Sigmund Freud

Freud was born to a wool merchant and his second wife, Jakob and Amalie, in Freiberg, Moravia,
in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on May 6, 1856. This town is now known as Příbor and is located
in the Czech Republic. For most of his life, he was raised in Vienna, and he was married there in
1886 to Martha Bernays. They had six children. His daughter, Anna Freud, also became a
distinguished psychoanalyst.
Freud lived his adult life in Vienna until it was occupied by Germany in 1938. Though Jewish,
Freud's fame saved him, for the most part. The Nazi party burned his books throughout Germany,
but they let him leave Austria after briefly confiscating his passport. He and his wife fled to England,
where he died from mouth cancer in September 1939.

Bertha Pappenheim
The case of Anna O (real name Bertha Pappenheim) marked a turning point in the career of the
young Viennese neuropathologist. It even went on to influence the future direction of psychology
as a whole.
Freud's friend, Josef Breuer, a physician and physiologist, had a large impact on the course of
Freud's career. Breuer told his friend about using hypnosis to cure a patient, Bertha Pappenheim
(referred to as Anna O.), of what was then called hysteria. Breuer would hypnotize her, and she
was able to talk about things she could not remember in a conscious state. During discussions
with her, it became apparent that she had developed a fear of drinking when a dog she hated
drank from her glass. Her other symptoms originated when caring for her sick father. Her
symptoms were relieved afterwards. This became known as the "talking cure." She would not
express her anxiety for his illness but did express it later, during psychoanalysis. Freud then
traveled to Paris to study further under Jean-Martin Charcot, a neurologist famous for using
hypnosis to treat hysteria.
Hysteria - an old-fashioned term for a psychological disorder characterized by conversion of
psychological stress into physical symptoms (somatization) or a change in self-awareness (such
as a fugue state or selective amnesia).

Symptoms: nervousness, hallucinations, emotional outbursts and various urges of the sexual
variety.

In Studies in Hysteria (1895) Freud proposed that physical symptoms are often the surface
manifestations of deeply repressed conflicts.

PSYCHOANALYSIS
Sigmund Freud was the founder of psychoanalysis and the psychodynamic approach to
psychology. This school of thought emphasized the influence of the unconscious mind on
behavior. Freud believed that the human mind was composed of three elements: the id, the ego,
and the superego. Freud's theories of psychosexual stages, the unconscious, and dream
symbolism remain a popular topic among both psychologists and lay persons, despite the fact
that his work is sometimes viewed with skepticism by many today.
This is the treatment of mental disorders, emphasizing on the unconscious mental processes. It
is also called "depth psychology." Psychoanalysis helps people understand themselves by
exploring the impulses they often do not recognize because they are hidden in the unconscious.

UNCONSCIOUS MIND
Freud (1900, 1905) developed a topographical model of the mind, whereby he described the
features of the mind’s structure and function. Freud used the analogy of an iceberg to describe
the three levels of the mind.
Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQaqXK7z9LM
https://www.simplypsychology.org/Sigmund-Freud.html
https://www.livescience.com/54723-sigmund-freud-biography.html
On the surface is consciousness, which consists of those thoughts that are the focus of our
attention now, and this is seen as the tip of the iceberg. The preconscious consists of all which
can be retrieved from memory. The third and most significant region is the unconscious. Here
lie the processes that are the real cause of most behavior. Like an iceberg, the most important
part of the mind is the part you cannot see.
The unconscious mind acts as a repository, a ‘cauldron’ of primitive wishes and impulse kept at
bay and mediated by the preconscious area.
For example, Freud (1915) found that some events and desires were often too frightening or
painful for his patients to acknowledge, and believed such information was locked away in the
unconscious mind. This can happen through the process of repression.
Repression is an unconscious defense mechanism employed by the ego to keep disturbing or
threatening thoughts from becoming conscious. Thoughts that are often repressed are those that
would result in feelings of guilt from the superego. Repressed memories may appear through
subconscious means and in altered forms, such as dreams or slips of the tongue ('Freudian slips').

Freudian Slip - an unintentional error regarded as revealing subconscious feelings

Sigmund Freud emphasized the importance of the unconscious mind, and a primary assumption
of Freudian theory is that the unconscious mind governs behavior to a greater degree than people
suspect. Indeed, the goal of psychoanalysis is to make the unconscious conscious.

THE PSYCHE
Freud also developed what he thought of as the three agencies of the human personality, called
the id, ego and superego. The id is the primitive instincts, such as sex and aggression. The ego
is the "self" part of the personality that interacts with the world in which the person lives. The
superego is the part of the personality that is ethical and creates the moral standards for the ego.
Freud assumed the id operated at an unconscious level according to the pleasure principle
(gratification from satisfying basic instincts). The id comprises two kinds of biological instincts (or
drives) which Freud called Eros and Thanatos.
Eros, or life instinct, helps the individual to survive; it directs life-sustaining activities such
as respiration, eating, and sex (Freud, 1925). The energy created by the life instincts is
known as libido.
In contrast, Thanatos or death instinct, is viewed as a set of destructive forces present in
all human beings (Freud, 1920). When this energy is directed outward onto others, it is
expressed as aggression and violence. Freud believed that Eros is stronger than Thanatos,
thus enabling people to survive rather than self-destruct.

Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQaqXK7z9LM
https://www.simplypsychology.org/Sigmund-Freud.html
https://www.livescience.com/54723-sigmund-freud-biography.html
The ego develops from the id during infancy. The ego's goal is to satisfy the demands of the id in
a safe a socially acceptable way. In contrast to the id, the ego follows the reality principle as it
operates in both the conscious and unconscious mind.
The superego develops during early childhood (when the child identifies with the same sex parent)
and is responsible for ensuring moral standards are followed. The superego operates on the
morality principle and motivates us to behave in a socially responsible and acceptable manner.
Freud proposed that we are all driven by the Pleasure Principle which inclines us towards easy
physical and emotional rewards and away from unpleasant things like drudgery and discipline. As
infants we are guided more or less solely according to the pleasure principle, Freud argued. But
it will, if adhered to without constraints, lead us to dangerous reckless things: like never doing any
work, eating too much or, most notoriously, sleeping with members of own family. We need to
adjust to what Freud called:
THE REALITY PRINCIPLE - the ability of the mind to assess the reality of the external world, and
to act upon it accordingly, as opposed to acting on the pleasure principle. Though we all have to
bow to this reality principle, Freud believed that there were better and worse kinds of adaptations.
He called the troublesome ones,
NEUROSES - are the result of faulty negotiations with –or in Freud’s language, repression of–the
pleasure principle.
Neuroses - a relatively mild mental illness that is not caused by organic disease, involving
symptoms of stress (depression, anxiety, obsessive behavior, hypochondria) but not a radical loss
of touch with reality.

Or a disorder involving obsessive thoughts or anxiety.

Freud described a conflict between three parts of our minds: the ID driven by the pleasure
principle, and THE SUPEREGO driven by a desire to follow the rules and do the right thing
according to society, and the EGO which has to somehow accommodate the two. To understand
more about these dynamics, Freud urged us to think back to the origins of our neuroses in
childhood.

DREAM ANALYSIS
In 1900, Freud broke ground in psychology by publishing his book "The Interpretation of Dreams."
In his book, Freud named the mind's energy libido and said that the libido needed to be discharged
to ensure pleasure and prevent pain. If it wasn't released physically, the mind's energy would be
discharged through dreams.
Libido - he energy of the sexual drive as a component of the life instinct.

The book explained Freud's belief that dreams were simply wish fulfillment and that the analysis
of dreams could lead to treatment for neurosis. He concluded that there were two parts to a dream.
The "manifest content" was the obvious sight and sounds in the dream and the "latent content"
was the dream's hidden meaning (i.e., the underlying wish). The manifest content is often based
on the events of the day.
The process whereby the underlying wish is translated into the manifest content is called
dreamwork. The purpose of dreamwork is to transform the forbidden wish into a non-threatening
form, thus reducing anxiety and allowing us to continue sleeping. Dreamwork involves the process
of condensation, displacement, and secondary elaboration.
The process of condensation is the joining of two or more ideas/images into one. For example,
a dream about a man may be a dream about both one's father and one's lover. A dream about a
house might be the condensation of worries about security as well as worries about one's
appearance to the rest of the world.

Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQaqXK7z9LM
https://www.simplypsychology.org/Sigmund-Freud.html
https://www.livescience.com/54723-sigmund-freud-biography.html
Displacement takes place when we transform the person or object we are really concerned about
to someone else. For example, one of Freud’s patients was extremely resentful of his sister-in-
law and used to refer to her as a dog, dreamed of strangling a small white dog.
Freud interpreted this as representing his wish to kill his sister-in-law. If the patient would have
really dreamed of killing his sister-in-law, he would have felt guilty. The unconscious mind
transformed her into a dog to protect him.
Secondary elaboration occurs when the unconscious mind strings together wish-fulfilling
images in a logical order of events, further obscuring the latent content. According to Freud, this
is why the manifest content of dreams can be in the form of believable events.
In Freud’s later work on dreams, he explored the possibility of universal symbols in dreams. Some
of these were sexual in nature, including poles, guns, and swords representing the penis and
horse riding and dancing representing sexual intercourse.
However, Freud was cautious about symbols and stated that general symbols are more personal
rather than universal. A person cannot interpret what the manifest content of a dream symbolized
without knowing about the person’s circumstances.

NOTES
DEFENSE MECHANISMS
Defense mechanisms are psychological strategies that are unconsciously used to protect a
person from anxiety arising from unacceptable thoughts or feelings.
We use defense mechanisms to protect ourselves from feelings of anxiety or guilt, which arise
because we feel threatened, or because our id or superego becomes too demanding.
Defense mechanisms operate at an unconscious level and help ward off unpleasant feelings (i.e.,
anxiety) or make good things feel better for the individual.

Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQaqXK7z9LM
https://www.simplypsychology.org/Sigmund-Freud.html
https://www.livescience.com/54723-sigmund-freud-biography.html