Behavior therapy/models human Behavior

SAGE Books

Psychology: Six Perspectives

Psychoanalysis

By: Dodge Fernald

Book Title: Psychology: Six Perspectives

Chapter Title: "Psychoanalysis"

Pub. Date: 2008

Access Date: November 3, 2022

Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.

City: Thousand Oaks

Print ISBN: 9781412938679

Online ISBN: 9781452224862

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452224862.n4

Print pages: 89-129

© 2008 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online

version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis

• Background of Psychoanalysis ◦ The Freudian Setting ◦ Concept of the Unconscious

• Structure of Personality • Development of Personality

◦ The Psychosexual Stages ◦ Fixations in Everyday Living ◦ Crises Through the Life Cycle

• Expressions of the Unconscious ◦ Symbolism in Behavior ◦ Dreams and Mistakes ◦ Defense Mechanisms ◦ Adjustments and Lifestyles

• Psychoanalysis as a Therapy ◦ Use of Free Association ◦ Resistance and Transference

• Commentary and Critique

Psychoanalysis stresses unconscious mental life. Memories, dreams, and other long-forgotten remnants of earlier conflicts and frustrations presumably lie in this realm of the mind. Outside normal awareness, but not entirely out of one's life, these latent conflicts do not disappear. The anxiety they arouse can reappear in daily life in subtle, disguised ways known as unconscious motivation, the core concept in psychoanalysis and the focus of psychoanalytic therapy.

When Breuer discontinued Bertha's therapy, which was not psychoanalytic, he left suddenly, without warning—today a serious breach of therapeutic ethics. After so many intensive sessions together, a contemporary psychotherapist would give notice several months before departure, enabling the patient to prepare for this important event and assisting the patient in gaining contact with another therapist, if that seemed appropriate. Instead, when Breuer left the case, he left Bertha facing still another crisis: how to cope with his abrupt, inexplicable departure.

Much in the fashion of a discarded lover, Bertha had been jilted. According to legend, she responded with an imagined pregnancy and other unconfirmed reactions to their final separation (Jones, 1953). This story, steeped in romance, illustrates unconscious motivation in principle, probably not in fact. The fantasy pregnancy appears fictional—but not the painful parting (Ellenberger, 1970; Hirschmüller, 1989).

The disruption in that parting would not surprise anyone knowledgeable about intensive psychotherapy today. If the therapeutic process goes well, a bond develops, and its unplanned cessation can become traumatic, especially for the patient. Bertha was troubled by her father's death, hostility toward her mother, resentment of her brother, and lack of any close relationship with any other family member or friend, and her contact with Breuer had become the one reliable, supportive human relationship in her life. A strong emotional reaction to this sudden break in intensive therapy would not be surprising at all. In fact, it would be expected—as would various efforts, conscious and unconscious, to ensure its continuation.

The case of Anna O., terminated so abruptly, stands at the beginning of the real-life story of Bertha Pappenheim. And Bertha's fate proved worse than Breuer expected. Their extraordinary therapy seemed to work for a while after each session. But it brought no lasting improvement.

Beginning with the background of psychoanalysis, this chapter then focuses on the structure and development of personality. Afterward, it considers the sequence of events creating unconscious motivation and, later, the way unconscious motivation is approached in psychoanalytic therapy. Finally, it concludes with

SAGE © 2008 by Sage Publications, Inc.

SAGE Books

Page 2 of 28 SAGE Books - Psychology: Six Perspectives

a commentary and critique of the psychoanalytic perspective.

Background of Psychoanalysis

The fanciful pregnancy tale dramatizes the patient-therapist relationship, especially as it develops in the system of psychology called psychoanalysis. The term psychoanalysis has two meanings, one referring to a theory of personality, the other to a method of therapy, both emphasizing unconscious conflicts in mental life that are typically shaped by childhood experiences (Freud, 1925b).

Psychoanalysis developed during Bertha's most turbulent years, the last decades of the 19th century, in the Viennese flat of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Specifically, it emerged from two places in that apartment at 19 Berggasse: the couch on which his patients reclined in his consulting room and the desk where he wrote in longhand in his study.

The couch stood against the wall in that elaborately decorated room. A pillow lay at its head, some folded blankets at its foot. Using the pillow, a patient could assume almost a sitting position; the blankets offered protection against chilly temperatures. Each patient was instructed to relax and say whatever came to mind, no matter how foolish or embarrassing it might seem.

Sitting most of the day in a green stuffed chair at the head of that couch, out of the patient's line of sight, Freud listened to disturbed people describing their lives. That process was psychoanalysis as a therapy.

Later in the evening, usually after nine o'clock, he retreated to his study at the back of his flat and tried to make sense out of these jumbled monologues. There he sat, in seclusion, for three or four hours. Smoking cigars at the rate of 20 per day, scratching out his manuscripts with pen and ink, he brought forth the ideas for his theory of personality, also called psychoanalysis.

The Freudian Setting

In a sense, psychoanalysis arose as Freud's lofty intellectual protest against his culture and times. The celebrated Viennese society of his day had a dark side. The long reign of Emperor Franz Josef had yielded to favoritism and corruption in city politics, and multiculturalism, responsible for Vienna's cosmopolitan character, had generated political unrest. In fact, cafe society owed some of its popularity to shortages of housing and fuel, which forced people out of their cold, crowded homes and into public places. The city's renowned culture makers—Mahler in music, Kraus in letters, Klimt in painting, and, eventually, Freud in psychoanalysis—were vilified or suppressed. Turn-of-the-century Vienna hardly merited its long reputation as the City of Dreams.

Freud also resisted Viennese culture on more personal grounds. Anti-Semitism ran rampant in the Vienna of his day. He did not practice any religion, but as a Jew he became acutely aware of the indignities suffered by his father. In one instance, unforgettable for little Sigmund, a stranger intentionally knocked his father's new hat into a mud puddle, declaring that people of Freud's ethnic background deserved such treatment.

Graduating from medical school with high promise, Freud had no interest in the practice of medicine. He sought instead a career in laboratory research, which was initially delayed by youthful misadventures. While serving in the military, authorities arrested him for being absent without leave. Absent again later, this time from his laboratory, he lost credit for successful research he had conducted in neurology. Still later he became implicated in a difficult matter involving cocaine and a friend's untimely demise.

But the major deterrent to his research career occurred because Freud, a minority person, experienced discrimination not only in his social life but also in his professional aspirations. Successful in school, Freud nevertheless found himself and other Jews excluded from opportunities at the university. With this barrier, his lack of funds, and a growing interest in marriage, he turned to clinical work to earn a living, though he professed no desire for “playing the doctor game” (1926). Finally, years later, he gained an academic affiliation, working twice the usual period before receiving that recognition.

SAGE © 2008 by Sage Publications, Inc.

SAGE Books

Page 3 of 28 SAGE Books - Psychology: Six Perspectives

In the meantime, without access to academic circles, he encountered a research opportunity within his practice as a physician. In this private setting, consulting with people about their personal problems, he developed all sorts of ideas about human behavior. He found himself free to engage in unrestrained flights of speculation on the human condition, calling this decade of the 1890s his years of “Splendid Isolation,” for he worked essentially without colleagues. In short, Freud's early poverty, ethnic background, and career frustrations prompted in him an ever-growing resentment against his city and culture. As a result, he completely avoided the political arena. The only favorable characteristic of the Viennese government, he once wryly remarked, was the inefficiency with which it operated. Instead, late at night, in the quiet of his study, he devoted himself to making “explosives”—broadsides directed at the whole way of life he experienced. Slowly, he alone developed psychoanalysis, which can be considered a grand intellectual protest against his time.

Psychoanalysis came not from laboratory studies or other traditional research but instead from a clinical practice, notably case studies. And far more than any other perspective in the 20th century, psychoanalysis arose through the work of one person—“The Professor,” as colleagues called him.

