This essay summarizes the major concepts of psychoanalysis, a revolutionary theoretical framework that psychologist Sigmund Freud developed to map the human mind, and clears some general misconceptions surrounding his ideas.
Misconceptions about Psychoanalysis
Most of the misconceptions surrounding Freudian psychoanalysis arise from one wrong assumption: that Freud is some kind of a biopsycho-essentialist and that the unconscious drives he talks about are inherent desires that humans are born with. However, it is clear from the inspiration he takes from historicists like Marx and Nietzsche that Freud is very much taking a socio-historical approach to these unconscious psychological drives rather than a bio-essentialist one.
Let’s start with the example of his concept of "Penis Envy", his proposition that young girls, unconsciously, feel a sense of inferiority and anxiety about not possessing a phallus. Most mainstream psychologists, who are themselves essentialists and insensibly ignore the relationship between society and an individual’s psyche, would misinterpret this as a patriarchal concept. However, what Freud is doing is exactly the opposite—he is pointing out that because we live in a (cishetero-normative) patriarchal society where the male category is seen as superior, the female subject develops, rather than being born with, an unconscious inferiority about not having a male genital that causes anxiety.
One can apply the same logic to perhaps Freud’s most controversial concept, “The Oedipus Complex,” the desire of young boys towards their mother and seeing themselves in competition with their father. This is not to be interpreted as an inherent desire that they are born with, but one that they develop with time as they are raised in a cisheteronormative society where males are seen as competing for females. The Oedipus Complex, therefore, is a symptom of a patriarchal society rather than something that a person is born with.
Another wrong belief that is presumed by many while analyzing Freud’s theories is the concept of sexuality—for Freud, sexuality is something much more than what we generally conceive it as. Freud gave the concept of "enlarged sexuality": anything that is erotic (derived from eros, the Greek god of love) and from which someone derives (erotic) pleasure is sexual; a baby sucking on their thumb is something sexual for Freud, for instance; it is not just the stimulating effect of nicotine that gives a smoker pleasure, but the very act of sucking on a cigarette, cigar, or pipe is pleasure-deriving and sexual.
The argument that Freud’s theories are not scientific because they do not follow the rigorous scientific method is often made against psychoanalysis. But this ignores the fact that psychology, a social science, and the natural sciences differ in their subjects of study, so their methods must also differ. Most of the other social sciences, like sociology, base their methodology in philosophy and history rather than following the method of hard natural sciences (physics, chemistry, and astronomy). One’s psyche is influenced by the social, economic, cultural, and historical factors surrounding it, so psychology’s method should also find its roots in philosophy and history (which is exactly what psychoanalysis seeks to do) rather than something like physics or chemistry.
The Ego, Id and Superego
Freud classifies the mind in two different ways: the first classification is simply the conscious and unconscious mind—it is not only the conscious mind but the unconscious too that affects our behavior. Freud suggests that most of our desires are actually unconscious. In fact, if psychoanalysis were to be summarized in a single statement, it would be exactly this—we don’t exactly want what we (consciously) think we want.
The second classification is based on how these two parts of the mind develop with time as an individual goes through the process of socialization: the ego, id, and superego.
It is important to get a rough understanding of what the mind actually is before diving into further discussion about the psychodynamics of these three agents in the psychic apparatus. Although it is the brain that gives rise to the mind, these two are not the same. The brain refers to something more physical that we can touch, whereas the mind is a collection of feelings, thoughts, emotions, drives, etc. that can’t be physically touched. When one talks about the parts of a brain, one can physically locate the different parts, which is not the case with the parts of the mind. The parts of the mind refer to the classification of the thoughts and emotions that the mind contains into different groups.
The Id is the collection of all those visceral, instinctual, and primitive human drives and feelings, often sexual in nature, that become repressed into the unconscious mind with time as most of these drives are socially unacceptable.
The Superego is that part of the brain that contains the conscience and moral and ethical laws, specifically, socially acquired control mechanisms that have been internalized and are typically first passed down by the social institution of family.
