Reality Principle

In Sigmund Freud’s theory, this is a learned psychological function that seeks to gratify instinctual desires through adaptation to the external world.

The reality principle exists in a state of tension with the innate pleasure principle.

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Regression

coloring time: foreverdigital / Jenn Vargas

In Freudian theory regression is a defense mechanism where the ego partially or fully regresses to an earlier phase of libidinal development due to unresolved anxiety that threatens everyday functioning.

Obviously, this is usually maladaptive as the individual re-experiences anxiety associated with an infantile stage of psychological development to which he or she is to some degree fixated.

Accordingly, aspects of the world are interpreted from the perspective of an anxious child. And this can lead to all sorts of unpleasant personality qualities–from paranoia, grandiosity, manipulation, pathological lying or some disturbing combination of these.

But controlled or therapeutic regression, as in creative play, reading old childhood books or listening to old records need not be maladaptive. In fact, it can be a necessary stage in integrating the total personality and moving on to new types of awareness and experience. It can also just be plain fun.

The difference between healthy and unhealthy regression is whether one does this consciously and progressively or is simply unconsciously playing out old neuroses, over and over like a broken record.

The one is childlike, the other childish.

At Earthpages.org:

• In the eyes of a child

On the Web:

• Freud’s Psychosexual Stage Theory

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Reaction Formation

Freud Quiere Bailar + OU: Wookie Sidecar

In Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, a defense mechanism in which the subject exaggerates the opposite of a repressed, socially unacceptable impulse.

The original impulse remains unresolved in its infantile form within the unconscious, thus feeding the fires of a neuroses.

But reaction formation can lead to a successful sublimation of the original impulse.

An example of the negative, neurotic type of reaction formation would be the gay basher who has repressed his or her own homosexual fantasies.

The positive, adaptive type would be the father who sublimates inappropriate sexual desire for his daughter into buying her fine, attractive articles of clothing.

Some would say, however, that the best solution to the above scenario would be to become conscious of and entirely resolve the unacceptable impulse through analysis, prayer and/or purification techniques.

Critics of this approach believe it’s impossible to eradicate sexual desires, appropriate or not. This view is at loggerheads with personal accounts from saints like Faustina Kowalska who claim to have received celibacy as a divine gift. » Reversal

References:

• Charles Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1977, pp. 136-137.

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Superego

superego: Ana Carolina Machion

Superego

In Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, the superego is the conscious or unconscious element of the ego that is formed from the child’s internalization of parental values, beliefs and prohibitions.

Because the superego is internalized in childhood, its moral injunctions are partially based on imagined rather than actual parental demands.

A common mistake among popular psychologists is to equate the superego with the conscience.

Although influencing moral attitudes, the superego differs from the conscience. Internal conflicts can arise between the superego and the conscience or between the superego and more recently acquired attitudes and beliefs.

» Censor, Conscience, Defense Mechanism, Dreams, Ego, Electra Complex, Introjection, Psychopath, Repression, Totem

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Sublimation

Freud's influence? by Great Beyond / Tony Case

Sublimation

A theoretical process outlined in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis where instinctual, antisocial id impulses are redirected toward non-instinctual, symbolic forms of behavior or expression.

This redirection of the id’s antisocial desires apparently depends on a certain degree of ego development, and is usually understood to fall within socially acceptable channels, such as the arts.

When art is displayed and accepted in a public space, either officially (as pictured right) or subversively (as with tolerated graffiti), sublimation can become a social psychological and not just an individual dynamic.

According to Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud, sublimation is a defense mechanism. And this process of making the scary safe may occur on a personal or societal level.

» Ashram, Cockburn (Bruce), Displacement, Myth, Reaction Formation, Symbol

References:

• Charles Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1977, pp. 159-160.

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Stages of Psychosexual Development

Freud, explícame tú esto: tnarik / Eduardo

Stages of Psychosexual Development

Sigmund Freud’s theory outlines four early stages of psycho-sexual development in which the ego and libido are developed:

1. The oral stage of 0-1 years where infant gratification is achieved through sucking the primary object of the mother’s breast (or substitute objects)
2. The anal stage of 1-3, in which sexual gratification is achieved through the child’s control over and actual production of feces. From his or her toilet training the child first learns the reality of restrictions from the external world
3. The latency period – occurring between the phallic stage and adolescence – in which the child pays less attention to the body and more to the acquisition of essential life skills
4. The genital stage at which time the adolescent’s attention is oriented to developing mature, loving human relationships with others

According to Freud’s theory, so-called normal individuals proceed through these stages without major difficulties while some become fixated at a given stage. Fixation in this sense refers to an unconscious attachment to a particular object of libidinal gratification.

For instance, the alcoholic fixated at the oral phase substitutes liquor and the bottle for the mother’s nipple. Whereas those disregarding or, conversely, obsessed with cleanliness, order and regularity would be fixated at the anal stage.