As an astute observer of the human condition, Freud's ideas eventually permeated much of the 20th-century outlook on human behavior in Western society, especially with regard to unconscious mental processes and the importance of childhood for the development of adult personality. His work initiated voluminous research in both these areas, which is still vigorously pursued today.

Before Freud, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer ruminated on unconscious mental life. He described human beings as perpetrators and victims of forces they do not comprehend, seeking goals they do not fully understand. But Freud declared that he developed his idea of the unconscious prior to discovering Schopenhauer's work. Yet it is clear that Darwin's work on evolution stimulated Freud's thinking about early experiences and the adult personality. If prehistoric environments influenced current behavior in the manner suggested by natural selection, earlier events in an individual's lifetime also might become powerful influences in one's adult behavior.

Freud's wide-ranging thought created resistance even within his limited circle of early supporters. Later followers were often still more rebellious. Loosely called neo-Freudians, they individually reformulated selective aspects of psychoanalysis, generally developing a less biological, more social orientation.

Through the reports of his patients and his own reflections, Freud had decided that even the mind of a child contains hidden sexual and aggressive impulses. This startling announcement in Victorian society brought forth criticism and condemnation in both scientific and public circles. His thinking continues to be controversial, and even his character has been doubted. But prolonged debate arises only over the life and work of people of note (Gleaves & Hernandez, 1999).

Freud's dramatic case studies earned him the Goethe Prize for excellence in literature, the only international award he received in his lifetime. In fact, many observers today view his system of thought as belonging more to literature than to science. As a storyteller, he showed this inclination even in the pseudonyms he chose for his male patients, reflecting their symptoms: Wolf Man, Gingerbread Boy, Rat Man, and so forth. His more restrained pseudonyms for women reflected the gentler social roles assigned to them in Austria and elsewhere at that time: Emmy, Dora, Elizabeth von R., and others.

Practicing psychoanalysts today collect their data in much the same way as Freud did, through case studies, but often without the couch. The analyst listens and observes, gathering information about the patient. But psychoanalytic scientists today also collect data in formal laboratory experiments, studying groups of people in more restricted, controlled ways (Cramer, 2000; Westen, 1998). In both research methods, the exploration of unconscious mental processes becomes a central goal.

Concept of the Unconscious

The concept of the unconscious is the core of psychoanalysis. A generic term, the unconscious, or unconscious mental processes, refers to the thoughts and feelings of an individual not open to examination by that person. In fact, Freud described two categories of unconscious processes. In one, unconscious cognition,

SAGE © 2008 by Sage Publications, Inc.

SAGE Books

Page 4 of 28 SAGE Books - Psychology: Six Perspectives

mental processes operate outside a person's awareness, but they do not pose any threat to that person. No conflict is involved. They arouse no deep-seated anxiety. The individual therefore makes no effort, intentional or otherwise, to exclude them from consciousness. When hitting a 95 miles-per-hour baseball, for example, the time required to respond precludes thinking in any detail about exactly what to do. Information processing takes place automatically. In a like manner, unconscious cognition does not become a significant issue in psychoanalysis.

The other category of unconscious mental processes does play a vital role in psychoanalysis, however, and here the mental activities do pose a threat. In unconscious motivation, certain mental processes instigate anxiety about earlier circumstances, prompting the person to exclude from normal awareness these thoughts and also the relevant feelings and behaviors they may arouse. Psychoanalysts sometimes speak of unconscious emotion when emphasizing the feelings; they speak of unconscious motivation with reference to the behaviors and reasons for them. Both types of reactions become unconscious, excluded from awareness because the individual perceives them as threatening.

Unconscious motivation begins with conflict, which occurs in everyone's life. Here conflict takes on a broad meaning, indicating a problem of almost any sort producing trauma, indecision, frustration, confusion, abuse—or any other manifestation of anxiety. Bertha undoubtedly experienced anxiety over the conflict with her rivalrous brother, with her overprotective mother, perhaps even with her romanticized father, and definitely with the restrictive gender roles in her society.

To defend against this anxiety, the individual develops various mechanisms, some described later as defense mechanisms. But the chief mechanism, on which all others are based, is repression. In repression, a person unintentionally excludes the anxiety-provoking memories, thoughts, and impulses from normal awareness, preventing them from entering consciousness. This concept has become widely debated today partly because of the various ways in which Freud labeled and described this process, partly because of the difficulty in producing this unconscious but motivated condition in laboratory studies (Erdelyi, 2000). But repression takes a primary place in traditional psychoanalytic theory. In a word, the solution for managing these anxiety- provoking thoughts is forgetting. The person forgets the event; it seemingly never occurred. It is kept from awareness by the barrier of repression. Or a whole series of related events are kept outside normal awareness.

However, the anxiety does not disappear. The so-called forgotten problem remains in the background of the individual's mental life, hidden but at the same time seeking expression. Thus, the conflict is only partly or tentatively solved by repression; still deep in the recesses of the individual's mind, it festers and smolders. In short, the individual commonly develops a fixation, meaning that the person becomes preoccupied with the unresolved problems, behaving in persistent, puzzling, and generally ineffective ways. A fixated person, intensely concerned with some past event that prompted anxiety, exhibits this tension again and again when confronted with similar events in present-day life. But the individual deals with the problem only indirectly.

These unconscious, anxiety-arousing thoughts and memories may simply appear as an inexplicable nervousness in the individual. Or they may be expressed in an indirect fashion, through an inordinate preoccupation with an almost infinite number of issues: family, food, fantasy, freedom, and friendship, just to name a few. Even in adult life, the person remains fixed on the earlier, unresolved issue, commonly dating back to childhood. Human beings, according to psychoanalysis, spend their lives in an endless struggle, shielding themselves and society from their unconscious fixations. Laid down early in life, they can influence later behavior in unconscious ways.

To portray unconscious motivation in everyday living, Freud used as a metaphor a historical monument, constructed as a memorial to some specific, earlier emotional event. The Great Fire of 1666 destroyed much of London. That fire is over, but the city erected a monument to the catastrophe. Hundreds of feet high, it stands where the fire started. An underground railway station has taken its name, Monument Station, and visitors to London can climb its stairs for a panoramic view of the city.

Suppose a modern Londoner sheds copious tears daily when passing that monument, each time overcome with remorse over the loss of lives and property of his ancestral family hundreds of years ago. Others would

SAGE © 2008 by Sage Publications, Inc.

SAGE Books

Page 5 of 28 SAGE Books - Psychology: Six Perspectives

view this man with some concern, for he remains fixated on a disaster that occurred long ago. He would be far better served by going about his current business or thinking with pleasure about how London has survived that dreadful event. But many disturbed people behave like this sobbing, impractical man, except they have little idea about what is troubling them. Still dealing with disruptive, unknown events from long ago, they cannot live in a satisfied, productive manner. They neglect what is real and current in their lives. According to psychoanalysis, this fixation with past trauma is the most fundamental characteristic of a disturbed personality (Freud, 1909).

Incidentally, one of Freud's early followers, Carl Gustav Jung, also emphasized our past, but he focused on our distant past, including the experiences of much earlier ancestors. As a neo-Freudian, he conceived of a deeper unconscious, well beyond our personal or individual unconscious. For Jung, the collective unconscious contains memories and thoughts common to all people everywhere, described as archetypes, meaning mental imprints or patterns to which we are universally predisposed. He found evidence for archetypes and other dimensions of the collective unconscious in human symbols, myths, fairy tales, religions, and other seemingly universal cultural expressions (Rosen, 2000). Critics call for more empirical, controlled support for this theory, but since Freud, the idea of unconscious thought has been pursued vigorously in many directions.

Traditional psychoanalysis approaches personality from the viewpoint of unconscious residues of earlier events in the lifetime of the individual. Prior to Freud, with his emphasis on childhood experience, people commonly explained a disturbed personality in terms of the devil, chance factors, one's constitution, or divine intervention. In particular, the 19th-century outlook explained bad behavior as the result of “bad blood,” described by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and other prominent writers. This preoccupation with blood as the responsible agent did not cease until the 20th century, and Sigmund Freud's concept of the personal unconscious played a very large role in this new line of thought.

