Development Of Freud's Radical Views example essay topic

Ida Levy PSYC 106-07 April 6, 2001 "A" Paper- Critical Thinking and Analysis Sigmund Freud: A Psychological Genius? On May 6, 1856, Sigmund Freud, physician, neurologist and psychologist, was born in what is now known as the Czech Republic (Sigmund 1). As many Jewish families at that time, the Freud were forced to move to Leipzig because of the anti-Semitic prosecution (1). Resettling once again in Vienna, Sigmund Freud attended Vienna University and remained in Vienna until the last year of his life (1). In 1938 the Nazis annexed Austria, and Freud, who was Jewish, escaped for England, where he died less than a year later (2). Much of what Freud has taught the psychological world has helped with the treatment of patients.

Freud found that patients would open up to him more if they were in a comfortable position (on a couch) and so was developed the generalization of psychiatrists and comfortable couches (A 1). When the patient was at ease, they were encouraged to speak their mind (1). Speaking of the first thoughts that entered their heads became known as "free association" (1). With this newfound freedom that the patient felt, suppressed memories and traumatic experiences were remembered (1). Usually, these disturbing and upsetting incidents were the root of their suffering (1). Many believe Freud to be the father of modern psychiatry and psychology.

The development of Freud's radical views can be due to his desire to solve the problems that were plaguing contemporary scientists of the late 1800's (1). Sigmund Freud showed signs of independence and brilliance well before entering the University of Vienna. He had loved reading to the point of running himself into debt at various bookstores. The scope of Freud's interests, and of his professional training, was very broad- he always considered himself first and foremost a scientist, attempting to extend the compass of human knowledge. He enrolled at the medical school at the University of Vienna in 1873. He concentrated initially on biology, doing research in physiology for six years.

After medical school, Freud began a private practice, specializing in nervous disorders (Sigmund 1). He was soon faced with patients whose disorders made no neurological sense. For example, a patient might have lost feeling in his foot with no evidence to any sensory nerve damage. Freud wondered if the problem could be psychological rather than physiological. Dr. Freud evolved- as he treated patients, he analyzed himself. He recorded his assessment and expounded his theories in 24 volumes published between 1888 and 1939.

Although his first book, The Interpretation of Dreams, sold only 600 copies in its first eight years of publication, his ideas gradually began to attract faithful followers and students along with a great number of critics. While exploring the possible psychological roots of nervous disorders, Freud spent nineteen weeks in Paris, studying with Jean Charcot, a French neurologist from whom he learned hypnosis (Sigmund 1). On return to Vienna, Freud began to hypnotize patients and encouraging them while under hypnosis to speak openly about themselves and the onset of their symptoms. Often the patients responded freely, and upon reviewing their past, became quite upset and agitated.

By this process, some saw their symptoms lessened or banished entirely. It was in this way that Freud discovered what he termed the "unconscious" (A 1). Piecing together his patients' accounts of their lives, he decided that the loss of feeling in one's hand might be caused by the fear of touching one's genitals; blindness or deafness might be caused by the fear of hearing or seeing something that might arouse grief or distress. Over time, Freud saw hundreds of patients.

He soon recognized that hypnosis was not as helpful as he had first hoped (A 1). He thus pioneered a new technique termed "free association". Patients were told to relax and say whatever came to mind, no matter how mortifying or irrelevant. Freud believed that free association produced a chain of thought that was linked to the unconscious, and often painful, memories of childhood.

Freud called this process "psychoanalysis". Freud often compared the mind to an iceberg- most of it was hidden from view. The awareness is the part of the iceberg that is above the surface. Below the surface is a much larger unconscious region that contains feelings, wishes and memories of which persons are largely unaware.

Some thoughts are stored temporarily in a preconscious area, from where they can be retrieved at will. However, Freud was more interested in the mass of thought and feeling that are repressed- forcibly blocked from conscious thought because it would be too painful to acknowledge. Freud believed that these repressed materials unconsciously exert a powerful influence on behavior and choices. Freud believed that dreams and slips of tongue and pen were windows to his patient's unconscious (A 1). Intrusive thoughts or seemingly trivial errors while reading, writing and speaking suggested to Freud that what is said and done reflects the working of the unconscious.

