage
theory.

The oral stage lasts from birth to about 18 months. The focus of pleasure is, of
course, the mouth. Sucking and biting are favorite activities.

The anal stage lasts from about 18 months to three or four years old. The focus of
pleasure is the anus. Holding it in and letting it go are greatly enjoyed.

The phallic stage lasts from three or four to five, six, or seven years old. The focus
of pleasure is the genitalia. Masturbation is common.

The latent stage lasts from five, six, or seven to puberty, that is, somewhere around
12 years old. During this stage, Freud believed that the sexual impulse was
suppressed in the service of learning. I must note that, while most children seem to
be fairly calm, sexually, during their grammar school years, perhaps up to a
quarter of them are quite busy masturbating and playing "doctor." In Freud's
repressive era, these children were, at least, quieter than their modern
counterparts.

The genital stage begins at puberty, and represents the resurgence of the sex drive
in adolescence, and the more specific focusing of pleasure in sexual intercourse.
Freud felt that masturbation, oral sex, homosexuality, and many other things we
find acceptable in adulthood today, were immature.

This is a true stage theory, meaning that Freudians believe that we all go through
these stages, in this order, and pretty close to these ages.

The Oedipal crisis

Each stage has certain difficult tasks associated with it where problems are more
likely to arise. For the oral stage, this is weaning. For the anal stage, it's potty
training. For the phallic stage, it is the Oedipal crisis, named after the ancient Greek
story of king Oedipus, who inadvertently killed his father and married his mother.

Here's how the Oedipal crisis works: The first love-object for all of us is our mother.
We want her attention, we want her affection, we want her caresses, we want her,
in a broadly sexual way. The young boy, however, has a rival for his mother's
charms: his father! His father is bigger, stronger, smarter, and he gets to sleep with
mother, while junior pines away in his lonely little bed. Dad is the enemy.

About the time the little boy recognizes this archetypal situation, he has become
aware of some of the more subtle differences between boys and girls, the ones
other than hair length and clothing styles. From his naive perspective, the
difference is that he has a penis, and girls do not. At this point in life, it seems to the
child that having something is infinitely better than not having something, and so
he is pleased with this state of affairs.

But the question arises: where is the girl's penis? Perhaps she has lost it somehow.
Perhaps it was cut off. Perhaps this could happen to him! This is the beginning of
castration anxiety, a slight misnomer for the fear of losing one's penis.

To return to the story, the boy, recognizing his father's superiority and fearing for
his penis, engages some of his ego defenses: He displaces his sexual impulses from
his mother to girls and, later, women; And he identifies with the aggressor, dad,
and attempts to become more and more like him, that is to say, a man. After a few
years of latency, he enters adolescence and the world of mature heterosexuality.

The girl also begins her life in love with her mother, so we have the problem of
getting her to switch her affections to her father before the Oedipal process can
take place. Freud accomplishes this with the idea of penis envy: The young girl, too,
has noticed the difference between boys and girls and feels that she, somehow,
doesn't measure up. She would like to have one, too, and all the power associated
with it. At very least, she would like a penis substitute, such as a baby. As every
child knows, you need a father as well as a mother to have a baby, so the young girl
sets her sights on dad.

Dad, of course, is already taken. The young girl displaces from him to boys and
men, and identifies with mom, the woman who got the man she really wanted. Note
that one thing is missing here: The girl does not suffer from the powerful
motivation of castration anxiety, since she cannot lose what she doesn't have. Freud
felt that the lack of this great fear accounts for the fact (as he saw it) that women
were both less firmly heterosexual than men and somewhat less morally-inclined.

Before you get too upset by this less-than-flattering account of women's sexuality,
rest assured that many people have responded to it. I will discuss it in the
discussion section.

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 own 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 in terms of our personality or character.

If you, in the first eight months of your life, are often frustrated in your need to
suckle, perhaps because 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 an 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 have a tendency 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 actually 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, 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, perfectionistic, 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 like 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 terribly messy. This is frustrating to
scientists, but it may reflect the reality of personality!

Therapy

Freud's therapy has been more influential than any other, and more influential
than any other part of his theory. Here are some of the major points:

Relaxed atmosphere. The client must feel free to express anything. The therapy
situation is in fact a unique social situation, one where you do not have to be afraid
of social judgment or ostracism. In fact, in Freudian therapy, the therapist
practically disappears. Add to that the physically relaxing couch, dim lights, sound-
proof walls, and the stage is set.