Structure of Personality

In psychoanalysis, personality emerges from the interactions of three forces or building blocks, all hypothesized internal structures, within the individual. The first, the id, is inborn, part of our biological inheritance; it is the source of all our energies, mental and physical, erotic and aggressive. The id serves as the “motor” of behavior, providing Bertha, for example, with the vitality needed for riding horseback, telling stories, and engaging in her private theater. Following the pleasure principle, the id seeks immediate satisfaction of all biological drives, sometimes automatically through sneezing, sweating, and blinking. The satisfaction of other drives—hunger, thirst, safety, and sexuality—requires effort and planning. The individual must find solutions or receive assistance.

From the energy of the id and through the baby's contact with the environment, the second dimension, the ego, emerges. The ultimate task of the ego, which is the center of the self or “I,” is to preserve the individual; it does so as the executive director or problem solver of the personality. In contrast to the id, the ego follows the reality principle, regulating the individual's behavior according to circumstances in the environment. It seeks appropriate ways to satisfy hunger, thirst, safety, and other demands of the id. A strong ego redirects expressions of the id that would be inappropriate in a particular time or place. In the early years, before the ego is adequately developed, an adult must play the ego's role for a child or adolescent, satisfying many of the demands of the id and redirecting others.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, young Bertha lacked the ego strength for coping with her family environment in Vienna. Unable to pursue her personal goals in realistic fashion, she resorted to the fantasy of her private theater. Sad, angry, and confused, she then stayed in bed all day, remained silent, and refused to take nourishment, displaying negative behaviors like those of a small child. She also made suicidal gestures. Her weak ego barely succeeded in the task of self-preservation. Eventually, Bellevue Hospital supplanted Bertha's ego, providing the support and structure she was unable to obtain for herself within her family.

The third force, the superego, begins to develop somewhat later and is significantly influenced by the acquisition of language. As a set of values and standards for behavior in a particular society, the superego is acquired through contact with parents, teachers, and other elders. It serves as a moral guide for the

SAGE © 2008 by Sage Publications, Inc.

SAGE Books

Page 6 of 28 SAGE Books - Psychology: Six Perspectives

individual, developing along two paths. As the child internalizes parental and other social prohibitions, these prohibitions become the conscience, that part of the superego placing restraints on “bad” behavior. As the child internalizes parental and other social goals, they become the ego ideal, that part of the superego that stresses achievement and other “good” behavior. Both parts of the superego develop through imitation of adults, as well as through direct instruction (Freud, 1925b).

Even as a young adult, Bertha refrained from all sexual expression and all direct confrontation with her overprotective parents. In psychoanalytic terms, this delayed development reflected an overly strong, almost punishing superego. Sex and aggression were “bad” behaviors, and the ego found an escape. Bertha retreated into the fantasy world of her private theater—and then became ill.

As the problem-solving dimension of personality, the ego faces a difficult task. Beset on one side by the urges of the id, on the other by the restrictions and goals of the superego, it must seek effective solutions in a particular environment. An extremely broad concept, the environment includes all external factors that have the potential to influence an individual, running the gamut from physical to social, subtle to obvious, family members to strangers, and so forth.

With the support of the Bellevue hospital, Bertha gained some ego strength. She began telling tales again, still dealing with personal problems, but this time with more refinement. Then she began writing some tales. They gave her a way of expressing herself, an opportunity she seized and then lost with Breuer. At first she wrote stories just for herself; later she shared them with cousins; and eventually she authored a small book.

As suggested in these activities, the ego is the problem-solving element in the personality—the responsible agent or self. A resourceful ego directs the individual into successful ways of dealing with problems—writing stories, doing volunteer work, and so forth (Figure 4.1). Bertha published these tales anonymously with her own money. Little Stories for Children described lonely people and abandoned babies, hardly the expected themes for young minds (Pappenheim, n.d.). Lonely and depressed, angry at family members, Bertha perhaps wrote these stories as a way of dealing with her own fate. In psychoanalytic terms, her writing was an attempt by the ego to find a solution to her loveless life.

Figure 4.1 Psychoanalytic Approach to Personality. As the executive dimension of the personality, the ego must deal with the requirements of the id, the restrictions of the superego, and the reality of environmental constraints. Not circled as a component of personality, the environment is vital in the development of the ego. In traditional psychoanalysis, a strong ego is a highly desirable attribute, the prime factor in resolving conflict in human life

Bertha stayed two months with her Karlsruhe cousins, gaining confidence through her fairy tales and new

SAGE © 2008 by Sage Publications, Inc.

SAGE Books

Page 7 of 28 SAGE Books - Psychology: Six Perspectives

friendships. Then she spent a short time with relatives in Frankfurt. Afterward, she returned to Vienna. Still experiencing symptoms, she wanted to resume therapy with Josef Breuer. But he refused (Rosenbaum, 1984b).

One of Bertha's Viennese neighbors struggled with these same symptoms—in a different way. He studied them in other people, although he experienced some himself as well. For his ideas, he was scorned by many and then lionized, first in Europe, later in the United States, and finally throughout much of the world. He occupied a flat not far from the center of Old Vienna. These quarters served as the home and offices for Sigmund Freud.

He began his practice with the traditional therapies of his day, all without success, at least by his standards. Gradually, he abandoned these medicines, direct advice, and even hypnosis. Instead, he learned to listen to his patients' innermost thoughts and feelings. These halting, commonly disturbing descriptions revealed the inner workings of the human mind; they became Freud's key to personality and its development.

Scrutinizing himself, his family, and friends, as well as his patients, Freud decided that much of human personality is formed early in life, chiefly during the first five years. The id remains constant, but the ego and superego undergo fundamental, enduring developments in the early years. One of Freud's major contributions to Western thought lay in pointing to childhood as a foundation of adult personality.

Development of Personality

Much of the child's development proceeds through predictable, biologically driven changes, called maturational stages. They occur throughout human life: physical, mental, social, and emotional. A common genetic background underlies most of the rapid developments in infancy, childhood, and adolescence, as well as the slower changes at later ages. From this standpoint, human life becomes a sequence of unfolding stages. But they are modified for each individual by unique hereditary and environmental factors.

The most obvious stages appear in physical developments. In locomotion, the child learns to sit, then crawl, later stand, still later walk, and finally run. In grasping, the child at first can only wave its arms wildly; later it gains control of its arms and hands; still later, it can oppose its thumb to other fingers; and eventually it can use just the thumb and index finger to grasp a cookie crumb or button its clothes.

The Psychosexual Stages

Freud speculated about a similarly predictable sequence in sexual development, defining sexuality broadly to include activities related to ingestion and excretion, as well as reproduction. He also considered the mental and social dimensions to be more important than the physical component.

In physical terms, these developments begin with the alimentary canal, first at the front end, in the lips and mouth. Then they move to the anus and later shift to the genitals. All these developments are the result of biological maturation in what we now call the erogenous zones. These phases of sexual growth, with their mental, social, and physical changes, are known as psychosexual stages, and they can have important consequences for the child's emerging personality, depending on the management of tasks that accompany each stage.

The roots of personality lie with these tasks because the erogenous zones provide our greatest sources of pleasure, and yet sexuality is something the child cannot understand or control. Moreover, sexuality involves social prohibitions, thereby creating anxiety in the child. Thus, the child's experiences can leave their marks, especially if performance of the task goes awry. Then the child becomes “stuck” or fixated on that problem (Freud, 1907).

According to psychoanalysis, all normal children pass through these stages. They do so at somewhat different ages, but the sequence is invariant.

SAGE © 2008 by Sage Publications, Inc.

SAGE Books

Page 8 of 28 SAGE Books - Psychology: Six Perspectives

The tasks in the first three stages are feeding, toilet training, and adjustment to family life. In each case, the task may generate conflict, depending on the child's readiness to manage it and the caretakers' modes of assistance. The outcomes have implications for the child's feelings of trust and well-being, competence and independence, and capacity for interpersonal relationships.

