Sigmund Freud

Entrance to Freuds consulting room (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was a Jew of Austrian parentage and the founder of psychoanalysis. He studied medicine in Vienna and then neurology and psychopathology. He was marginalized by the medical community for his interest in the idea of infant sexuality. Today he, perhaps ironically, is often frowned on as a reductionist.

Freud remains one of the great innovators of the modern age. He attempted to scientifically outline the idea of the unconscious which formerly had been represented in literature, philosophy and nineteenth-century occultism.

His psychoanalytic techniques of free association and abreaction were influenced by several other contemporaneous “doctors of the mind,” most notably Jean-Martin Charcot, but Freud made them uniquely his own.

His works were almost entirely destroyed by the occupying Nazis. In 1938 he reluctantly withdrew from Vienna to London, leaving behind several sisters, all of whom died in concentration camps.

A habitual cigar-smoker, his relationship with his daughter Anna became extremely close; she acted as secretary, friend and confidant. Freud eventually contracted jaw cancer but refused pain-killers because they dulled his mind and interfered with his work.

After Freud’s death Anna further elaborated on the idea of defense mechanisms, distinguishing herself as an important thinker in her own right.

Related Posts » Catharsis, Cathexis, Censor, Civilization and its Discontents, Ego, Electra Complex, Eros, Fromm (Erich), Icebox effect, Id, Jung (Carl Gustav), Klein (Melanie), Moses and Monotheism, Neurosis, Object, Oedipus Complex, Parapraxes, Pleasure Principle, Psychopath, Psychosis, Reality Principle, Repression, Sadism, Masochism, Secondary Revision, Stages of Psychosexual Development, Superego, Thanatos, The Future of an Illusion, Unconscious

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Anna Freud

Anna Freud (1895-1982) was the daughter of Sigmund Freud and an important psychoanalytic thinker particularly in the area of child psychoanalysis. Her The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936) elaborated on her father’s idea of defense mechanisms.

Sigmund and his daughter Anna Freud Nederlands: Foto van Sigmund en Anna Freud, op vakantie in de Italiaanse Dolomieten (1913) Česky: Sigmund Freud se svou dcerou Annou (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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Conscience

Image via http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/conscience

Conscience is a somewhat mysterious and much debated concept. In contemporary psychology it’s understood as a conscious system of moral values, or that aspect of the self that the person experiences as giving voice to these values–i.e. “my higher self says I shouldn’t do this.”

According to Freudian psychoanalysis, the conscience differs from the superego in that the former refers to moral values (the “still, small voices”) held in our conscious mind. The superego, on the other hand, contains moral values that are, in part, unconscious.

In religion, we find some belief systems claiming that the conscience comes from a higher plane or realm (e.g. astral or heavenly). But conscience is sometimes contrasted, in Catholicism for instance, with the Will of God. The belief here is that an unenlightened person may suppose they’re making good choices when they’re not.¹

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¹ See, for instance, the Catholic devotional book, My Daily Bread by Father Anthony Paone.

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Compensation

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Compensation is a psychological term that was first introduced by Alfred Adler in Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Physical Compensation (1907).

Adler understood compensation in terms of underlying feelings of inferiority. In order to cope with the pain of feeling inferior, the psyche develops beliefs at the opposite end of the psychological spectrum. That is, it ‘compensates’ by feeling superior to other people. Hence the now familiar idea of the inferiority-superiority complex.

By 1907, Adler was part of Sigmund Freud‘s inner circle. And so was C. G. Jung. In that year Jung also wrote about the idea of compensation:

In 1907 Carl Gustav Jung notes the pathogenic complex posses a quantum of libido which grants it a degree of autonomy that is opposed to conscious will. Though this dynamic has a pathological cast, it conveys the essence of what Jung termed compensation; namely, the capacity of the unconscious to influence consciousness.¹

However, Jung wouldn’t name compensation as such until 1914.

