Psychoanalysis

Category: Theoretical approaches

Sigmund Freud

Psychoanalysis is the approach in psychology and psychiatry started by Sigmund Freud. Freud laid the foundations for the theory and practice of psychoanalysis in the books Studies on Hysteria (1895) and The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Psychoanalysis, as a method of treating mental illness, involves exploring a patient's unconscious mind through dialogue. In psychoanalysis, patients are encouraged to explore their thoughts, emotions, and experiences in a safe and non-judgmental environment, with the goal of uncovering repressed memories and resolving inner conflicts.

Freud's work in psychoanalysis led him to develop several key concepts, including the unconscious mind, the id, ego, and superego, and the psychosexual stages of development. The human mind consists of three parts: the id, ego, and superego. The id is the most primitive part of the psyche, and it is responsible for our instinctual drives and impulses. The id operates on the pleasure principle, seeking immediate gratification of our desires without considering the consequences. The ego is the rational part of the psyche, and it mediates between the id and the external world. The ego operates on the reality principle, which takes into account the consequences of our actions and tries to find a balance between our desires and the demands of the external world. The superego is the moral component of the psyche, representing society's internalized values and ideals. The superego is responsible for our sense of guilt and shame when we violate societal norms and values.

Freud also believed that the human psyche is divided into three levels of awareness: the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. The conscious level contains thoughts and perceptions that we are currently aware of, while the preconscious level contains thoughts and memories that we can bring to consciousness with effort. The unconscious level contains thoughts and memories that are repressed and hidden from our awareness.

In the book, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1904) Freud widened the concept of sexuality and he now understood it from a much wider and developmental perspective. Sexuality was considered diphasic, development from birth to five is centered around erotogenic zones of the bodily. After that, follows the period of comparative quiescence (latency), and after that second stage of sexual openness starts with puberty.

In the book Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913) Freud explores the myth (that he invented) about the killing and eating of the violent father in the primal horde. Freud starts with Darwin's theory that states that in early primitive human societies, a single alpha male possessed a harem of females, with all other males prohibited to form relations with those females. Freud makes an assumption that in a single event in a distant human past the band of brothers that was expelled from the group by their alpha-male father, returned and kill and eat him. Brothers both feared and respected the father. After the act of murdering and eating the father, the sons are in a state of remorse and guilt, and they give up having sexual relations with the women belonging to the deceased father, and in that way, they create new symbolic order, and that is the order of the law. The respect and remorse that the brothers felt toward their father, to Freud, is the symbolic origin of the Oedipus complex, and totemism. Even more, this hypothetical singular event represents the true origins of human society, and of all religions, as an effect of collective guilt and ambivalence regarding the killing of the father figure (the true original sin).

Other Representatives of Psychoanalysis

The most important other theorists of psychoanalysis are Erik Erikson (phases of psychosocial development), Anna Freud, Carl Jung (who developed his own approach of analytical psychology), Alfred Adler (who developed the approach of individual psychology) , and Karen Horney. The theory of the representatives of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory - Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Walter Benjamin, Leo Löwenthal, Karl Korsch, Friedrich Pollock, Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer - was highly influenced by Freud. One of the most influential scions of psychoanalysis is Jacques Lacan.

Jacques Lacan

French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan sees the unconscious as structured as a language, in Saussure's meaning of language as a system of signs (signifier and signified), whereby Lacan emphasizes speech acts (signifier). Accordingly, the subject is formed through and in language, while the mind represents a connection of associations and substitutions. The subject as a baby accepts the mother's speech signifiers as his own, although they initially act as an Other in relation to him. By acquiring the mother's (Foreign) language, a person is forced to learn to express needs and feelings through language. Lacan draws a parallel between Jakobson's linguistic terms "metaphor" and "metonymy" and Freud's terms "condensation" and "displacement". Even all the types of „Defective“ linguistic communication is significant for Lacan.

In Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, the subject constitutes a trilogy of orders. These orders are: „Real“, „Imaginary“, and „Symbolic“. Imaginary represents the discourse of everyday life, and on this level effects of the unconscious are not acknowledged. In the Imaginary subject mis-recognises the nature of the Symbolic, because the subject sees the Symbolic as transparent and realistic. Imaginary represents the area of „necessary illusions“. The Real, per Lacan, is always „in its place“. The Symbolic represents the substitute for what is absent from the Real.

The „Mirror Stage“ is theoretically very important for Lacan because it represents the emergence, in 6 – 18 months old infants, of the capacity to recognize their own image. This recognition is significant because the infant has to recognize the image as itself, but also as not itself, and only as a reflection. The mirror is a part of the Imaginary.

A child forms his own identity when the father (agent of the father principle) interrupts the mother-child relationship. The mother’s place (feminine) tends to be the Real, the father represents the Symbolic, and the child is Imaginary. That is, the child builds his or her identity by accepting sexual differences. Sexual differentiation starts with the realization that the mother lacks a penis (mark of difference). Lacan names the symbolic meaning of the penis „phallus“. While the penis is real, the phallus becomes a symbolic signifier of what is missing. The Symbolic makes the child confront its vulnerability and mortality, which is symbolically represented by the fear of castration. Through this Symbolic gives the world (society) law and meaning.

Books:

Erik, Erikson. Childhood and Society (1950);

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900);

- The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1904);

- Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905);

- Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913);

- The Unconscious (1915);

- Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1915–17);

- Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921);

- The Ego and the Id (1923);

- Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926);

- Civilization and Its Discontents (1930);