In the oral stage, the infant first derives pleasure through stimulation of the mouth when obtaining food, which in turn produces the energy needed for survival. For this task, the highly sensitive lips and tongue are well suited. The infant enjoys this stimulation, emitting the sucking reflex even in the absence of food. If the infant's nutritional and emotional needs are adequately met during this first stage, the child develops the potential for a confident, trusting outlook on life. If not, feelings of apprehension and dissatisfaction may arise instead. And if repressed, these feelings may become major components of the adult personality.

In the second and third years, with gains in muscular control, the child is confronted with a new and more difficult task: toilet training. Contrary to the feeding task in the oral stage, which is compatible with the demands of the id, the child in the anal stage must oppose id impulses, resisting the pleasure associated with elimination. The child must withstand the tension until reaching a proper time and place for excretion. The child who manages this task successfully gains a sense of competence and pleasure in the world. Successful toilet training is most important in developing and strengthening the ego. If instead, the training is too strict, the child's resentment again may become enduring, appearing in adulthood as a rebellious, impulsive personal style or as an excessive concern with correctness. Needless to say, the caretaker's supervision of this task and the child's biological readiness play major roles in bringing about favorable or unfavorable outcomes.

These stages may interact and overlap with one another and with the next stage, which begins around age three—with another shift in erotic pleasure. And here we come to another point of resistance in one of Freud's followers. Freud called this next phase the phallic stage, for the child becomes more sharply aware of gender differences and relationships among adults, including the parents' particular roles. Adopting the ways of one or both parents, the child also takes greater notice of the genitals, obtaining pleasure from self-stimulation. The child may engage in related fantasy activities, including a desire for intimate relations, notably with the parent of the opposite sex. According to psychoanalysis, the child's relationships with the parents and siblings at this stage, however stable or turbulent, set the pattern for personal relationships in later life.

But Freud's expression excludes one gender, and Karen Horney raised this issue. As a neo-Freudian speaking of feminine psychology, she disagreed with several of Freud's basic concepts, declaring that females must be understood on their own terms, not simply as different from males. Acknowledging Freud's genius and his work in a male-dominated society, she argued that men's exclusion from pregnancy, childbirth, and breast feeding prompted them unconsciously to depreciate women. For these thoughts, she became recognized as the first female psychoanalyst and a pioneer in female psychology (Paris, 2000). Late in his career, Freud turned to female sexuality, but he expressed less confidence about his understanding owing in some substantial measure to the times and culture in which he lived.

Freud had another label for this third stage, when children become more sharply aware of gender differences. He called this condition the Oedipus complex, referring to an ancient Greek tragedy in which King Oedipus unwittingly killed his father and married his mother, a potential curse, Freud claimed, laid on every male child. The son directs his first desire for sexual intimacy toward his mother and, accordingly, his first hostile wish toward his father, who has become his rival. The boy wants his mother all to himself; he views his father as a nuisance, feeling resentful about his father's relations with his mother and expressing satisfaction when his father is absent. But at other times the boy feels affection for his father, who protects him and satisfies many of his needs. The result is ambivalence; the child experiences conflict.

Encouraged by Jung much later, Freud incorporated into his thinking a Greek drama about women. In this tale, Electra fell in love with her father and participated in the murder of her mother. Freud regarded the daughter's desire for intimacy with her father and rivalry with her mother as another universal theme, which Jung described as the Electra complex, and here the daughter experiences conflict. Thus, both boys and girls participate in a family triangle, seeking a special intimacy with the parent of the opposite sex and adopting a cautiously adversarial stance toward the same-sexed parent. And when brothers and sisters arrive, this rivalry is enlarged to include them. With several siblings, all contesting for places in the family, these interpersonal

SAGE © 2008 by Sage Publications, Inc.

SAGE Books

Page 9 of 28 SAGE Books - Psychology: Six Perspectives

struggles, conscious and unconscious, can exert considerable influence on the development of personality. These struggles, Freud declared, become inevitable whenever human beings must live together.

In this context of problems in living together, still another of Freud's rebellious followers became prominent. In his individual psychology, Alfred Adler stated that each person, in his or her own individual way, strives for mastery in the environment. This striving becomes the chief force in life because shortly after birth we all experience feelings of inferiority, owing to our physical limitations with respect to our caretakers, all of whom are stronger, bigger, quicker, and wiser. Our great deficit in life begins with our enormous dependence on others. Our enduring difficulty lies with this early experience of not being a fully capable adult (Adler, 1927).

Freud's emphasis on childhood stimulated these thoughts, but Adler, well before his time, developed them into topics of considerable modern interest, such as parenting, family relationships, and living successfully in a community. Among them, sibling rivalry and the influence of birth order are now widely recognized and investigated (Stewart, 2000). Today in popular psychology, interest in self-help books on marital relationships, parenting, and sibling rivalry is exceeded only by the unremitting interest in self-help books on human sexuality.

Unlike other creatures, Freud continued, human beings begin their sex lives twice; the first time, like all other animals, occurs early in life, when the child is only three to six years of age. This effort is a feeble one. Then, after a quiescent period of several years, in a stage called latency, the sex life begins again, this time evolving toward sexual maturity. The patterns in this second instance, beginning at puberty, have already been laid down by the preceding childhood sexuality. Intense emotional processes accompany these years of adolescence, reflecting the prior Oedipus/Electra outcomes, and they function partly outside normal awareness.

Freud described this love-and-aggression triangle as “the romance of the family” (Freud, 1905). It had more relevance in his Vienna than in societies that offer more opportunities for diverse, open lifestyles (Malinowski, 1927, 1929).

There are traditional resolutions of the Oedipus and Electra complexes. Through identification, the child adopts the characteristics of someone else, typically the same-sexed parent, rather than maintaining an adversarial relationship with that person. The parent thus becomes a model, not a rival. Identification is the chief but not the only means by which the ego deals with the Oedipus/Electra conflict. In any case, this conflict subsides during a latency of four or five years and then arises again in adolescence. When this second phase goes well, teenagers gradually detach themselves from their parents, ceasing to be children and becoming adult members of society. In adult life, the earlier struggle may be transformed into affectionate and competitive expressions, as well as other derivative forms.

These conclusions about the outcomes in adult life need further empirical support. And times and cultures have changed since Freud's day. But the idea that roots of adult personality lie in the management of childhood conflict has exerted a powerful influence on research in developmental psychology and also in clinical practice.

Fixations in Everyday Living

Life is full of hazards, however. No one makes the journey without some bumps and bruises, mental and physical. Passing through these early stages without any significant disruption requires careful, intelligent caretakers and extraordinarily good luck. Typically the child's needs at some point are unmet or disrupted through negligence or misfortune. Then, as noted already, the outcome may be a fixation, in which the gratification of a certain need has been blocked, and the individual becomes controlled or possessed by that issue, overly but unconsciously focused on resolving it. Freud speculated extensively about fixation and its outcomes in adulthood (Freud, 1905, 1909).

According to traditional psychoanalysis, a child in the oral stage is especially susceptible to conflict related to the need for nourishment—when food is not available, not satisfying, not presented in an emotionally satisfying manner, and so forth. As a result, the child may become fixated on these issues later, remaining

SAGE © 2008 by Sage Publications, Inc.

SAGE Books

Page 10 of 28 SAGE Books - Psychology: Six Perspectives

overly concerned with food, constantly seeking love and support, worried about nutrition, demanding special treatment, and the like. This insecurity, Freud speculated, may remain for the rest of the child's life.

Similarly, if toilet training goes poorly because of the child's lack of readiness, the parents' unreasonable expectations, or any related tension, the child may become fixated at this stage, again becoming unconsciously preoccupied with the problem. Attempting to make amends at later ages, the child may become excessively neat, clean, obedient, and prompt, reflecting an overdeveloped superego. Or, adopting the opposite stance, the child may become messy, tardy, disobedient, and inconsiderate of others. In either case, the frustration over the earlier failure remains. Fixation is a sign of arrested ego development; the person cannot “let go” of the earlier difficulty. Later, even as an adult, the person struggles unsuccessfully to achieve a solution or to retaliate.