In “The Importance of the Unconscious in Psychopathology” (1914), he introduced the idea, saying, “the principal function of the unconscious is to effect a compensation and to produce a balance. All extreme conscious tendencies are softened and toned down through a counter-impulse in the unconscious.”²

We can see that Jung’s view of compensation, as compared to Adler’s, is geared more toward the idea that the psyche strives to achieve balance and integration.

In fact, Jung believed the psyche has a natural tendency toward balance and integration. If a particular attitude becomes extreme, Jung believed that therapy and close attention to dreams could help to amplify repressed or underdeveloped psychological contents.

On several occasions Jung says that his own particular brand of therapy is essential to this process. And he believed that he had successfully analyzed himself in this regard. But, at the same time, Jung didn’t try to sell potential clients on his views. If an ardent churchgoer, for example, was satisfied with what Jung may have taken as a skewed perspective, Jung would let the person be. Apparently Jung only intervened when clients’ old systems and attitudes lead to neurosis (or psychosis) and help was requested.

This latter claim might, however, be a bit exaggerated, in keeping with the tendency of some Jungians to elevate Jung as some kind of new prophet for modern times. There are also accounts where Jung was quite brash and bold, surprising and even shocking his clients. Perhaps they had asked for his help. But whether or not he was, at times, playing the the ‘wise guru’ and on a bit of a power trip remains open to debate.³

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¹ See Peter Mudd » http://www.enotes.com/compensation-analytical-psychology-reference/compensation-analytical-psychology

² Ibid.

³ Although married to Emma Jung, it seems Carl had sex with at least two of his clients, Sabina Spielrein and Toni Wolff, which certainly wouldn’t wash in psychiatry today. See » http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung#Marriage

Collective Unconscious

collective unconscious (Photo credit: noneck via Flickr)

The idea of the collective unconscious refers to Carl Jung‘s belief that humanity shares an underlying, biologically inherited storehouse of collective experience and knowledge.

From his considerable study of world myth and religion, Jung came to the conclusion that this collective data is cross-cultural. In fact, he didn’t just see the collective unconscious in myth and religion. He saw universally recognizable motifs among dreams, myth, religion, the arts and architecture. One leading example he provides is the mandala. For Jung,  the circular shape of the mandala represents the potentially limitless self.

Jung calls these hypothesized patterns of human existence archetypes.¹ Existing in a larger time frame than most people’s daily awareness, the archetypes of the collective unconscious apparently connect the past, present and future.

Jung speaks to the arbitrary nature of the term collective unconscious. Towards the end of his career he writes that he rendered essentially spiritual ideas in scientific-sounding language for the sake of professional and societal legitimacy. So this, in a sense, makes him something of a postmodern thinker way before the term became popular.

Because he was, in part, doing a sell job, his insistence on the bio-genetic base of the collective unconscious seems confusing to some, especially when he says:

The unconscious has no time. There is no trouble about time in the unconscious. Part of our psyche is not in time and not in space. They are only an illusion, time and space, and so in a certain part of our psyche, time does not exist at all.²

Could a timeless psyche be entirely biological? Perhaps Jung was saying that, although grounded in the body, the archetypes exhibit or resonate with a spiritual component. That is, a bio-genetic ground is necessary for the interplay of body and spirit.

What About Sigmund Freud and the Unconscious?

Freud and Jung’s views about the unconscious differ, but not so much as many believe. Some pop psychologists and New Age gurus quickly dismiss Freud’s ideas, unaware that his model of the unconscious also contains collective elements.

As we’ve seen in the above, Jung describes the archetype as a component of mankind’s psychological substratum—the collective unconscious. Freud similarly spoke of phylogenetic “schemata” and “prototypes.” And borrowing from ancient Greek and Jewish literature, Freud also devised the “Oedipus complex,” a “primal father” and likened the shadowy contents of the unconscious to archaeological ruins.