In general, fixation manifests in excessive behavior such as excessive housecleaning and/or extreme emotional states (depression, fear, anxiety, forced elation).

For Freud, normal human development pretty much ends at the genital phase. Behaviors such as celibacy, fasting and prolonged solitude may be viewed as pathological by Freudians. Other more holistic thinkers, however, see this as a reductive and potentially dangerous approach, one suggesting spiritual ignorance, immaturity and perhaps sin.

The International Institute for the Advanced Studies of Psychotherapy and Applied Mental Health sums up Freud’s theory as follows:

Although Freud’s theory of psychosexual development was extremely influential and continues to be taught in professional psychology programs today, empirical research has failed to generate significant support for these ideas and it is generally not an accepted model among practicing psychologists. Additionally, this theory has drawn criticism for being constructed on sexist ideas. Regardless, terminology associated with the stages of psychosexual development has found wide popular usage in a variety of registers and fields of activity.¹

—

¹ http://www.psychotherapy.ro/resources/constructs/psychosexual-development/

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Splitting

Split Up: ViaMoi

Splitting

In Freudian theory, this is a defense mechanism where the ego divides into one or more parts to attempt to deal with anxiety.

One part remains fully conscious and is experienced as the real self, while the other may become unconscious and projected onto an object (a Freudian term that includes another person).

When a split-off aspect of the ego is projected, the object is often unrealistically seen as alternating between being “good” and “bad.”

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Numinous

Numinous

The term numinous is often said to have been coined by the German Lutheran scholar Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) to describe a personal experience of spiritual power.

But in 1647 Nathaniel Ward wrote in The simple cobler of Aggawam in America:

The Will of a King is very numinous; it hath a kinde of vast universality in it.

Source: Oxford English Dictionary

The term is derived from the Latin numen, usually translated as “the presence of a god or goddess” or the “will, manifestation or power of a deity.”

The most ancient example is in a text of Accius cited by Varro: “Alia hic sanctitudo est aliud nomen et numen Iouis” (“Here, the holiness of Jupiter is one thing, the name and power of Jupiter another.”

Schilling, Robert. “Numen.” Encyclopedia of Religion. Ed. Lindsay Jones. Vol. 10. 2^nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005. 6753-6754. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Gale.

For Otto, numinosity originates from outside the self but is perceived within. A higher process than the magical, the numinous takes many forms. It has primitive, daemonic and dark as well as elevated, noble and pure aspects.

Otto calls the absolute and purest experience of the numen “the Holy.” This high aspect of the numinous involves an experience marked by a feeling of “Awefulness,” “Overpoweringness,” “Energy” or “Urgency.”

Sometimes Otto implies that the numinous is identical among all religions. Other times he reveals a Christian bias, suggesting that the numinosity experienced through the Bible and by various Christian mystics is absolute and pure.

Innocue Vivito: Numen adest - Hammarby by Henry Heatly

From today’s standards, Otto’s definition of numinosity might seem a bit vague and unsystematic. But his work is regarded as a milestone and continues to have a profound influence in depth psychology and comparative religion.

The term numinous is also used by C. G. Jung to depict a spiritual experience involving some kind of alteration of ego-based consciousness (i.e. “altered states”).

For Jung, the experience of numinosity arises when an archetype of the collective unconscious is activated. Depending on combined factors such as the condition of the psyche, the stability of the ego and the archetypal source, numinosity may be either psychologically healing or destructive.

Joseph Campbell says that numen has parallel terms in the “Melanesian mana, Dakotan wakon, Ironquoian orenda and Algonquian manitu.”

But it would be unwarranted to suppose that these terms necessarily point to identical spiritual forces and related experiences.

Along these lines, the Romanian scholar, Mircea Eliade says that numinosity exhibits a diversity of intensities, qualities and effects. And Deidre Sklar adds from the perspective of dance:

While the experience alternately called presence, or unity, or numinosity may be the same across spiritual traditions, “ways of doing” are different. Presence comes in a multitude of flavors. “The virgin,” is different than “Buddha” or “God the Father.” Kneeling in prayer before the virgin is a different bodily experience than sitting cross-legged in meditation. Both the natures of the divinities and the ritual practices performed in their names are elaborated in distinct communities to do different work upon soma.

Deidre Sklar, “Reprise: On Dance Ethnography.” Dance Research Journal, Vol. 32, No. 1 Summer, 2000: 70-77, p. 72.

Sigmund Freud saw the numinous in terms of a person recalling the unified “oceanic bliss” that everyone apparently felt within the mother’s womb. Perhaps Freud’s greatest shortcoming was his inability – or perhaps unwillingness – to study religion on its own terms, at its own level of experience.

Before Otto, Jung, Campbell, Eliade and Freud, the philosopher Immanuel Kant spoke to a realm of the noumena. Kant said we cannot know the character of the noumena but may ascertain its existence by virtue of the “intelligible order of things” in the empirical world of phenomena.