And when the great adolescent task goes badly, owing to disturbed groundwork in the Oedipus/Electra stage, issues of sexuality and personal relationships appear. Restrictions, punishment, and guilt have left their mark, and again, the development of the ego is arrested. The normal capacity for love is blocked or diverted. The individual may remain for the rest of life overly combative, submissive, or otherwise unable to deal with authority, intimate relations, and so forth. On this basis, Freud argued, the Oedipal/Electra stage is the seat of adult personality disorders (Freud, 1917).

The Pappenheims' management of these childhood conflicts and Bertha's response to them remain unknown. But psychoanalysts would speculate that things went poorly. The prevailing sexual code, Bertha's later behavior, and comments by relatives suggest life was not easy for the little girl. In addition to severe restrictions of the superego and the early deaths of two older sisters, an unresolved Electra complex perhaps contributed too.

Even in her teens, Bertha displayed some unusual difficulties in everyday living. For example, Breuer described her sexuality as “astonishingly undeveloped,” and she enjoyed few satisfying relationships with peers, male or female. In a psychoanalytic sense, these problems were remnants of unresolved Oedipus/ Electra issues. And some of her tales can be viewed in this way.

In the last of her Little Stories for Children, a water sprite lived alone by a pond. As punishment for some misdeed, she was prevented from ever leaving her little sanctuary. A great stone head with a forbidding look kept a watchful eye on her. But one night she became uncontrollably drawn out of the pond by dance music. Reaching the dance floor, she met a tall, bearded, blue-eyed man. She became his partner, wrapped in his embrace, dancing to music more and more intoxicating, until it faded. Then the little sprite looked into his eyes. Instantly, a tremor seized the man's body, and he turned away. He knew he had danced with a little sprite; she knew the dance was over and the romance too.

The little sprite crept back to the pond and found it frozen. So she lay down beside the pond waiting for the ice to melt. It snowed and snowed, covering her body. The stone head laughed at her plight. Finally, spring arrived and melted the mantle of snow. Then the stone head, gazing sternly on the scene below, observed a tiny plant. Its solitary white flower sprouted from the place where the sprite had lain beside the pond (Pappenheim, n.d.).

Bertha perhaps composed this melancholy tale from her own life. She too had been prevented from leaving her home. A malicious stone head guarded the water sprite's virtue, just as a death's head, perhaps resembling her over-protective father, threatened Bertha during her hallucinations. And she too heard dance music, which brought thoughts of romance. In coloring and countenance, the water sprite's dance partner resembled Josef Breuer who, in turn, resembled Bertha's father (Hirschmüller, 1989). And that romantic figure disappeared instantly from the sprite's life, just as Breuer had done with Bertha in earlier days.

Written some years after her father's death and her therapy with Breuer, this tale suggests that Bertha still remained disturbed over those earlier events. From a psychoanalytic perspective, that reaction might be expected.

But numerous factors can contribute to any psychological disorder, and early conflict can produce many

SAGE © 2008 by Sage Publications, Inc.

SAGE Books

Page 11 of 28 SAGE Books - Psychology: Six Perspectives

disparate outcomes. These psychoanalytic stages today are viewed as speculative. More conservatively, it is safe to say that life at times is difficult for everyone, especially in childhood, and that for most of us, some childhood problems persist in adult life. Psychoanalysis is significantly responsible for this view. The importance of childhood for later adjustment and personality is widely accepted today.

By the outset of the 20th century, Freud's work had stimulated considerable support and vociferous objections. Several of his hypotheses and theories have been impossible to investigate scientifically because the underlying concepts are too vague. Others have yielded mixed results, not a surprising outcome, for the value of theory lies primarily in the research it generates. But recent studies in cognitive, social, developmental, and clinical psychology have offered empirical support for the unconscious, which stands as the cornerstone of psychoanalysis (Cramer, 2000; Westen, 1998, 1999).

Crises Through the Life Cycle

Neo-Freudians have modified and extended psychoanalytic theory through the full course of human development. One of them, Erik Erikson, identified eight stages in the life cycle from birth through old age but, like Freud, without impressive empirical support. These stages include a series of tasks or changes in social functioning, called psychosocial crises, each involving relationships with other people (Erikson, 1963).

Four crises occur in childhood. In the first, trust versus mistrust, the infant develops confidence and optimism, or a negative, distrustful outlook, depending on the caretaker's management of the infant's need for nourishment and support. In the child's second year, the caretaker's task is to allow the ambulatory child as much freedom as possible without endangering itself, creating the crisis of autonomy versus doubt. From ages three to six the child is ready to attempt simple tasks, producing the crisis of initiative versus guilt, depending again on the caretaker's response to the child's inept efforts. In the final childhood crisis, industry versus inferiority, the caretaker guides the child to appropriate tasks, thereby enhancing a sense of achievement, or presents tasks too demanding for the youngster's level of maturity, producing feelings of inadequacy in that child.

With puberty, the teenager's social goals and circumstances change markedly. In this crisis of identity versus role diffusion, the adolescent begins an intensive effort to develop a sense of self as an individual, seeking his or her own pathway in life. Erikson called this challenge of moving away from the family the identity crisis, a time of personal upheaval and uncertainty.

Bertha Pappenheim experienced much emotional turmoil in late adolescence. One might speculate that her parents and culture forced her toward an identity that she could not accept—that of a dependent housewife.

The tensions aroused by moving away from one's family create in young adulthood the crisis of intimacy versus isolation. If this crisis is successfully managed, through a close relationship with someone else, the person feels supported rather than alone and alienated. The crisis of generativity versus stagnation occurs in middle adulthood, raising the challenge of progressing beyond intimacy and one's own welfare to a broader concern for humanity. In the final crisis, called integrity versus despair, the individual looks back on his or her life and finds meaning and satisfaction or disappointment and despair. Integrity here refers to emotional integration, and the issue is not what has happened but rather how a person feels about those earlier events.

Like many theories, Erikson's work has been criticized as lacking precision and empirical support, especially in the later crises. But in emphasizing the full life cycle, social development, and an identity crisis, this theory offers useful points of departure for the study of adjustment and maladjustment. At the core of this view, founded on Freud's work, stands the notion of fixation. Unresolved childhood social crises can become core aspects of the personality later in life.

Expressions of the Unconscious

This concept of the unconscious can incite disagreement. As something apart from normal awareness, something not available through ordinary introspection, its presence or absence cannot be proven directly.

SAGE © 2008 by Sage Publications, Inc.

SAGE Books

Page 12 of 28 SAGE Books - Psychology: Six Perspectives

Instead, evidence can be collected for or against the presence of unconscious mental processes, and in each instance, a case must be built. Seeking degrees of certainty, psychoanalysis often makes such a case (Schwartz, 2003). And support has been gained from investigations outside the traditional psychoanalytic context, revealing empirical evidence for unconscious thought in cognition, motivation, and emotion (Westen, 1998).

Symbolism in Behavior

Unconscious motivation occurs when someone behaves in certain ways, but neither these actions nor the reasons behind them are open to direct, conscious scrutiny, though they may convey traces of their origins (Freud, 1915, 1917). And here a brief review is in order.

Psychoanalysis is sometimes called the study of personality from the viewpoint of conflict, referring to the incompatible urges and tendencies that pervade human life. Our biological requirements and interests are commonly at odds with the restraints imposed by civilization. The struggle for survival continues in all cultures. At a more personal level, we experience ambivalence toward those people most important in our lives—those who have loved and protected us during our earliest, most vulnerable years. At one time or another, our interactions with them became frustrating and painful—for example, when we were punished for something we did not understand, when we were denied requests that seemed perfectly reasonable, or when we were ignored when we needed assistance. Emotional closeness in a family inevitably produces a great variety of feelings within each member, including tenderness, rivalry, fear, respect, and other incompatible feelings.