The Ego is the conscious self that is produced by the dynamic tensions and interactions between the id and the superego and has the responsibility of resolving the conflicting demands of the id and the superego with the requirements of external social reality.
Therefore, according to Freud, the mind should be viewed as a dynamic energy system. All objects of consciousness exist in the ego, and the contents of the id permanently belong to the unconscious mind. The superego is an unconscious screening mechanism that aims to regulate the id's pleasure-seeking desires by imposing restrictive constraints.
It is worth pointing out again that these three parts of the mind develop with time as an individual is socialized in a certain kind of society during a certain historical epoch and are not static agents. In primitive hunter-gatherer societies, for example, only what Freud refers to as the id would have existed, and there would be nothing like the superego because of the absence of a social morality.
A mentally and socially healthy individual would have a harmonious relationship between these three elements of the psyche. An internal conflict arises in the mind between its component parts or elements if the outside environment does not allow for the satisfaction of the id's pleasure drives, that is, if the satisfaction of some or all of the id’s drives would violate the moral standards established by the superego. Neurosis (Freud’s term for any kind of general mental disorder, as opposed to his concept of Psychosis, a collective term for terminal mental illnesses, often involving a loss of touch with reality) may result if the ego fails to resolve these conflicts. Freud's central idea is that the mind has a variety of defense mechanisms to try to keep conflicts from getting out of hand, the most common of which include:
Sublimation, the manifestation of socially unacceptable drives into socially acceptable forms; a person who constantly deals with violent drives of the id might sublimate them through a sport that involves physical violence, like wrestling or a martial art.
Repression, the pushing back of these conflicts into the unconscious mind; although repression might initially be effective at calming difficult impulses and emotions, it can lead to greater neurosis and anxiety down the road.
Regression, resorting to a past, childhood behavioral characteristic to cope instead of dealing with unacceptable impulses in a more adult way.
Trauma Theory and Importance of the Past
Freud was one of the first thinkers to talk about traumas and how our childhood experiences play a big role in our adult behavior, shaping our sense of the self. Childhood trauma, if not processed and resolved, leads to various neurotic and psychotic conditions as an individual grows up. Not just childhood, but if a person is unable to healthily move on from their past or process traumatic events (that might not have taken place in their childhood), it would result in a barrier to their psychological well-being and personal growth.
His first work discussing this phenomenon, which was also his first important work in psychology, was Studies on Hysteria (1895). Before Freud and Josef Breuer (co-author of Studies on Hysteria), hysteria in women and other mental illnesses in general were considered to be caused by a worsening physical state of the brain and that mental illnesses were nothing but physical diseases of the brain. Freud and Breuer found, through a number of Breuer’s hysteric patients, mainly Bertha Pappenheim, that hysteria was a result of trauma faced by the patient in their childhood, with Freud emphasizing the sexual nature of trauma.
They were the first to find a new kind of cure for mental conditions, the “talking cure” (talk therapy). Breuer found that Pappenheim's hysteric symptoms—which included headaches, excitement, vision disturbances, partial paralysis, and loss of sensation and had no physical origins—improved once she expressed (talked out) her repressed trauma and emotions. This phenomenon of relief from strongly repressed emotions is called “catharsis”. The talking cure lies at the heart of psychoanalytic therapy.
Through his concept of "war neurosis," Freud would foreshadow the modern concept of "post-traumatic stress disorder" (PTSD), the symptoms of which include flashbacks, nightmares, severe anxiety, as well as uncontrollable thoughts about traumatic events. During the first world war, soldiers were suffering from unexplainable breakdowns; their symptoms such as, disconnected speech and nightmares, were diagnosed as symptoms of physical shocks to the brain. But, it quickly became apparent that soldiers who weren't operating on the front line, not being exposed to exploding shells were also suffering, so the physiological explanations didn't stand up. Often written off as cowardly or weak, many of these soldiers were simply forced back into action within a few days. But Freud believed that this war neurosis was a psychological rather than a physical problem; he thought that there must be emotional trauma triggered by the horrors experienced by the soldiers during the war that caused them anxiety. By the end of the war, Freud’s theories had gained more popularity, and thus, World War I acted as a breakthrough moment for the psychoanalytic movement.
