INTRODUCTION TO FRUED AND PSYCHOANALYSIS THEORY

INTRODUCTION TO FRUED AND PSYCHOANALYSIS THEORY






Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in the Czech Republic. After working much of his life in Vienna, he left in 1938 to avoid Nazi persecution. He moved to England where he died in Hampstead in 1939.


Freud's early work in psychology and psychoanalysis endeavored to understand and cure the human mind by means of hypnosis. Freud's initial exposure to hypnosis in a clinical setting was over the winter of 1885-1886, when he studied in Paris with Jean-Martin Charcot, a renowned French professor of neurology. Charcot's work centered on the causes of hysteria, a disorder which could cause paralysis and extreme fits. He soon discovered that the symptoms of hysteria could be induced in non hysterics by hypnotic suggestion and that the symptoms of hysterics could be alleviated or transformed by hypnotic suggestion. This ran contrary to the then-prevalent belief that hysteria had physiological causes; it suggested that a deeper, unseen level of consciousness could affect an individual's conscious conduct.


For Freud, dreams were the royal road to the unconscious. He began to analyze dreams in order to understand aspects of personality as they relate to pathology. He believed that behavior was not a chance occurrence; every action and thought is motivated by the unconscious at some level. In order to live in a civilized society, people have a tendency to hold back their urges and repress their impulses. However, these urges and impulses must be released in some way; they have a way of coming to the surface in disguised form: one way they are released is through dreams. Freud discovered that the elements in a subject's dream tend to be particularly close to repressed unconscious content and that free associations starting from those dream elements quickly encounter topics causing emotional arousal as the unconscious is stimulated, followed by resistance to those feelings. He revolutionized the study of dreams with his work The Interpretation Of Dreams.


As a result of his clinical experience, Freud developed a model of the human personality which has stood the test of time. Many of the terms Freud introduced, such as Ego, Superego, the Id and the Unconscious are therefore still used in contemporary psychology. Freud's basic concept was a construct of the human psyche as an orderly progression through the developmental stages of childhood to final maturation in adult life.


The Structure of the Personality:





Freud's orientation was biological, a natural result of his medical training and of the period in which he began his work. His conception of the individual was as a reservoir of dynamic energy, continuously seeking a means of discharge and in turn continuously needing replenishment. This veritable storehouse of energy he called the Libido, the genetically inherent energy empowering the life instinct. The instinctual drive towards survival and replacement of energy requires translation into more specific terms such as 'food, love, security' etc.


Instincts drive and direct behavior, the goal of which is the satisfaction of needs derived from the instincts. Needs create tension, and behavior is directed towards reduction of this tension. This concept of needs is called the Pleasure Principle, the attempt to keep excitation or tension as low as possible. In practice this is the desire for immediate gratification. Freud ascribed the appropriate directional functioning to what he termed the Id, which included other genetically inherent features, such as the impulse to love and to seek gratification. The Id strives to bring about the satisfaction of instinctual needs on the basis of the pleasure principle. The Id represents the inner world that has no knowledge of objective reality. Its psychic processes are primary processes - undirected attempts at immediate satisfaction. It is not governed by logic; it contains contradictory yet co-existent impulses. It is the individual's primary subjective reality at the unconscious level.


The Id can do no more than formulate a necessity, so the Ego is invoked. It develops from the Id because of the organism's need to cope with external reality for the satisfaction of its instinctual requirements. Freud described the Ego as a regulating agent and an intermediary, registering demands and meeting requirements, which in turn necessitates coordination with the environment - the world of reality. Although it seeks pleasure and the avoidance of pain, the Ego is under the influence of the Reality Principle, which is the delay of immediate gratification in recognition of social requirements or higher needs. It operates by means of secondary processes - perception, problem solving, and repression - that is, realistic, logical thinking and reality testing.


Levels of Consciousness:


The id, the ego and the superego function in different levels of consciousness: indeed, Freud's theory of the mind hinges upon the ability of impulses or memories to "float" from one level to another. The interaction between the three functions of the mind represents a constant movement of items from one level to another.