The individual is most vulnerable to conflict during the early years. Too weak to fight, too small to threaten, too ignorant to scheme, too clumsy to flee, too speechless to explain—the child is at others' mercy. Despite the most watchful caretakers, childhood traumas are almost inevitable. For little Bertha, the early deaths of her siblings certainly had this potential, as did her later quarrels with Wilhelm, restrictions in sexual expression, and the cultural discrimination against females.

Conflict, then, sets the stage for something to follow—the ego's effort to cope with conflict and the anxiety it generates. What happens when the ego cannot manage this task directly? In psychoanalysis, the answer is clear. The ego solves the problem indirectly.

In repression, a controversial concept, anxiety-provoking thoughts are excluded from consciousness through unintentional forgetting. In psychoanalysis, repression is the primary defense mechanism of the ego. Fearing reprisal for forbidden impulses, a person may repress the whole experience, thereby diminishing the overt anxiety. But repression is only a partial solution. The conflict is not truly resolved; the anxiety does not disappear completely.

In dealing with this persistent, puzzling anxiety, the individual develops a fixation, becoming overly and unconsciously concerned with the unknown problem. The person becomes “possessed” by it. Coping with it in the back of the mind, the person's effectiveness in daily life is thereby reduced (Freud, 1915).

This fixation occurs because repression is not a static state, like a lid screwed onto the top of a jar. It is instead a bubbling cauldron in which highly emotional conflicts seek expression, kept from daily awareness at the cost of considerable psychic energy. When these conflicts threaten to break the ego's barrier of repression, the fixation appears in indirect and unexpected ways called symbolic behavior. In other words, symbolic behavior is any disguised expression of some fixation; it is the behavioral manifestation of a partly repressed thought or feeling. Thus, fixation is a process, referring to the covert, internal state of tension. Symbolic behavior is an outcome, referring to any presumably disguised expression of that internal state appearing in dreams, mistakes, adjustment reactions, and other forms.

Unlike typical symbols, such as a wedding ring or a person's signature, symbolic behavior becomes a representation and a misrepresentation, a compromise between the underlying impulse and its complete denial. Especially in the context of maladjustment, a symbolic behavior is sometimes called a symptom, meaning any overt condition that suggests an underlying disorder.

SAGE © 2008 by Sage Publications, Inc.

SAGE Books

Page 13 of 28 SAGE Books - Psychology: Six Perspectives

Symbolic behavior can appear, Freud emphasized, in people in any condition—ill or healthy. Moreover, different symbolic behaviors can represent the same or different fixations in a particular individual. For the observer of human nature, Freud concluded, symbolic behavior can convey all sorts of information—at times more than the observer wants to know (Freud, 1901). But these behavioral expressions are most likely to occur when a person is sick, tired, under emotional strain, or in an otherwise weakened condition.

Still sick and experiencing emotional strain, two years after completing Little Stories for Children Bertha published another book, this one for adults. Again, writing these tales could be considered symbolic behavior, revealing something about her personal issues, conscious or unconscious. But this time she became more open about herself, perhaps showing further signs of growth. She used a pseudonym with obvious elements of her own name, P. Berthold, and told a collection of stories through a collection of junk, calling the book In the Junk Shop (Pappenheim, 1890).

All the characters in these stories remain lonesome souls. In a junk shop, they are not suited for everyday life. And they betray one another, or some chance factor disrupts their bond, perhaps symbolizing what happened to Bertha.

According to psychoanalysis, Bertha's depression, paralyses, headaches, anesthesia, and other symptoms were partial expressions of buried conflicts—childhood concerns about love, sex, rejection, anger, and relations with parents and siblings, all thrust into an unconscious realm at the price of these debilitating symptoms. Psychoanalysts regard such symptoms as possible symbolic behavior—clues to underlying emotional disturbance (Muroff, 1984). Freud, in particular, pointed to the symbolism in dreams, odd mistakes, defense mechanisms, and adjustment reactions, as well as one's overall lifestyle (Figure 4.2).

Figure 4.2 Forms of Symbolic Behavior. When the ego cannot manage a conflict directly, it may seek an indirect solution through repression, resulting in a fixation. Signs of the unconscious fixation may appear later in various symbolic forms, ranging from dreams and everyday mistakes to an unusual lifestyle

Dreams and Mistakes

In the study of symbolism, Freud developed an elaborate theory of dreams, the intermittent visual and auditory images occurring in a semi-narrative sequence during sleep. He postulated that the ego, less vigilant in sleep, allows repressed conflicts to escape from the unconscious and appear symbolically in the dream story (Freud, 1900). This dream story, however incoherent, is the manifest content of the dream, the obvious sequence of events depicted by the visual, auditory, and other dream images. Freud's interest lay instead

SAGE © 2008 by Sage Publications, Inc.

SAGE Books

Page 14 of 28 SAGE Books - Psychology: Six Perspectives

in the latent content of dreams, the underlying, unconscious meaning, which is partly symbolized and partly hidden by the manifest content. The latent content becomes available only through careful inquiry into the dreamer's recent and earlier experiences and into the dreamer's spontaneous reactions to specific elements of the manifest content. In other words, any dream interpretation requires carefully obtained background information about the dreamer.

One night Bertha dreamed that she had tamed two jackals and kept them each on a leash. Reeking with an offensive odor, these animals turned into a pair of men she recognized as her neighbors in Vienna. She controlled them by pulling on their leashes, which concluded the manifest content of the dream. Some observers might view these actions as symbolically sexual, aggressive, or both on the part of the dreamer, perhaps elements of the latent content. But according to psychoanalysis, no dream interpretation can be of any use whatsoever without a detailed knowledge of Bertha's life at the time and without her unrestrained thoughts about the dream, called free associations. Freud remained emphatic on this point, which is constantly overlooked by enthusiastic but unenlightened followers.

Especially in dream interpretation, Freud made extensive use of universal symbols. Transcending culture, a universal symbol conveys the same meaning or the same set of meanings for all people everywhere, regardless of background. These symbols presumably have existed down through the ages. In contrast, an individual or private symbol carries a specific meaning for a particular person, which is not necessarily shared by others. According to Freud, most symbols, especially those that are universal, pertain to relatively few topics: the human body, family members, birth and death, nakedness, and sexuality (Freud, 1916).

Freud's approach was highly speculative and included dozens of universal symbols for male and female genitalia (Freud, 1916). But simply enumerating these symbols does no justice to Freud's thought. Even discussing his ideas in one or two paragraphs produces an inadequate account, almost a caricature. His range of interests and emphasis on human beings as symbolizing creatures have been of major importance in literature, art, drama, and other humanities. But by today's standards, this thinking lacks the empirical support considered essential in science.

Freud spoke of The Interpretation of Dreams as his most important work. The text of this book shows a logical, step-by-step organization befitting a scientific report. The illustrations, often of Freud's own dreams, reflect a series of disparate but personally important themes in his life. Thus, at the first level the book takes readers ever upward to increasingly sophisticated dream analysis. At the second and lower level, the illustrations transport the reader ever downward into increasingly deeper reaches of Freud's unconscious mind (Schorske, 1979). Owing to its magnitude and dual content, this work best illustrates Freud's thought and stands as the masterpiece of his writings, though the theory still lacks convincing support.

The unconscious appears in dreams, Freud speculated, because the ego becomes less vigilant during sleep. But symbolic expressions of the unconscious also appear regularly throughout waking life, he declared. In daily behavior, we sometimes do or say things incorrectly or clumsily because unconscious conflicts break the barrier of repressions, revealing our inner concerns and unacceptable wishes. In fact, the popularity of psychoanalysis in public life centers around the attention it devotes to dreaming and to these lapses in appropriate behavior.

