a
brief and short summary presenting the main ideas and concepts of Sigmund
Freud's psychoanalytical theory.
Controversial
as he is influential, Sigmund Freud changed the way we understand and treat the
human psyche.
Freud's
writings span over 40 years of intense work, moving back and forth from his
clinic where he treated patients to his study where he wrote. Freud was always
developing and revising his ideas and his theory is not unchanging and as is
best understood as a developing story of plumbing the depths of the human soul.
Following
his work as a neurologist, young Freud and his colleagues proposed the idea
that certain physical symptoms (such as "hysteria") can be attributed
to mental conditions. After experimenting with hypnosis the discovered that
people know more than they think they do, and that certain information can be retrieved
from people under hypnosis that is unavailable to them while awake. Freud also
discovered that sometimes illness can disappear after locating and surfacing
its inducers. The main ramification of this is that we appear to be functioning
on different levels of consciousness (this
means that what you experience right now is only a small part of what is
actually happening inside you). Freud described these levels as the conscious (what you
have on your mind, like this idea by Freud) , preconscious (what could be easily made conscious,
like what you had for breakfast) and unconscious (unavailable to the conscious, like
everything that happened before your earliest memory).
After hypnosis proved limited Freud sought to
find other ways to penetrate into the unconscious and dig up into conscious
whatever it is that was making his patients suffer. The answer was "speech
therapy", a revolutionary idea for the time that offered the notion
that words can cure if we only pay real close attention to them. Nothing we say
or do, says Freud, is accidental or insignificant, and that is why careful dissection
of a patient's speech can aid the therapist in directing him towards new discoveries
regarding himself. Freud also took a big interest in dreams that he saw as code
that once deciphered can open doors to the unconscious and our deepest
truths.
When thus analyzing his patients psyche Freud
soon realized that the deeper you dig the more it becomes apparent that it all
leads back to one place: early childhood. Freud then devised a theory of the
process we go through from birth to adulthood, arguing that the particular
manner in which we pass through this process will determine to a large extent
who we are. Freud knew very well that processes requires energy and he claimed
that this energy is sex, or love or the power on life, call it whatever you
like, Freud called it libido and claimed that it is the most essential and rudimentary
source of drive and energy in us. Everything we do is in fact a channeling of
the libido (channels have been determined by our particular development).
Following the horrors of World War 1 Freud revised his theory and offered an
additional source of drive, the death craving force of destruction.
Freud famously offered another later model of
the mind constructed of: Ego, Id and Super Ego. The Id is the initial
raw drive that operates by the "pleasure principle" of maximum pleasure
minimum pain. But as the poet said, "you can't always get what you (deep
down inside you darkest fantasies) want", and this is where the Ego comes
in to manage your desires with reality (the "reality principle").
When we grow up and go through the Oedipal Complex of giving up the
competition with dad over mom we start to develop another "division"
in ourselves, the Super-Ego which is the internalized expectations of society
from us such as morals, values, ambitions etc. The ego is constantly engaged by
the Id and Super-ego while trying to mange us and reality, not easy at all.
Summaries of important works by Freud:
Sigmund Freud - The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud - Civilization and Its Discontents