Free association. The client may talk about anything at all. The theory is that, with
relaxation, the unconscious conflicts will inevitably drift to the fore. It isn't far off
to see a similarity between Freudian therapy and dreaming! However, in therapy,
there is the therapist, who is trained to recognize certain clues to problems and
their solutions that the client would overlook.

Resistance. One of these clues is resistance. When a client tries to change the topic,
draws a complete blank, falls asleep, comes in late, or skips an appointment
altogether, the therapist says "aha!" These resistances suggest that the client is
nearing something in his free associations that he -- unconsciously, of course -- finds
threatening.

Dream analysis. In sleep, we are somewhat less resistant to our unconscious and
we will allow a few things, in symbolic form, of course, to come to awareness.
These wishes from the id provide the therapist and client with more clues. Many
forms of therapy make use of the client's dreams, but Freudian interpretation is
distinct in the tendency to find sexual meanings.

Parapraxes. A parapraxis is a slip of the tongue, often called a Freudian slip. Freud
felt that they were also clues to unconscious conflicts. Freud was also interested in
the jokes his clients told. In fact, Freud felt that almost everything meant something
almost all the time -- dialing a wrong number, making a wrong turn, misspelling a
word, were serious objects of study for Freud. However, he himself noted, in
response to a student who asked what his cigar might be a symbol for, that
"sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." Or is it?
Other Freudians became interested in projective tests, such as the famous
Rorschach or inkblot tests. The theory behind these test is that, when the stimulus is
vague, the client fills it with his or her own unconscious themes. Again, these could
provide the therapist with clues.

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 in order to bring the repressed emotions that have been
plaguing the client for so long, to the surface. You can't feel really 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 in 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
little 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."

Discussion

The only thing more common than a blind admiration for Freud seems to be an
equally blind hatred for him. Certainly, the proper attitude lies somewhere in
between. Let's start by exploring some of the apparent flaws in his theory.

The least popular part of Freud's theory is the Oedipal complex and the associated
ideas of castration anxiety and penis envy. What is the reality behind these
concepts? It is true that some children are very attached to their opposite sex
parent, and very competitive with their same-sex parent. It is true that some boys
worry about the differences between boys and girls, and fear that someone may cut
their penis off. It is true that some girls likewise are concerned, and wish they had a
penis. And it is true that some of these children retain these affections, fears, and
aspirations into adulthood.
Most personality theorists, however, consider these examples aberrations rather
than universals, exceptions rather than rules. They occur in families that aren't
working as well as they should, where parents are unhappy with each other, use
their children against each other. They occur in families where parents literally
denigrate girls for their supposed lack, and talk about cutting off the penises of
unruly boys. They occur especially in neighborhoods where correct information on
even the simplest sexual facts is not forthcoming, and children learn mistaken
ideas from other children.

If we view the Oedipal crisis, castration anxiety, and penis envy in a more
metaphoric and less literal fashion, they are useful concepts: We do love our
mothers and fathers as well as compete with them. Children probably do learn the
standard heterosexual behavior patterns by imitating the same-sex parent and
practicing on the opposite-sex parent. In a male-dominated society, having a penis --
being male -- is better than not, and losing one's status as a male is scary. And
wanting the privileges of the male, rather than the male organ, is a reasonable
thing to expect in a girl with aspirations. But Freud did not mean for us to take
these concepts metaphorically. Some of his followers, however, did.

Sexuality

A more general criticism of Freud's theory is its emphasis on sexuality. Everything,

both good and bad, seems to stem from the expression or repression of the sex
drive. Many people question that, and wonder if there are any other forces at work.
Freud himself later added the death instinct, but that proved to be another one of
his less popular ideas.

First let me point out that, in fact, a great deal of our activities are in some fashion
motivated by sex. If you take a good hard look at our modern society, you will find
that most advertising uses sexual images, that movies and television programs
often don't sell well if they don't include some titillation, that the fashion industry is
based on a continual game of sexual hide-and-seek, and that we all spend a
considerable portion of every day playing "the mating game." Yet we still don't feel
that all life is sexual.