Id:


As the baby emerges from the womb into the reality of life, he wants only to eat, drink, urinate, defecate, be warm, and gain sexual pleasure. These urges are the demands of the id, the most primitive motivational force. In pursuit of these ends, the id demands immediate gratification: it is ruled by the pleasure principle, demanding satisfaction now, regardless of circumstances and possible undesirable effects. If a young child was ruled entirely by his id, he would steal and eat a piece of chocolate from a store regardless of the menacing owner watching above him or even his parents scolding beside him.


The id will not stand for a delay in gratification. For some urges, such as urination, this is easily satisfied. However, if the urge is not immediately discharaged, the id will form a memory of the end of the motivation: the thirsty infant will form an image of the mother's breast. This act of wish-fulfillment satisfies the id's desire for the moment, though obviously it does not reduce the tension of the unfulfilled urge.


Ego


The eventual understanding that immediate gratification is usually impossible (and often unwise) comes with the formation of the ego, which is ruled by the reality principle. The ego acts as a go-between in the id's relations with reality, often supressing the id's urges until an appropriate situation arises. This repression of inappropriate desires and urges represents the greatest strain on, and the most important function of, the mind. The ego often utilizes defense mechanisms to achieve and aid this repression. Where the id may have an urge and form a picture which satisfies this urge, the ego engages in a strategy to actually fulfill the urge. The thirsty five-year-old now not only identifies water as the satisfaction of his urge, but forms a plan to obtain water, perhaps by finding a drinking fountain. While the ego is still in the service of the id, it borrows some of its psychic energy in an effort to control the urge until it is feasibly satisfied. The ego's efforts at pragmatic satisfaction of urges eventually builds a great number of skills and memories and becomes aware of itself as an entity. With the formation of the ego, the individual becomes a self, instead of an amalgamation of urges and needs.


Superego


While the ego may temporarily repress certain urges of the id in fear of punishment, eventually these external sources of punishment are internalized, and the child will not steal the chocolate, even unwatched, because he has taken punishment, right, and wrong into himself. The superego uses guilt and self-reproach as its primary means of enforcement for these rules. But if a person does something which is acceptable to the superego, he experiences pride and self-satisfaction.


The superego is sub-dividable into two parts: conscience and ego ideal. Conscience tells what is right and wrong, and forces the ego to inhibit the id in pursuit of morally acceptable, not pleasurable or even realistic, goals. The ego ideal aims the individual's path of life toward the ideal, perfect goals instilled by society. In the pursuit, the mind attempts to make up for the loss of the perfect life experienced as a baby.


Consciousness and the Unconscious:



Freud divided the mind into layers. Perceptual awareness, he termed the conscious state. But a large part of a person's inner life goes on outside awareness. This unconscious part of the mind includes some material which has been dissociated from conscious thinking - the Subconscious; and some that can relatively easily become conscious - the Preconscious contents. The Preconscious is described as having no sense of awareness but it's contents are available for recall. The unconscious contains memories which have been repressed, and under normal circumstances cannot be recalled. According to Groddeck, we "are lived by our unconscious"; Freud certainly subscribed to this theory.


In Freudian psychoanalysis, the word preconscious is applied to thoughts which are unconscious at the particular moment in question, but which are not repressed and are therefore available for recall and easily capable of becoming conscious. As explained by David Stafford-Clark in What Freud Really Said(1965)...


"If consciousness is then the sum total of everything of which we are aware, pre-consciousness is the reservoir of everything we can remember, all that is accessible to voluntary recall: the storehouse of memory. This leaves the unconscious area of mental life to contain all the more primitive drives and impulses influencing our actions without our necessarily ever becoming fully aware of them, together with every important constellation of ideas or memories with a strong emotional charge, which have at one time been present in consciousness but have since been repressed so that they are no longer available to it, even through introspection or attempts at memory."


There are two ways that material is made unconscious. The first, a conscious process, consists of making an experience unconscious; that is, material in the preconscious that is inadmissible to consciousness is suppressed down into the unconscious. Note: this may be considered 'suppression' and the material is then considered to be subconscious. The material may emerge into the preconscious or even consciousness if current circumstances are similar to the original circumstances and remind the person, causing emotional charge.