In addition, late in his career Freud revised his libido theory to include the general ideas of eros (life instinct) and thanatos (death instinct). Because Freud maintained that the fundamental aspects of the unconscious are universal, aspects of his model of the self, like Jung’s, point to a collective unconscious.³ And not only that. Freud, himself, said that Jung introduced nothing new with the idea of the collective unconscious.  He wrote that the “content of the unconscious is collective anyhow.”⁴

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¹ Jung’s notion of the archetypes borrows from ideas previously found in anthropology, sociology, philosophy, religion and theology. The term archetype is traceable to St. Augustine, 354-430 CE.

² C. G. Jung Collected Works vol. 18, para. 684, cited in  “Time and Space” at http://www.fundacion-jung.com.ar/ingles/citas.htm.

³ Michael V. Adams illustrates this point in The Cambridge Companion to Jung, (ed.) Polly Young-Eisendrath and Terence Dawson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 101.

⁴ Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p. 209, cited in R. J. Lifton with Eric Olson (eds.), Explorations in Psychohistory: The Wellfleet Papers, New York: Simon and Shuster, 1974 p. 90.

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Civilization and its Discontents

Civilization and its Discontents via Tumblr (click on image for quotes from the book)

Civilization and its Discontents is an important work written in 1929 (after WWI) by Sigmund Freud in which he proposes a “death instinct” (thanatos) said to exist on both personal and cultural levels.

Freud says tensions arise between personal, instinctual desires their cultural repression. And realizing that mankind is capable of mass destruction, Freud suggests that not only individuals but subcultures and even entire societies can be neurotic.

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Jean-Martin Charcot

Jean-Martin Charcot (1825 – 1893) – Portrait (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-93) was a pioneering French neurologist and psychologist born in Paris. His work has had a lasting impact in both of those fields, to the extent that he’s been called the “Napoleon of the neuroses.”

Charcot worked at the widely respected Salpêtrière teaching clinic in Paris where he made important contributions to neurology. He’s best known, however, for his groundbreaking work on hypnotism and is often mentioned as one of Sigmund Freud‘s early instructors. Charcot’s studies on hysteria fascinated Freud, who in turn developed his own theory of hysteria.

Paving the way for a more biologically based type of psychiatry, Charcot discovered that brain damage to certain regions of the cerebral cortex are linked to speech impairment and epilepsy. This supported the seminal work of the French physician, Paul Broca, suggesting that different parts of the body are controlled by correspondingly different regions of the cerebral cortex.

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Censor

Censorship by IsaacMao via Flickr

The censor is a psychological mechanism hypothesized by Sigmund Freud in which threatening or socially inappropriate dream material is toned down. Freud describes the censor through the analogy of professional writing.

To be effective, media writers must consider their audience. If words are too strident or suggestive, an editor rejects or possibly edits an article for publication.

With regard to dreams, Freud believed the censor acts like a newspaper editor. The censor disguises an unconscious wish symbolized in a dream. The stronger the prohibition of the wish by the ego, superego or conscience, the more it will be distorted in the dream, or in a series of dreams.

Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) is worth quoting at length here:

A similar difficulty confronts the political writer who has disagreeable truths to tell those in authority. If he presents them undisguised, the authorities will suppress his words…A writer must beware of censorship, and on its account he must soften and distort expression of his opinion…The stricter the censorship, the more far-reaching the disguise and the more ingenious too may be the means employed for putting the reader on the scent of the true meaning. The fact that the phenomena of censorship and of dream-distortion correspond down to their smallest details justifies us in presuming that they are similarly determined.¹

However, Freud’s analogy might not hold up in the 21^st century because it assumes a political writer is concerned with telling the truth and not just with making a living, stomping on an opponent, or winning an election.

As for the idea of the censor itself, it assumes that the brain (and person) works like software filters, merely distorting hidden desires before they reach consciousness. The idea that dreams could be symbolic because they point to something far greater than mundane reality is never considered. Why? Well, Freud was a reductionist atheist. So for most of his life he saw just about everything from a sexual, materialist and conceptual bias, which for spiritually biased people is not entirely wrong but definitely incomplete.