Accessing the Unconscious: Dream Interpretation and the Freudian Slip
According to Freud, the unconscious mind plays a great role in shaping our behavior. A common argument made against this is that the unconscious can’t be observed, so it is meaningless to talk about it. However, Freud also described two major ways in which the content of the unconscious manifests itself into observable categories: dreams and the famous “Freudian slip”.
When an individual is in a state of sleep, their conscious mind takes a passive role and the unconscious dominates. Hence Freud argued that dreams must be the reflections of the unconscious content of the mind, referring to them as “the royal road to the unconscious”. Certain memories repressed in the unconscious would resurface in dreams; however, dreams are not transparent reflections of the unconscious content, but present these repressed thoughts in a distorted form.
In his work The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Freud lays out his method of “dream interpretation” to uncover actual elements of the unconscious so that the patient can know more about themself and get therapeutic relief. He argued that a dream consists of two types of content: the “latent content” and the “manifest content”. Latent content is the actual unconscious content that underlies a dream, whereas manifest content is the distorted version of the latent content that we remember as a dream. There are two ways our mind transforms latent content into manifest content:
Condensation, the grouping together of various people, objects, places, etc. into a single dream-image, so the things we remember happening in a dream often work as symbols for various categories grouped together.
Displacement is the replacement of a thing in the latent content with a different, often unrelated, object. Freud uses the case of a female patient who dreamed of strangling a white puppy to illustrate this displacement. When it was ultimately connected to the latent content, it was discovered that the white dog symbolized the patient's sister-in-law. The patient had a strong hatred for this woman; she was overly pale-skinned and had been called a "dog who bites" by the patient during one of their arguments. As a result, the rage that the patient felt towards the sister-in-law got displaced in the manifest content of the dream by an image of the patient strangling a white dog, the dog acting as a symbol for the patient’s sister-in-law.
The task of dream interpretation is to precisely identify what the symbols in a remembered dream (manifest content) represent in relation to the actual content of the repressed unconscious (latent content).
In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Freud argued that not only in dreams, but many of our unconscious thoughts resurface in everyday life as what would seem like minor errors in speech. In our day-to-day conversations, we often forget names or words that are otherwise very commonly known, make errors in pronunciation, or substitute a wrong word for a right one. Freud names these slips or errors as “parapraxes” (now popularly known as “Freudian slips”) and argues that these errors are manifestations of the repressed emotions and memories that are shunted out from the conscious mind and repressed back to the unconscious. So just like dreams are distorted manifestations of unconscious content of the mind, the everyday parapraxes or Freudians slips too are distorted manifestations of hidden unconscious content.
Society as Repression and Freudo-Marxism
In perhaps the most important work of his later life, Civilization and Its Discontent (1930), Freud sets forth his idea of the conflict between the demands of civilization or society as a whole and the individual’s instinctual desires for pleasure. Freud suggests that there are some basic, primitive human instincts, like the desire for violence and killing, and voracious craving for sexual pleasure. These types of drives are clearly harmful for civilization, so society, through various mechanisms, mainly the law and socialization, prohibits the fulfillment of these desires. As a result, the civilized human feels a kind of dissatisfaction with their life.
While Freud’s account of this conflict would seem pessimistic as he considers it an inherent characteristic of civilization to suppress instinctual desires, the Freudo-Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, in his work Eros and Civilization (1955), outlines a more optimistic interpretation of this conflict by integrating Freud’s theory of civilization and Karl Marx’s theory of class struggle. Marx proposed that history is driven by the conflict between different socio-economic classes and that the resolution of these conflicts brings a new epoch in history; the final stage of society where all class conflicts are resolved would be a society with no socio-economic classes, a communist society. Marcuse suggests that although the idea of class conflict driving the history of society is true, this conflict is nothing but a manifested version of a deeper psychological conflict that Freud talks about: the conflict between an individual’s desire to liberate itself from repressed drives and society’s demands to constantly restrict them. For Marcuse, then, historical progress is an attempt by human beings to completely liberate their minds, and a communist society would be one without any form of psychological restrictions. His main argument is that it is not an inherent characteristic of society to repress an individual’s drives, but it is societies that are divided into different socio-economic classes that require different forms of psychological restrictions in order to maintain the status quo.