The second way that material is made unconscious is repression. This is itself an unconscious process and consists of forbidding material to rise up and enter the preconscious, so that it remains uninspected in the unconscious. Very painful trauma, physical or emotional, is thus shut of from consciousness. Sometimes only part of an experience may be repressed; some memory of it may remain preconscious but feelings are not attached to it. A constant expenditure of energy is required to maintain the repression.


As we have seen, the personality of the individual is dependent upon the interaction of three mental structures: the Id, the Ego and the Superego. Behavior is usually the result of an interaction within this system. The Ego is the executive of the personality, mediating and reconciling the demands of the Id, with its instinctual and persistent demands, the need to conform with the Superego, with its introjections and related conscience and Ego-ideals, and the objective facts of reality. This interaction is unconscious most of the time; however much of it is Preconscious so that it can easily be brought into consciousness, and some of it is conscious thought and feelings.


Where the Ego is unable to accede to the demands of the Id, or in certain cases, the demands of society, these impulses are repressed and become unconscious, but they are not divested of energy and are often the cause of future trouble.





The reactions of the Ego are influenced by incidents and memories that have accumulated over the years. This brings us back to the childhood period: the focus of Freudian theory. In infancy there is virtually no organization of memory or experience, hence the Id is in a dominating position, and frustration or delay can cause a violent 'all or nothing' reaction. If frustration is of a traumatic intensity and prolonged, the ensuing warping of the child's personality is long lasting. In many cases, cognitive development along certain lines can be arrested at that stage. If, for example, an infant is deprived of love and affection over a long period, its own natural impulse to give love can be distorted. The infant's attitude in later life will be affected, so that it is unable to achieve a proper relationship with others. It has been said that "Under stress we tend to return to the age at which progress to emotional maturity was arrested."


An important feature of early childhood is the development of the 'Guilt Complex' or conscience. Initially the child accepts the standards imposed by parents, which are enforced by their reward-or-punishment approach. With experience and knowledge the child acquires its own standards of behavior, based on observation and parental precept (rule of conduct). Behavior which digresses from these self-imposed standards arouses feelings of guilt and failure: at times, under certain circumstances, these feelings may be at an unconscious level, and like other unconscious and repressed ideas, can give rise to abnormal behavior.


An important contribution of Freud was his recognition that repressed ideas, when released into the conscious mind accompanied by the emotions associated with them at the time (a process of abreaction), discharge their pent-up energy and cease to be a source of disturbance. This is known as Catharsis (purging, cleansing).


Freud devoted much time and effort to perfecting techniques for analyzing mental disturbances, and relating them to primary causes. Hypnosis, psychoanalysis, free (word) association, and dream interpretation were all used to trace typical disturbances to traumatic memories at specific developmental stages of childhood.


With regard to repressed ideas arising from traumatic conditions experienced in adult life - there is nearly always a predisposition to abnormality resulting from similar childhood experiences of a traumatic nature.


Freud's basic model of the mind, in which the Ego mediates between internal drives and perceptions of external reality, bears a remarkable resemblance to recent notions in behavioral neurology about the hierarchical organization of the cortex and the limbic system. Freud's description of the Unconscious includes the wellspring of the Id and the storehouse of suppressed or repressed traumatic material, as well as the structural unconscious processes that run the body. I prefer to differentiate consciousness between Subconscious processes - both cognitive and affective - and those that are deeply imbedded Unconscious processes, including automated behavior and the store of Genetic or Archetypal memories.






References:


· Gregory Mitchell. (2011): Sigmund Frued and Fruedian Psychoanalysis. Mind


Development resource book. Retrieved on 10th June, 2012. Retrieved from:


http://www.trans4mind.com/mind-development/freud.html
· David B. Stevenson. (1998). Freud's Division of the Mind. The Victorian Web. Brown University. Retrieved on 10th June, 2012. Retrieved from:
http://www.victorianweb.org/science/freud/division.html


















Definitions of consciousness










Consciousness is notoriously difficult to define, though as some have pointed out, we all know what it is from direct experience. Here is a selection of notable views.






"A mere echo, the faint rumour left behind by the disappearing 'soul' upon the air of philosophy ."


William James, 'Does Consciousness Exist?'' 1904






"Consciousness: the having of perceptions, thoughts and feelings; awareness. The term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what consciousness means... Nothing worth reading has been written about it."


