Study Guide to a General Overview of Sigmund Freud

SIGMUND FREUD

INTRODUCTION

In discouraging an attempt to abbreviate and summarize his works, Freud once remarked that he felt such undertakings usually deterred the reader from going to the original sources themselves and, at the same time, such abbreviated summaries deluded him into believing that he had obtained a sufficient grasp of the subject matter. The author trusts that such will not be the case with the present volume. The range, depth, and profundity of Freud’s thought, the incalculable influence his discoveries have had in all areas of human understanding, and the sometimes tortured twistings and turnings, revisions and recantations that his theories underwent over a creative life which spanned almost half a century defy any attempt at a summary description. There is just too much there. Contrary to a popular misconception, Freud was not dogmatic. Many of his most important conclusions were put forth with the greatest tentativeness and, especially in some of his later works, his ideas often suffer from inconclusiveness and are even a little vague. Freud was a complete dualist and his theories sometimes seem to be expressions of his own personal ambivalence; that is, the inability (or refusal) to hold a single exclusive position and deny the truth of its opposite. This fact makes for a rich comprehensiveness but it also substantially contributes to the difficulties the beginner will find in the attempt to say clearly and with authority just what Freud’s ideas were.

Varied and conflicting schools of psychology have grown out of the seeds which Freud so liberally scattered throughout his writings. (A student once observed that a Freudian footnote was often worth more than chapters by other psychologists.) And one of the principal tasks of this brief work will be the attempt to help clarify just what Freudian Psychoanalysis is, and just what it is not. A monumental confusion abounds in the minds of students and professionals alike in attempting to distinguish the principles of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy. These terms are often used with a great deal of imprecision as interchangeable, which they are not! As a brief working definition of Psychoanalysis, the author proposes the following: Psychoanalysis is just what Freud says it is and nothing else. He himself felt bitter about the appropriation of the term made by C. G. Jung and others and argued in the Introductory Lectures and elsewhere that since he had made the fundamental discoveries of this revolutionary science of the mind, he and he alone was entitled to say what doctrines comprised Psychoanalysis. The stupendous discoveries of the unconscious mind, the Oedipus Complex, the nature of dreams, the etiology of the neuroses, infantile sexuality, and the origin and meaning of civilization’s most important institutions, religion, morality, the family, and art, plus the elaboration of a therapeutic technique which could uncover the most hidden recesses of the human psyche and alleviate the suffering of neurotically ill human beings, gave him the legitimate right, Freud argued, to demarcate the boundaries of the science of Psychoanalysis. Any psychology which claimed this august title for itself but at the same time denied the relevance of these discoveries simply was not Psychoanalysis.

His biographer Dr. Ernest Jones has written that Freud’s discoveries must be studied chronologically in collaboration with a step-by-step discussion of the growth and changes in his personality. But for the purposes of this book the author feels that an intense concentration on Freud’s discoveries and the books in which he discussed them is required. Freud identified three of his works as those which he took to be his most significant contribution to human knowledge: The Interpretation of Dreams (Traumdeutung), Totem and Taboo, and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, although there were other works which he personally preferred, the Leonardo da Vinci monograph for example. Dr. Jones added to this list the essay on the unconscious (1915). As a starting point, we shall concentrate on these four works (and their derivatives), the discoveries made in them, and correlate these with Freud’s other major works which are extensions, confirmations, and sometimes rejections of the fundamental discoveries.

However, it must be noted that there exists an important break in the continuity of Freud’s thoughts after 1920 when a novel and overriding discovery led him to posit the existence of what he termed a Death Instinct (Todestrieb). This discovery severely modified and in some ways contradicted his first theory concerning the nature of human instincts. The theory of the Death Instinct remains one of the most obscure and baffling hypotheses ever put forth by the father of Psychoanalysis.

THE THREE CATEGORIES

Our discussion will be divided into three major categories. This is not meant to imply the existence of any definitive lines of demarcation between Freud’s Clinical, Cultural and Metapsychological theories. But his intellectual life did fall into three distinct periods within which his interests and discoveries tended to center on quite different areas of human activity. What we shall call the Clinical Period covers the years from 1895 to 1917 and slightly overlaps the beginnings of Freud’s Cultural Period which extends from 1913 to the end of his life in 1939. The Metapsychological Period comprises the years 1920 - 1939 and is initiated by the highly speculative essay, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. But these distinctions are more a matter of literary convenience than descriptive of radical breaks in the Freudian chain of thought. Freud wrote clinical, cultural, and metapsychological books and papers throughout his life.

CLINICAL

We use the term Clinical to describe all those discoveries Freud made in the actual practice of Psychoanalysis as a branch of medicine. The major works of this period are: The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Studies in Hysteria (1895), and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901). Without question, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (a series of lectures which Freud delivered in the years 1915 - 1917 to the Medical Faculty of the University of Vienna), and the last book he wrote and never completed, An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1939), present the beginning student with the very finest available summary of the principles of Psychoanalysis.

CULTURAL

The Cultural Period in the history of Psychoanalysis begins with the publication of Totem and Taboo in 1913, and signifies the application of Freud’s clinical techniques and discoveries to the problems of civilization. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), and Moses and Monotheism (1939), will also be discussed.