The Death Drive
In his essay, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud introduces a new type of drive that shapes human behavior, the “death drive”—a drive towards death and destruction as opposed to the “pleasure principle” (the drive towards seeking instant psychological pleasure).
Death drives are destructive; their goal is not pleasure or survival but lashing out. By the progress of civilization, law, and order, these destructive drives are repressed, but they don't disappear—they are only pushed back into the unconscious, only to re-emerge in global or local outbursts such as war or conflict for its own sake.
These are examples of when death drives are directed outwards, but the original form of the death instinct is directed inwards. Death drive might sound like something like suicide, but it isn't. Death drive is a symptom of the unconscious, whereas suicide is a conscious decision made to avoid pain, which means that suicide still falls in line with the pleasure principle. On the other hand, the death drive is the unconscious desire to not be. Freud speculates that it is the drive that desires the end of all drives: we arose from inorganic matter and will return to it. This drive, then, is the symptom of life to return to its original state, to disorganize back into non-life. The death drive is satisfied by the destruction of the regular order. The drive itself is not just to exist anymore, but to watch other things stop existing, to watch yourself and the world burn, to not get what gives you pleasure. You might experience the death drive in the rush of taking an unsafe or unnecessary risk or making a bad bet that you make anyway. It's beyond the pleasure principle because you don't get anything from it. The death drive does not seek to win; it seeks to make everyone else lose, even if that means losing yourself in the process.
Conclusion
It would not be an exaggeration to claim that Freud's life and works have been revolutionary for the field of psychology, with his discovery of the unconscious mind and the talking cure. Before Freud, mental illnesses were considered to be caused by a worsening physical state of the brain, and the mentally ill were mostly thrown in an asylum. Freud was the first doctor to offer the patient a chance to talk. The freedom we take for granted today to talk about our deepest feelings, from sexual difference to our innermost fears, emerges, at least in part, from Freud's methods and ideas.
His innovative ways of mapping the human mind challenged taboos and conventions in ways that radically changed our conceptions of the self. Freud's ideas contributed largely to allowing people to be different from others and accept "abnormality" because the abnormal is, according to Freud, very normal.
Although most of Freud's theories have been wrongly discarded from mainstream psychology, his ideas continue to dominate various fields of the humanities and social sciences, including, but not limited to, continental philosophy, critical theory, literary and film studies, and art criticism.
References
Chattapadhay, Sayan. Introduction to Literary Theory. IIT Kanpur, 2018.
Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 1920.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. 1929.
“Freud, Sigmund.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy | An Encyclopedia of Philosophy Articles Written by Professional Philosophers., https://iep.utm.edu/freud/. Accessed 20 Mar. 2023.
Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. 1923.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. 1899.
Freud, Sigmund. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. 1901.
Freud, Sigmund. “Why War? A Letter from Freud to Einstein.” UNESCO, 2019, https://en.unesco.org/courier/marzo-1993/why-war-letter-freud-einstein.
Freud, Sigmund, and Josef Breuer. Studies on Hysteria. 1895.
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. 1955.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. 1848.
“What Is Psychoanalysis? - Sexuality.” Freud.Org.Uk, Freud Museum London, https://www.freud.org.uk/education/resources/psychoanalysis-part-2-sexuality/. Accessed 20 Mar. 2023.
Davies, Bryony. “Freud and His Cigars.” Freud.Org.Uk, Freud Museum London, 22 Apr. 2020, https://www.freud.org.uk/2020/04/22/freud-and-his-cigars/.
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