Kant’s noumena may point to a source of numinous experience but it is not the numinous itself.

Mystics from various traditions write about different numinous experiences. And even within a single tradition descriptions of the numinous vary dramatically in terms of both quality and intensity.

Consider, for example, the ordinary churchgoer who claims to feel an invisible presence of peace on entering a Church as compared to the full-fledged saint who speaks of various all-absorbing states of numinous rapture.

In Paradise Lost John Milton depicts Satan’s dismay when he sees the gloom of hell that he’s traded for the light of heaven.

“Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,” Said then the lost archangel, “this the seat That we must change for Heaven, this mournful gloom For that celestial light?”

At Earthpages.org:

• An Outline of Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy
• C. G. Jung and Numinosity
• Celibacy, Sex and Spirituality

» Archetypal Image, Aurobindo (Sri), Ego, Holy, Inflation, Jackson, (Michael), Joachim of Fiore, Mysticism, Numen, “Numinosity,” Paranoia, Participation Mystique, Power, Psychosis, Ramakrishna (Sri), Religion, Sargon, Symbol, Teresa of Avila (St.) Kowalska (Faustina Helen, St). Vampires, Vulcan

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Self

sTURM UND dRANG (Self Portrait) by Artwerk / Yanko

Self

The human self, being the basis of personal identity, has been variously understood.

Some say the self is the agency that says “I.” This is the conceptual, reflective part of ourselves that apparently remains unchanged from the first time to as long as one can think of the idea of “I.”

In psychological terms this is the ego, not to be confused with egotism or egoism. Theorists subscribing to this view often reject any kind of transcendental, unchanging core to selfhood.

Others suggest that individuals possess multiple selves. Here the self is viewed as “the personality or organization of traits” (J. P. Chaplin, Dictionary of Psychology, Bantam 1985, p. 414), another view that rejects an eternal, unchanging aspect of the self.

From a Western philosophical standpoint the question of self belongs to ontology (the study of being) and phenomenology (the study of experience). Ontology and phenomenology, however, are arguably influenced by cosmology (theories about the character of the universe) and ethics (questions about right and wrong).

The psychologist Freud’s theory about the self is limited to two main factors–nature (instinctual drives of sex, aggression, love and death) and society (parents, significant others and social institutions). This is because Freud viewed God and any notions of an afterlife as illusions created to satisfy unconscious psychological desires and wishes, and his restricted worldview had a significant effect on his outlook.

Meanwhile Freud’s star pupil, Jung, took psychoanalytic theory a step further by suggesting the possibility of archetypal aspects of the self (i.e. eternal aspects existing beyond yet connected to the everyday world). For Jung, the self, itself, is an archetype of wholeness.

In Biblical Christianity, the true, essential self is not of this world but created to enjoy otherworldly, everlasting heaven:

If any one would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake will save it (Matthew 16:24-25).

Hindus in agreement with Sankara tend understand the true self (atman) as identical with an invisible, underlying aspect of creation (brahman). Once liberated, the self loses all sense of individuality.

Ramanuja’s school of Visistadvaita presents another Hindu perspective where the true self is said to ultimately retain some sense of individuality as it rests in the godhead.

A branch of New Age believers say we have many slightly different selves coexisting in parallel or multiple universes, all unified by an oversoul existing above, beyond and yet within those multiple realities. A good example of this point of view can be found in the Seth Books by Jane Roberts.

In a witty and regal vein, King William III (William of Orange) was among those who’ve pondered the nature of the self:

As I walk’d by my self
And talk’d to my self,
My self said unto me,
Look to thy self,
Take care of thy self,
For nobody cares for Thee.
I answered my self,
And said to my self,
In the self-same Repartee,
Look to thy self
Or not look to thy self,
The self-same thing will be.

» Alchemy, Anatman, Archetype, Archetypal Image, Atman, Blake (William), Brahman, Buddhism, Collective Unconscious, Conscience, Defense Mechanism, Dennet (Daniel), Ego, Fromm (Erich), Hero, Hinduism, Individuation Process, Karma Transfer, Leibniz (Gottfried, Wilhelm), Maslow (Abraham), Mead (George Herbert), Numinous, Persona, Pollution, Postmodernism

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Secondary Revision

Sigmund Freud originally uploaded by wordscraft

Secondary Revision

In Sigmund Freud’s classic work on dreams and the unconscious, The Interpretation of Dreams (German edition: 1899 & 1900), secondary revision is said to occur whenever we remember a dream’s content.

Freud says the original dream content is usually obscure, incoherent and highly symbolic, and our memory of it is fragmented at best.

On waking the conscious mind fills in the gaps to make some kind of sense out of the dream, even though our waking interpretation doesn’t necessarily fit with the actual dream content.

In his Dictionary of Psychology (Bantam: 1985) J. P. Chaplin calls this secondary elaboration, and says we essentially try to make a better “story” out of the dream content.

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