METAPSYCHOLOGICAL

The term Metapsychological will perhaps be unfamiliar to most readers. By his own admission Freud struggled throughout his life with a strong inclination toward philosophical speculation. In the early years of the great clinical discoveries he confessed that he had forcibly mastered this tendency but with the writing of Totem and Taboo, which by its very nature defies any attempt at clinical verification, Freud relented, and permitted himself the luxury of going far beyond the range of empirical evidence. Finally, in the last two decades of his life (1920 - 1939), his distaste for non-scientific speculation vanishes, and we find him grappling with the eternal philosophic problems of life and death, the essence of man, the relationship between freedom and determinism, and what came to be his overriding concern, How did human nature get to be what it is? In his own words, he permitted himself to give free rein to his speculative tendencies. Our inquiry into Freudian Metapsychology will lead us to examine the three major works of this period, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Future of an Illusion, and Civilization and Its Discontents.

We may thus distinguish two broad general tendencies in the development of Psychoanalysis, the practical and the theoretical: Psyschoanalysis as therapy, the attempt to alleviate the suffering of neurotically ill human beings, and Psychoanalysis as theory, i.e., cultural and metapsychological speculation. As time went on, Freud became convinced that his great achievement would finally be recognized not so much for its medical value as a curative agent in the field of mental disease, but rather as a tool of cultural investigation and explanation which would shed light on the hitherto obscure realms of the beginnings of the institutions of human culture.

Freud was convinced that the understanding of so-called abnormal mental activity, neurosis, psychosis, the perversions, as well as the minor errors and accidents which fill our daily lives and the strangely familiar yet till then incomprehensible realm of dreams, would provide a unifying clue to a comprehensive theory and law of mental functioning. This is what Metapsychology attempts, the unification and explanation of all the elements of human psychology, conscious-unconscious, normal-abnormal, individual-social, intellectual-emotional, an ambitious project which Freud felt he had only begun.

PSYCHOANALYSIS: AN INTELLECTUAL REVOLUTION

Freud considered himself one of the discoverers who had wakened the human race from its slumbers, and contributed to the dethroning of man as the central figure in the universe. The first modern thinker in the Western tradition to accomplish this was the Polish mathematician Nicholas Copernicus who initiated the cosmological revolution of the seventeenth century by mathematically establishing (in his De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium [On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres], 1543) the heliocentric theory of the universe, the now thoroughly accepted fact that the earth revolves around the sun and is not the fixed center of a universe singled out by a beneficent Deity for special consideration among all the heavenly bodies. The earth was no longer special. Then, in 1859, Charles Darwin dealt the human ego its second great blow by propounding the Theory of Evolution (no longer considered a theory but rather the foundation of modern biology). In place of the traditional religious contention that man was an act of special creation and different in essence from the lower animals by virtue of his possession of an immortal soul, Darwin amassed a convincing amount of evidence to demonstrate that man is completely a product of natural forces, sharing a much closer kinship to nature’s animals than God’s angels. Man and the primates share a common ancestry and their specific differences can be thoroughly explained by the natural mechanisms of physical evolution.

In several places Freud wrote that he had dealt the final lethal stroke to human ignorance and arrogance by demonstrating that man’s behavior, seemingly guided by conscious motives, seemingly free, and seemingly rational (Greek philosophy had defined man as the rational animal), was on the contrary the product of powerful unconscious, determined, and irrational energies of whose very existence he was unaware, and over which he exercised little or no control. Freud employed the metaphor of an iceberg to describe how human consciousness is grounded in the unconscious (significantly, Freud termed the operation of the unconscious the Primary Process). Only a small portion of an iceberg is visible, the rest is hidden from sight. But it is the invisible portion of the iceberg, by far the greatest portion of it, which determines and directs its movements. So it is with human behavior. By far the greater portion of the human psyche is invisible, i.e., unconscious, and yet it is the unconscious which determines (not just influences but determines) the apparently consciously directed, free rational manifestations of human behavior.

SPECIFICITY OF FREUD’S UNCONSCIOUS

But it was not simply Freud’s assertion that unconscious elements play a much bigger role in human behavior than generally believed that startled and outraged his contemporaries. The nineteenth century in Europe produced a number of philosophies which argued for the pre-eminence of non-rational energies in the human mind. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Von Hartmann and others had structured their philosophies on just such an assertion. It was the Freudian discovery of the specific nature of the Primary Process that once and for all put an end to the illusion of the supremacy of conscious, rational, and especially moral agents motivating and determining human behavior. For the unconscious is the repository of all those impulses, purposes, wishes and drives which civilized man reserves to animal and savage behavior, and from which he invariably excuses himself. Murderous impulses, incestuous wishes, sadism, cannibalism, sexual perversions and boundless egoism dominate the human unconscious, and exercise profound and far-reaching influences on our conscious behavior which seems so far removed from them. Civilized man was discovered to be first and foremost an animal who had never relinquished his primitive sexual and aggressive drives, although he had become a past master at distinguishing them to himself and creating rationalizations to apologize for his most blatant behavioral contradictions of the principles of consciousness, rationality and morality.

SEXUAL DISCOVERIES AND RESPONSES

It was the discovery of the universality of sex and aggression in every manifestation of human behavior that brought down on Freud the condemnation of