Psychoanalytic Theory

THE

PSYCHOANALYTIC

THEORY

I. Overview of Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory

Freud's psychoanalysis is the best known of all personality theories because it (1) postulated the primacy of sex and aggression--two universally popular themes; (2) attracted a group of followers who were dedicated to spreading psychoanalytic doctrine; and (3) advanced the notion of unconscious motives, which permit varying explanations for the same observations.

II. Biography of Sigmund Freud

Although he was born in the Czech Republic in 1856 and died in London in 1939, Sigmund Freud spent nearly 80 years of his life in Vienna. A physician who never intended to practice general medicine, Freud was intensely curious about human nature, and in his practice of psychiatry he was perhaps more interested in learning about the unconscious motives of his patients than in curing neuroses. Early in his professional career, Freud believed that hysteria was a result of being seduced during childhood by a sexually mature person, often a parent or other relative. However, in 1897, he abandoned his seduction theory and replaced it with his notion of the Oedipus complex. Some recent scholars have contended that Freud's decision to abandon the seduction theory in favor of the Oedipus complex was a major error and influenced a generation of psychotherapists to interpret patients' reports of early sexual abuse as merely childhood fantasies.

III. Levels of Mental Life

Freud saw mental functioning as operating on three levels: the unconscious, the preconscious, and the conscious.

A. Unconscious

The unconscious consists of drives and instincts that are beyond awareness but that motivate many of our behaviors. Unconscious drives can become conscious only in disguised or distorted form, such as dream images, slips of the tongue, or neurotic symptoms. Unconscious processes originate from two sources: (1) repression, or the blocking out of anxiety-filled experiences and (2) phylogenetic endowment, or inherited experiences that lie beyond an individual's personal experience.

B. Preconscious

The preconscious contains images that are not in awareness but that can become conscious either quite easily or with some level of difficulty.

C. Conscious

Consciousness is the only level of mental life directly available to us, but it plays a relatively minor role in Freudian theory. Conscious ideas stem from either the perception of external stimuli (perceptual conscious system) or from unconscious and preconscious images after they have evaded censorship.

IV. Provinces of the Mind

Freud conceptualized three regions of the mind: the id, the ego, and the superego.

A. The Id

The id, which is completely unconscious, serves the pleasure principle and seeks constant and immediate satisfaction of instinctual needs. As the region of the mind that contains the basic instincts, the id operates through the primary process.

B. The Ego

The ego, or secondary process, is governed by the reality principle; that is, it is responsible for reconciling the unrealistic demands of both the id and the superego with the demands of the real world.

C. The Superego

The superego, which serves the idealistic principle, has two subsystems: the conscience and the ego-ideal. The conscience results from punishment for improper behavior whereas the ego-ideal stems from rewards for socially acceptable behavior.

V. Dynamics of Personality

The term dynamics of personality refers to those forces that motivate people. The concept includes both instincts and anxiety.

A. Instincts

Freud grouped all human drives or urges under two primary instincts: sex (Eros or the life instinct) and aggression (the destructive or death instinct).

1. The Sexual Instinct

The aim of the sexual instinct is pleasure, which can be gained through the erogenous zones, especially the mouth, anus, and genitals. The object of the sexual instinct is any person or thing that brings sexual pleasure. Both the aim and the object are flexible, so that many sexually motivated behaviors may seem to be unrelated to sex. For example, narcissism, love, sadism, and masochism all possess large components of the sexual drive even though they may appear to be nonsexual. All infants possess primary narcissism, or self-centeredness, but the secondary narcissism of adolescence and adulthood is not universal. Sadism, which is the reception of sexual pleasure from inflicting pain on another, and masochism, which is the reception of sexual pleasure from painful experiences, satisfy both sexual and aggressive drives.

2. The Destructive Instinct

The destructive instinct aims to return a person to an inorganic state, but it is ordinarily directed against other people and is called aggression.

B. Anxiety

Only the ego feels anxiety, but the id, superego, and outside world can each be a source of anxiety. Neurotic anxiety is apprehension about an unknown danger and stems from the ego's relation with the id; moral anxiety is similar to guilt and results from the ego's relation with the superego; and realistic anxiety, which is similar to fear, is produced by the ego's relation with the real world.

VI. Defense Mechanisms

Defense mechanisms operate unconsciously to protect the ego against the pain of anxiety.

A. Repression

Repression involves forcing unwanted, anxiety-loaded experiences into the unconscious. It is the most basic of all defense mechanisms because it is an active process in each of the others. Many repressed experiences remain unconscious for a lifetime, but others become conscious in a disguised form.

B. Undoing and Isolation

Undoing is the ego's attempt to do away with unpleasant experiences and their consequences, usually by means of ceremonial