Sometimes a mistake in everyday life is popularly called a Freudian slip because Freud regarded many such errors, but not all, as symbolic behavior—further expressions of the unconscious. They include temporary forgetting, errors of the tongue or pen, accidental self-injury, and various bungled actions. Bertha injured herself by nursing her father in a needlessly strenuous fashion, though her wealthy family could readily afford full-time help.

Why did Bertha place such unreasonable demands on herself? Did this “accidental” self-injury serve some unconscious purpose in her life? Was her overly stressful nightly nursing driven by unconscious conflicts? In traditional psychoanalysis, her totally unnecessary sacrifice perhaps became her way of seeking assistance for her own personal problems.

With the widespread interest in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, his book about errors in everyday

SAGE © 2008 by Sage Publications, Inc.

SAGE Books

Page 15 of 28 SAGE Books - Psychology: Six Perspectives

life, Freud became jubilant. He called it a triumph for psychoanalysis; the gulf between normal and abnormal mental life had been narrowed (Freud, 1901).

Defense Mechanisms

Another sign of the unconscious appears in a defense mechanism, a way of thinking or behaving that enables a person to avoid awareness of anxiety-arousing thoughts. Formally, these reactions are called the ego's mechanisms of defense because the ego defends against unwanted thoughts by deceiving itself. This idea, that people unconsciously avoid what they do not want to know, became so popular that the public and psychologists themselves lengthened Freud's list of defense mechanisms, often incorrectly. Anna Freud, his daughter and noted psychoanalyst, deserves much credit for clarifying and elaborating the defense mechanisms. In contrast, coping mechanisms are employed consciously to deal with stress. They include thinking about the situation in a more positive way, focusing attention elsewhere, and relieving stress through relaxation techniques and physical exercise.

In defense mechanisms, the individual defends without awareness of the real problem, as in the following: rationalization, by concocting plausible but false explanations; reaction formation, by taking a stance opposite one's deeper feelings; displacement, by directing an emotional reaction onto something or someone other than its appropriate target; and sublimation, by engaging in socially acceptable behavior as an indirect expression of socially unacceptable impulses. There is no intent to be deceitful in any of these mechanisms. The individual's conflict remains unconscious. Repression, the basic defense mechanism, underlies all others.

Bertha's passionate declaration of love for her father may be viewed on this basis. It perhaps had origins in displacement, whereby she directed onto him the love she wanted to express toward a male peer. It may have involved reaction formation, whereby she disguised even from herself the hostility she felt toward her father because of his overprotectiveness, which prevented her from establishing close relationships with peers. These statements are consistent with psychoanalytic theory, but without more precise information, they remain mere conjecture.

In one study of defense mechanisms, two groups of 10 children each were examined four times over a two-year period. Beginning at age six years and six months, each child individually told stories in response to a traditional projective test. Altogether, 134 stories were recorded, coded, and randomized to make identification of the author and date impossible. Then they were scored for use of three defense mechanisms: denial, refusing to acknowledge disturbing events; projection, attributing one's undesirable traits to others; and identification, accepting as one's own the goals and ideas of another person.

It was predicted that denial, the simplest mechanism, would decrease as the children gained increased cognitive development; that it would be replaced by projection, which assigns the blame to others; and that identification would show a gradual increase, presumably reaching a peak later, in adolescence, when the individual encounters the identity crisis. All three predictions were confirmed, providing further evidence that children do not suddenly adopt and discard defense mechanisms. Instead, they experience shifts among them almost automatically, reflecting the usual patterns of cognitive development (Cramer, 1997).

Adjustments and Lifestyles

From a psychoanalytic standpoint, the unconscious sometimes emerges dramatically in an adjustment reaction—a disturbed condition that may include diverse symptoms, ranging from personal discomfort to socially disruptive behavior. Bertha's phobia about black snakes, her puzzling cough, inexplicable deafness and blindness, and paralyses with no medical bases revealed adjustment reactions described today in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—IV, cited earlier as the basic guideline for clinical diagnoses in our times. In psychoanalysis, such instances of anxiety and inexplicable illness, formerly called neuroses, may be viewed as symbolic expressions of unconscious conflicts that partly burst through the repression.

Even a person's lifestyle may reflect unconscious motivation, as Alfred Adler suggested. Here lifestyle refers

SAGE © 2008 by Sage Publications, Inc.

SAGE Books

Page 16 of 28 SAGE Books - Psychology: Six Perspectives

broadly to a person's way of living—the activities, friends, possessions, and entertainments one chooses to pursue or ignore.

Repressed conflict in the oral state, Freud speculated, may result not only in a dissatisfied, distrustful outlook on the world but also in more specific lifestyle patterns. Years after deprivation of oral needs in childhood, an adult may display an oral-passive character, evident in excessive eating and drinking, special concerns about nutrition, persistent demands for love and attention, and a marked dependency on others for support. Another adult, also deprived in the oral state, may exhibit instead a resentful lifestyle, called an oral- aggressive character: prone to hostility, envy, argument, and a generally contentious demeanor. In traditional psychoanalysis, both these very different overt reactions may be symbolic expressions of a fixation at the first psychosexual stage.

In the anal stage, conflict over toilet training may result in a fixation. After experiencing overly strict training procedures in childhood, a person may become unconsciously defiant, exhibiting an anal-expulsive character in an incurably messy, tardy, irresponsible mode of life. Or, to make amends for earlier training failures, an anal-retentive character may demonstrate an excessively clean, prompt, trustworthy lifestyle. For any fixation, symbolic expressions may vary from one individual to another.

Many modern psychologists resist these specific conjectures about psychoanalytic “characters,” for they lack substantial empirical evidence. But most accept the broader, general implications: Childhood experiences can shape adult lifestyles. As for Freud, he extended this thinking into the Oedipus-Electra stage, as noted earlier.

Bertha's overly strenuous nursing at the time of her father's illness depicts a temporary lifestyle, lasting a few months, and suggests an Electra theme. Despite her family's wealth, she chose this sacrificial role, which justified her nights alone with her beloved father, the only man toward whom she showed deep affection. She experienced intimacy through nursing, bathing, and perhaps even toileting him. Without full awareness, this devoted daughter partly fulfilled the Electra wish. In addition, this lifestyle offered self-punishment for her aggressive impulses toward her parents, who favored Wilhelm and restricted her social life. Bertha described her mother as a stove, too hot for close comfort. From the psychoanalytic perspective, unconscious sexual and aggressive urges lay behind her martyrdom for her father and resistance to her mother (Noshpitz, 1984).

A more enduring dimension of Bertha's lifestyle occurred in her efforts to control virtually everyone with whom she associated. Earlier, in Vienna, she totally controlled polite conversations, even in gentle social gatherings. She controlled her therapy with Breuer, setting an entirely new direction—until it overwhelmed him. She controlled her father's nightly care—until it overwhelmed her. Around-the-clock nursing would have left her and other family members free for more personal companionship with him. The fact that they accepted her sacrificial role bears further testimony to her capacity for control. She demanded and obtained this self- destructive lifestyle (Noshpitz, 1984).

And when she became ill herself, she controlled the family in a very different way, forcing the members into caretaking roles for her—or at least forcing them, even Wilhelm, to behave in ways properly respectful of a sick person. From the psychoanalytic perspective, these efforts at sacrifice and control, both direct and indirect, stand as symbols of Bertha's unconscious struggle against the gender restrictions and discrimination she experienced with her parents, her brother, and her culture. These efforts continued as a lifestyle throughout her adulthood, even into her later years.

Totally alone during his early work with Bertha, Breuer had available no theory of personality, especially concerning her control efforts and the erotic nature of her fantasies (Holzman, 1984). She was sexually naïve, and Breuer was naïve about her undeveloped sexuality and its possible contribution to her illness. Through the storytelling procedure, he relieved Bertha's painful feelings stemming from recent events—her father's illness and death, abuse by Wilhelm, and an overprotective mother. But those stories never became pathways to deeper explorations of earlier events. Breuer's therapy remained essentially on the surface.