For Freud, nothing was accidental. Freud believed that human personality, strivings, and beliefs arise from a conflict between the pleasure-seeking impulses and the social restraints against their expression. This conflict between expression and repression, in ways that bring the achievement of satisfaction without punishment or guilt, drives the development of personality. Freud divided the elements of that conflict into three interacting systems: the id, ego and superego. The id is a reservoir of unconscious energy that continually strives to satisfy basic drives to survive. The id operates on the pleasure principle- if unconstrained it seeks instantaneous gratification.

As a child learns to cope with the real world, his ego develops. The ego operates on the reality principle, which seeks to alter the id's impulses in realistic ways- to accomplish pleasure in practical ways, avoiding pain in the process. The ego contains partly conscious thoughts, judgments, and memories. It is the personality executive. The ego arbitrates between impulsive demands of the id, the restraining demands of the superego and the real-life demands of the external world. Around age four or fice, a child's ego recognizes the demands of the newly emerging superego.

The superego is the voice of conscience that forces the ego to consider not only the real but also the ideal. Its focus is on how one should behave. The superego develops as the child internalizes the morals and values of parents and culture, thereby providing both a sense of right, wrong and a set of ideals. Because the superego's demands often oppose the id's, the ego struggles to reconcile the two (Nairne 474-475). Analysis of his patients' histories convinced Freud that personality forms during a person's first few years. He concluded that children pass through a series of "psychosexual stages" during which the id's pleasure-seeking energies focus on certain sensitive areas of the body.

During the oral stage, usually the first year, an infant's sensual pleasure focuses on sucking, biting, and chewing. During the anal stage, the second year, bowel and bladder retention and elimination become a source of gratification. During the phallic stage, from roughly ages three to five years, the pleasure zones shift to the genitals. Freud believed that during this stage boys seek genital stimulation and develop unconscious sexual desires for their mothers along with jealousy and hatred for their father, whom they consider a rival.

Boys feel unrecognized guilt for their rivalry and a fear that their father will punish them, such as by castration. This collection of feelings he named the "Oedipus Complex" after the Greek legend of Oedipus, who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. Freud hypothesized that females experienced a parallel "Electra Complex", but soon changed his mind. With their sexual feelings repressed and redirected, children enter a latency stage. Freud maintained that during this latency period, extending from around age five or six to puberty, sexuality is dormant and children play mostly with peers of the same sex. At puberty, latency gives way to the final stage, the genital stage.

Youths begin to experience sexual feelings towards others (Nairne 476-478). At any point in the oral, anal, or phallic stages, strong conflict can lock, or fixate, the person's pleasure-seeking energies in that stage. Thus people, who were either orally overindulged or deprived, perhaps by abrupt, early weaning, might fixate at the oral stage. Orally fixated adults might continue to smoke or eat excessively to satisfy their needs for oral gratification. Those who never quite resolve their anal conflict, a desire to eliminate at will that combats the demands of toilet training, may be both messy and disorganized or highly controlled and compulsively neat. To live in social groups, impulses cannot be freely acted on; they must be controlled in socially acceptable ways.

The result here is anxiety. Freud proposed that the ego protects itself against anxiety with "defense mechanisms". Defense mechanisms reduce or redirect anxiety in various ways, but always by distorting reality. One defense mechanism is repression. Repression banishes anxiety arousing thoughts and feelings from consciousness. Freud believed that repression explains why lust a parent is not remembered from childhood.

However, he also believed that repression is often incomplete, with the repressed urges seeping out in dream symbols and slips of the tongue. A second mechanism, regression, entails retreating to an earlier, more infantile stage of development. Thus, when facing the anxious first days of school, a child may regress to the oral comfort of thumb sucking. Projection disguises threatening impulses by attributing them to others.

According to Freudian theory, racial prejudice may be the result of projecting one's own unacceptable impulses or characteristics onto members of another group. A final defense mechanism, sublimation, is the transformation of unacceptable impulses into socially valued motivations. Sublimation is therefore socially adaptive and may even be a wellspring for great cultural achievements (Nairne 475-476). Freud has been largely criticized since the day he published his first book. Some say he is biased against women and others say attributes too much to sexual desires in children.

Although Freudian ideas still are not totally accepted, the development of the International Psychoanalytic Association aided this recognition. Freud created an original method to understanding the growth of human personality. Moreover, he developed a totally different way to cure patients, through speaking and being spoken to. Even though he was never given the accreditation that he deserved during his life, Freud is generally regarded as one of the most distinguished and ingenious minds of modern times.