3rd Year Psycology
All groups
Psychoanalytic Theory
• Freud was trained as a neurologist. In the late 1800s,
two approaches existed to the study of neurology. The
German school (which would have influenced Freud
during his undergraduate medical training) emphasized
anatomy, and the goal of the German neurologist was to
describe function or dysfunction at the level of the brain
and spinal chord.
• Conversely, the French school of neurology (which would have
influenced Freud in the 1880s) emphasized clinical experience, and
the goal of the French school was to describe clinical
manifestations and the collection of symptoms (called a syndrome)
exhibited by a patient. In reading Freud, one can see both traditions
reflected in his work.
What you are and What you aren’t
(The Nature of Human Beings in Psychoanalytic Theory
• For Freud, humanity was first grounded in its animal
nature, motivated by the drives for food, self-
preservation, sexual release and destruction.
Impulses and drives were to be tamed. The human being
required direction and intervention in order to grow and
function in society. Any other course would lead to
anarchy—the unbounded and free expression of desire
and instinct.
What you are and What you aren’t
(The Nature of Human Beings in Psychoanalytic Theory
• Freud considered human beings to be primarily biological creatures, and he
developed his theory of the mind with this placed foremost in his awareness.
In his “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (1895/1966) he began the work of
attempting to “represent psychical processes as quantitatively determinate
states of specifiable material particles, thus making those processes
perspicuous and free from contradiction” (p. 295).
• At the time when Freud would have been most
influenced in his education, the intellectual landscape
was teeming with the ideas (and their variations) of
Darwin, Spencer (social Darwinism) and the “crisis of
faith” (it was during this time that the dating of various
books of the Bible was called into question, suggesting
that it was more of an anthology than a revealed text)
emerging at the end of the Victorian era.
• This transformation in thought, combining an emerging
empirical view of science (one deeply influenced by
biology) and Freud’s rejection of the Christian divinity of
humans and all religion as an intrapsychic phenomenon,
left Freud little place for the higher aspirations of the
goodness of humans found in Marxism and other
socialist tracts popular in that time.
• Freud suggested two theories of the mind. The first, discussed in 1915, is
commonly referred to as the topographical model. Freud suggested that the
mind was divided into three layers, the conscious, the preconscious and
the unconscious. (Freud never used the term subconscious.)
• The conscious mind is that part of the mind of which we are usually aware. It is the
sensory memory, the working memory, and our sense of awake awareness. Freud
thought that the conscious mind was only a very small part of the mind.
• In contrast, the unconscious mind was a vast storehouse of memories, thoughts,
feelings, drives and impulses. All of our experience makes an impression on the
unconscious mind. The unconscious is understood to be just that—unconscious—
out of our awareness. What is contained in the unconscious is, paradoxically, not
known to the individual yet integral to her or him. For Freud, the unconscious was
the “driver of the bus” and we (our conscious minds) were simply the passengers.
• Sandwiched between the conscious and unconscious is the preconscious mind.
The concept of the preconscious was needed to account for the fact that there are
some things we don’t carry in our conscious minds all the time, but are readily
available from our memory.
• In 1923, Freud proposed a new theory of the mind, one which incorporated
the topographical model but added a more theoretical twist. The tripartite
model suggested that the mind was composed of the Id, the Superego, and
the Ego.
• The Id (tr. from the German as the it) was said to be the whole of the primitive
urges and drives (e.g., sex, hunger, death, self-preservation), the uncivilized
animal which was our fundamental nature. The Id was considered to reside
mainly in the unconscious mind.
• The Superego was the mental structure that developed as the individual was
exposed to, learned, and incorporated social norms and rules. This
incorporated set of rules served to hold down (i.e., repress) the animal urges
of the Id, resulting in an individual who was in control of his or her urges and
desires, and maintained control in light of the social need to be in control. The
Superego was considered to reside mainly in the conscious and preconscious
minds. were not the masters of their own houses.
• According to Freud (but not according to later theorists) the Ego was simply
the by-product of the interaction between the Id and the Superego. In other
words, our personality, our sense of self, was the result of the clash between
the desires of the Id and the control of the Superego. While this limited view of
the Ego is no longer accepted at face value, this conceptualization is revealing
of how Freud approached humanity—conscious experience was the result of
the interplay of other forces. Humans were not the masters of their own
houses.
You . . . on a good day
(The Nature of Healthy Functioning)
• Healthy functioning for Freud was not all that healthy by modern standards.
To understand this, some discussion of Freud’s model of psychopathology is
necessary. Freud developed a classification scheme to differentiate
categories of psychopathology.
• In Freud’s system, psychopathology was considered to be a structural issue.
An individual’s character structure will have been shaped by the influence of
mothering (remember, in Freud’s time and culture, the father was rarely
involved in parenting young children) and the development of the Superego
and its success in repressing the Id.
• Freud stated, “If we throw a crystal to the floor, it breaks; but not into haphazard
pieces. It comes apart along its lines of cleavage into fragments whose
boundaries, though they were invisible, were predetermined by the crystal’s
structure. Mental patients are split and broken structures of this same kind”
(Freud, 1933/1964, p. 59). A patient was considered to fall into one of three
categories: neurotic, perverse, or psychotic.
• The neurotic category was subdivided into obsessive, hysteric, and phobic types.
The perverse and the psychotic categories had no further divisions. Modern
psychoanalytic writers tend to refer to the perverse character structure as the
borderline character structure (McWilliams, 1994). One became neurotic,
perverse, or psychotic as a result of the presence or absence of care in the early
years. For Freud, development in the first 6 years of life was crucial to future
character and temperament.
• According to Freud, healthy individuals were the neurotics. The neurotics’ prime
emotion was guilt, and their inner experience was one of conflict between what
they wanted to do (i.e., the influence of the Id) and what they knew they should
do (i.e., the influence of the Superego).
• A “successful” neurotic was one who balanced the drives of the Id with the
demands of his or her surroundings. Health was measured in how an individual
accomplished this task. Freud proposed a series of defense mechanisms which
had the role of containing, manipulating and/or transforming the drives and
desires of the Id so that they did not spill over into socially unacceptable thoughts
and behaviours.
You . . . on a bad day
(The Nature of Problems and Non-adaptive
Functioning)
• Following the description of the healthy neurotic, an unhealthy neurotic is
unable to function because of inner conflicts between drives or desires and
the dictates of the Superego. The perverse or borderline client was said to
be experiencing an extreme split in his or her character structure, leaving
her or him with multiple ego states, roller-coaster emotions, and stormy
love-hate relationships, all held together by primitive defense mechanisms.
• The psychotic client was said to be disconnected from the socially-agreed
upon shared reality. Specifically, Freud suggested that a key to psychotics’
pathology was their relation to language. They did not use words in the
same way as perverse or neurotic clients.
You . . . on a bad day
(The Nature of Problems and Non-adaptive
Functioning)
• This disconnected language was a key feature of psychotics, and later
psychoanalytic therapists worked with the free association method to adapt
it to work with psychotic clients. Interestingly, Freud did not consider
psychoanalysis to be suited to the treatment of psychosis. It was the work
of his followers that opened psychoanalysis to this possibility.
“So . . . tell me about your mother”
(The Nature of Change or Corrective Action
• To work within the psychoanalytic frame, one must adopt at least one basic
assumption: “What you hear is not what is going on—there is always an
underlying cause to the surface presentation.” Once grounded in this
assumption, the psychodynamic clinician follows a clear set of guidelines for
practice. The basic method of psychoanalysis involves four techniques: free
association, interpretation, evenly suspended attention, and
management of the transference relationship .