But Freud's emphasis on sexuality was not based on the great amount of obvious
sexuality in his society -- it was based on the intense avoidance of sexuality,
especially among the middle and upper classes, and most especially among women.
What we too easily forget is that the world has changed rather dramatically over
the last hundred years. We forget that doctors and ministers recommended strong
punishment for masturbation, that "leg" was a dirty word, that a woman who felt
sexual desire was automatically considered a potential prostitute, that a bride was
often taken completely by surprise by the events of the wedding night, and could
well faint at the thought.

It is to Freud's credit that he managed to rise above his culture's sexual attitudes.
Even his mentor Breuer and the brilliant Charcot couldn't fully acknowledge the
sexual nature of their clients' problems. Freud's mistake was more a matter of
generalizing too far, and not taking cultural change into account. It is ironic that
much of the cultural change in sexual attitudes was in fact due to Freud's work!

The unconscious

One last concept that is often criticized is the unconscious. It is not argued that
something like the unconscious accounts for some of our behavior, but rather how
much and the exact nature of the beast.

Behaviorists, humanists, and existentialists all believe that (a) the motivations and
problems that can be attributed to the unconscious are much fewer than Freud
thought, and (b) the unconscious is not the great churning cauldron of activity he
made it out to be. Most psychologists today see the unconscious as whatever we
don't need or don't want to see. Some theorists don't use the concept at all.

On the other hand, at least one theorist, Carl Jung, proposed an unconscious that
makes Freud's look puny! But we will leave all these views for the appropriate
chapters.

Positive aspects

People have the unfortunate tendency to "throw the baby out with the bath water."
If they don't agree with ideas a, b, and c, they figure x, y, and z must be wrong as
well. But Freud had quite a few good ideas, so good that they have been
incorporated into many other theories, to the point where we forget to give him
credit.

First, Freud made us aware of two powerful forces and their demands on us. Back
when everyone believed people were basically rational, he showed how much of
our behavior was based on biology. When everyone conceived of people as
individually responsible for their actions, he showed the impact of society. When
everyone thought of male and female as roles determined by nature or God, he
showed how much they depended on family dynamics. The id and the superego --
the psychic manifestations of biology and society -- will always be with us in some
form or another.
Second is the basic theory, going back to Breuer, of certain neurotic symptoms as
caused by psychological traumas. Although most theorists no longer believe that all
neurosis can be so explained, or that it is necessary to relive the trauma to get
better, it has become a common understanding that a childhood full of neglect,
abuse, and tragedy tends to lead to an unhappy adult.

Third is the idea of ego defenses. Even if you are uncomfortable with Freud's idea
of the unconscious, it is clear that we engage in little manipulations of reality and
our memories of that reality to suit our own needs, especially when those needs are
strong. I would recommend that you learn to recognize these defenses: You will
find that having names for them will help you to notice them in yourself and
others!

Finally, the basic form of therapy has been largely set by Freud. Except for some
behaviorist therapies, most therapy is still "the talking cure," and still involves a
physically and socially relaxed atmosphere. And, even if other theorists do not care
for the idea of transference, the highly personal nature of the therapeutic
relationship is generally accepted as important to success.

Some of Freud's ideas are clearly tied to his culture and era. Other ideas are not
easily testable. Some may even be a matter of Freud's own personality and
experiences. But Freud was an excellent observer of the human condition, and
enough of what he said has relevance today that he will be a part of personality
textbooks for years to come. Even when theorists come up with dramatically
different ideas about how we work, they compare their ideas with Freud's.

Readings

Freud's work is preserved in a 23 volume set called The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. For a briefer overview, you
might want to try Freud's A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis or New
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. They are a part of The Standard
Edition, but can also be found separately and in paperback. Or you might try a
collection, such as The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud.

Some of Freud's most interesting works are The Interpretation of Dreams, his
own favorite, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, about Freudian slips and
other day-to-day oddities, Totem and Taboo, Freud's views on our beginnings,
Civilization and Its Discontents, his pessimistic commentary on modern society,
and The Future of an Illusion, on religion. All are a part of The Standard Edition,
but all are available as separate paperbacks as well.
The father of psychoanalysis has been psychoanalyzed many times. First, there is
his official biography, by his student Ernest Jones. More recent is a biography by
Peter Gay. A highly critical account of Freud's work is Jeffrey Masson's The Assault
on Truth. The best book I've come across on Freud and the entire psychoanalytic
movement is Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis, by George
Makari. The commentary on and criticism of Freud's work is unending!

© Copyright 1997, 2006, 2009, C. George Boeree