Stuart Sutherland, 'Consciousness', International Dictionary of Psychology', 1995






"...there is no question of there being a commonly accepted, exclusive sense of the term... I prefer to use it as synonymous with 'mental phenomenon' or 'mental act.' "

"...intentional in-existence, the reference to something as an object, is a distinguishing characteristic of all mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon exhibits anything similar."


Franz Brentano, 'Psychology from an empirical standpoint', 1874






" ...current values of parameters governing the high-level computations of the operating system."


P. Johnson-Laird, 'A computational analysis of consciousness', Cognition and Brain Theory, 1983














"Consciousness is like the Trinity; if it is explained so that you understand it, it hasn't been explained correctly ."


R.J. Joynt, 'Are Two Heads better than One?', Behavioural Brain Sciences, 1981






"'Consciousness' refers to those states of sentience and awareness that typically begin when we awake from a dreamless sleep and continue until we go to sleep again, or fall into a coma or die or otherwise become 'unconscious'."


John Searle , 'The Mystery of Consciousness', 1997






"What is meant by consciousness we need not discuss - it is beyond all doubt."


Sigmund Freud, 'New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis', 1933






"It is often held therefore (1) that a mind cannot help being constantly aware of all the supposed occupants of its own private stage, and (2) that it can also deliberately scrutinize by a species of non-sensuous perception at least some of its own states and operations. Moreover both this constant awareness (generally called 'consciousness'), and this non-sensuous inner perception (generally called 'introspection') have been supposed to be exempt from error.


Gilbert Ryle, 'The Concept of Mind', 1949






"...perhaps 'consciousness' is best seen as a sort of dummy term like 'thing'; useful for the flexibility that is assured by its lack of specific content."


Kathleen Wilkes, 'Is Consciousness Important?', British Journal of Philosophy of Science, 1984






"We are conscious of something, on this model, when we have a thought about it. So a mental state will be conscious if it is accompanied by a thought about that state...The core of the theory, then is that a mental state is a conscious state when, and only when, it is accompanied by a suitable HOT [Higher Order Thought]"


David M. Rosenthal, 'A Theory of Consciousness', The Nature of Consciousness (ed Block, Flanagan and Güzeldere), 1997






"Behaviourism claims that consciousness is neither a definite nor a usable concept. The behaviourist, who has been trained always as an experimentalist, holds, further, that belief in the existence of consciousness goes back to the ancient days of superstition and magic."


John Watson, 'Behaviourism', 1924






"'Consciousness' is a word worn smooth by a million tongues. Depending upon the figure of speech chosen it is a state of being, a substance, a process, a place, an epiphenomenon, an emergent aspect of matter, or the only true reality."


George Miller, 'Psychology: the Science of Mental Life'', 1962






"Consciousness, we shall find, is reducible to relations between objects, and objects we shall find to be reducible to relations between different states of consciousness; and neither point of view is more nearly ultimate than the other."


T.S.Eliot (Doctoral dissertation), 1916






"The concept of consciousness is a hybrid or better, a mongrel concept: the word 'consciousness' connotes a number of different concepts and denotes a number of different phenomena... P-consciousness is experience...A is access-consciousness. A state is A-conscious if it is poised for free use in reasoning and for direct 'rational' control of action and speech...Conflation of P-consciousness and A-consciousness is ubiquitous in the burgeoning literature on consciousness..."


Ned Block, 'On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness', Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 1995






"... in the most interesting sense of the word 'consciousness', consciousness is the cream on the cake of mentality, a special and sophisticated development of mentality. It is not the cake itself."


David Armstrong, 'What is consciousness?' , The nature of Mind and Other Essays, 1980






"The improvements we install in our brain when we learn our languages permit us to review, recall, rehearse, redesign our own activities, turning our brains into echo chambers of sorts, in which otherwise evanescent processes can hang around and become objects in their own right. Those that persist the longest, acquiring influence as they persist, we call our conscious thoughts."


Daniel Dennett , 'Kinds of Minds', 1996






"The presence of mental images and their use by an animal to regulate its behavior, provides a pragmatic working definition of consciousness"


D.R.Griffin, 'The Question of Animal Awareness', 1976