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¹ Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) trans. James Strachey, London: Pelican, 1976, pp. 223-224.

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Celibacy

Several religious traditions regard celibacy as a requirement for advanced spiritual progress and healthy premarital relationships. And married seekers primarily concerned with God realization are often counseled to practice celibacy or, depending on their psychological makeup and related calling, sexual moderation.

In contrast to Sigmund Freud‘s theories about so-called normal psychosexual development¹ and C. G. Jung‘s advocacy of a mind/body holism, some celibates claim that unspent sexual energy is transmuted to higher forms of psycho-spiritual awareness.

Aspects of popular culture and many ordinary people tend to characterize celibacy as something odd or deviant but the devout monastic, saint or guru and many non-denominational spiritual persons say it’s essential not only for personal development but also for the universal work of spiritual ‘liberation’ or, depending one one’s path, ‘salvation.’

This spiritual work is said to be just that—work. But it’s not the kind of immediately visible work that everyone can easily understand. Rather, it’s arguably more subtle and inwardly demanding. The work of salvation is said to involve meditation, contemplation and intercession. These practices apparently facilitate others’ ability to recognize and respond to God as an active force of love in their lives.

In Catholic and Hindu mysticism, the transpersonal connecting principles are, respectively, the ‘taking of sin’ and ‘karma transfer.’

Celibacy combined with higher forms of contemplation is said to elevate all concerned individuals, but this is probably a best-case scenario. In actual practice it seems that some individuals react in a hostile manner toward deeply spiritual persons, this being a possible explanation for the well-known phenomena of religious persecution, scapegoating and martyrdom.

And while some contemplative celibates may seem like socially inept or repressed “losers” to those predominantly concerned with worldly rewards, the celibates themselves often say they are regularly in touch with helpful spiritual powers (e.g. The Holy Spirit, The Goddess), intermediaries (e.g. angels, deceased relatives and saints) and other saintly living people—i.e. those whose inner relationship with God invisibly reaches out to others.

For a discussion on the notion of healthy vs. unhealthy types of celibacy, see ”Celibacy, Sex and Spirituality.”

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¹ From the entry “Cathexis” at earthpages.ca:

Freud never considers the possibility that pent up libidinal energy could be redirected to the spiritual life. On this score, many saints and mystics attest to the importance of celibacy. Without it, they say, their spiritual work (e.g. intercession) just can’t get done. Many go even further, describing chastity not as a kind of unavoidable necessity but as a great gift and virtue. This positive attitude lead St. Frances de Sales to say

Chastity is the lily among virtues and makes men almost equal to angels.

Sadly, many people still on a materialistic level of consciousness find this difficult to understand. As a result, some predominantly spiritual people may suffer ridicule and persecution, even by their apparently religious peers. Even more sad, it seems that some potential spiritual sensitives are, themselves, duped by the status quo viewpoint. So instead of flowering into sainthood, they may end up in psychiatric wards.

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Catharsis

Detail of The School of Athens by Raffaello Sanzio, 1509, showing Plato (left) and Aristotle (right) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The term catharsis has deep literary roots, and goes back to Plato and Aristotle.¹  In everyday contemporary usage an experience is called “cathartic” if it helps us release a good deal of pent up emotions. Usually some kind of enhanced intellectual understanding follows.

Catharsis is also used in the arts with much the same meaning, where some dramatic performance – be it theatrical, visual, poetic or musical – compels us to release feelings, this usually followed by some insight into ourselves or into life in general and the human experience.

Sigmund Freud picked up on the ancient and modern usages of catharsis and incorporated the concept into his psychoanalysis, specifically when talking about abreaction.

Today, the term crops up time and again in the arts and music.

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¹ See this good discussion, “Plato and Aristotle on Tragedy” about the complexities of catharsis: http://classics.uc.edu/~johnson/tragedy/plato&aristotle.html

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