Several years later Freud constructed an extensive theory of personality from which to work. With this background, he helped his patients to retrace earlier events, beginning with the unconscious conflicts that brought the person to therapy in the first place. Then he guided the patient in the difficult process of moving

SAGE © 2008 by Sage Publications, Inc.

SAGE Books

Page 17 of 28 SAGE Books - Psychology: Six Perspectives

through the barrier of repression, aiming to encounter the earlier traumatic events that usually had occurred in childhood. Possessing a more mature ego than in childhood years, the adult in therapy has far greater promise for viewing long-forgotten childhood conflicts with greater understanding, tolerance, and acceptance (Figure 4.3).

Figure 4.3 A Theoretical Foundation for Psychoanalysis. The upper portion of the figure shows the demands on the ego in managing conflict. The lower portion shows the behavioral expressions of repressed conflict. The darkened sequence—conflict, repression, and fixation—depicts the core of unconscious motivation, standing at the center of psychoanalytic theory, holding the pieces together. The arrows show the sequence of events in the origins and outcomes of unconscious motivation. A person in therapy progresses in the opposite direction, working upward against the arrows

SAGE © 2008 by Sage Publications, Inc.

SAGE Books

Page 18 of 28 SAGE Books - Psychology: Six Perspectives

Psychoanalysis as a Therapy

Neither Freud nor Breuer nor anyone else employed psychoanalytic therapy with Bertha. Her troubles antedated the theory and therapy. Freud was advancing toward these ideas; Breuer went on to other interests; and Bertha was showing some improvements in her health.

In the meantime, Freud learned about Bertha from two friends, one younger and the other much older than he. The first, Martha Bernays, later became his wife. She had known Bertha since their schooldays, and the young women met on several occasions. The second friend told Freud about Bertha in professional dialogues. Freud's older friend in this instance was none other than Bertha's former therapist, one Josef Breuer.

By this time, Breuer had concluded that hysteria was not caused by some physical defect, especially when none could be found and the illness moved from place to place in the person's body. He decided instead that extreme psychological stress could cause these problems and that a release from this stress could cause the symptoms to disappear.

Fascinated by Breuer's account, Freud declared that he would have continued treatment, if not for the sake of the patient, then for the sake of science. He regarded Breuer's approach as incomplete. It did not go beyond the symptoms to predisposing factors in childhood. In particular, Breuer never considered Bertha's unconscious conflicts.

So psychoanalysis did nothing for Bertha. It came after her illness. But she did something for psychoanalysis. Through Breuer, she stimulated Freud's thinking about these disorders and their treatments, thereby pioneering in the foundations of psychoanalysis as a psychotherapy.

But what would have happened if Bertha experienced her adolescent upheaval 15 years later? With her family's wealth, their Viennese background, and her mother's insistence on the very best treatment for her daughter, Bertha might well have become a patient in psychoanalysis.

Use of Free Association

Psychoanalytic therapy offers no certain route to the truth, but in contrast to other psychotherapies, it aims at uncovering unconscious thought. The analyst assists the patient, called the analysand, by offering a safe, facilitating environment for these explorations, enabling the patient to gain greater freedom of thought and action. Through these self-explorations, the patient develops self-understanding and increased mastery in the environment.

In traditional psychoanalysis, the sessions would be very different from those she experienced with Breuer. Like the archaeologist seeking to understand a buried civilization, the psychoanalyst searches beneath the surface, exploring long-forgotten roots of personal problems. The bowls and busts, ornaments, and other artifacts from ancient civilizations that littered Freud's consulting room gave testimony to his passion for the archaeologist's method. Much like the study of past life in a buried city, Freud and his patient painstakingly reconstructed an earlier scene from her life, piece by piece, using only fragmentary evidence—symptoms of one sort or another. For Freud, this task became inspiring and tedious; for the patient, it provoked distress. She was hard at work against herself, trying to bring forth the very experiences she wanted most to forget.

Freud stressed the search for a set of determinants. Seldom does the patient's problem arise from a single traumatic event. Instead, a number of smaller incidents become a group of provoking causes (Breuer & Freud, 1893). Sometimes the first incident leaves no mark and a later one of the same kind produces symptoms, and yet those symptoms would not have appeared without the earlier provoking incident. Hence, in removing the symptoms, all the provoking incidents must be taken into account.

In Breuer's presence, Bertha considered numerous emotional incidents directly, thereby weakening or eliminating the anxiety associated with them. But merely working through the symptoms in this way, without

SAGE © 2008 by Sage Publications, Inc.

SAGE Books

Page 19 of 28 SAGE Books - Psychology: Six Perspectives

considering their underlying causes, produced little long-term gain and no fundamental change in personality.

For probing beneath the symptoms, the chief psychoanalytic techniques include free association and interpretation. Freud discovered the first of these methods by listening to his patients.

Abandoning the traditional herbs, baths, electrotherapy, and even hypnosis, he tried to work with his patients' memories. As his patients lay on the couch with their eyes closed, he demanded that they recall some elusive event. He pressed for an answer, verbally and even physically, pushing with his hand on their brows. One patient rebuked him for this technique; he made her forget something she was just about to remember! After that, Freud became less intrusive and more dependent on the meanderings of the patient's mind. Later patients taught him to go even more slowly and to take these mental wanderings very seriously.

Eventually, Freud presented each patient with simple, explicit instructions. He told them to be completely straightforward; just say whatever comes to mind; never omit anything too embarrassing or painful to share with others. Throughout his psychoanalytic sessions, he reminded his patients of this pledge, required of anyone who participated in his psychoanalytic therapy (Freud, 1926).

This unrestrained expression of ideas, letting one thought lead to another, that to another, and so forth, is called free association. Here the word free means free from any instructions. These uncontrolled thoughts and memories, encouraged by the relaxing freedom of lying on the couch, became the primary material in psychoanalysis as a therapy. With this method, Freud claimed a technique for exploring the unconscious.

But free association is never entirely free. Inevitably, the analysand engages in some sort of selection process. Complete honesty is also an impossible task. The overall aim is to speak as freely as possible.

Trying to put aside every reservation, patients attempt to report all their thoughts, no matter how stupid, insulting, or strange they seem. Of course they resist sharing some of them, and they are unable to retrieve certain memories. In this difficult and taxing task, honesty is the key factor. Nothing must be consciously withheld, nothing censured.

In the process of interpretation, the analyst encourages the patient to examine carefully the thoughts brought forth in free association and to search for any unexpected or symbolic meanings. The patient tries to think beyond the mere facts, or perceived facts, and discover their meanings, their particular importance in one's own life. At appropriate moments the analyst encourages interpretations, raises a question about the patient's reports, or simply supports further inquiry. Often, these efforts at interpretation lead to new views of the free associations, which sometimes concern earlier conflicts that have been disguised through repression by the childhood ego. To be resolved, the conflicts must be identified, re-experienced, and then accepted by the more mature, adult ego.

Among all the techniques in psychoanalytic therapy, interpretations are the most susceptible to investigator bias. Events are viewed as endowed with meanings about which even the behaving individual may be unaware. Symbolism becomes a central concern, and the interpretation of these symbols remains a speculative endeavor. The analyst may interpret events in therapy in ways consistent with his or her own wishes, expectations, or hypotheses, unintentionally or otherwise misconstruing the data in various ways. In the context of investigator bias, the analyst has the potential to influence the behavior of the analysand, the collection of data, and the interpretive process.

When Bertha sat alone with her father on that fateful night in Ischl, awaiting the surgeon, she experienced for the first time her most frightening dreamlike hallucination—a black snake crawling toward her father, followed by many black snakes crawling out of the walls. Breuer never encouraged any interpretation of this recurring, possibly phallic, image. Had he done so in the classical psychoanalytic manner, which was not then available, Bertha's concerns about sexuality might have come to the fore. Acknowledging these feelings would have created opportunities for Bertha to begin to incorporate adult sexuality into her own life. Instead, these feelings were displaced onto Breuer who, as a surrogate parent, also was unprepared to deal with them.

Bertha had never been in love—at least to the point that it replaced her relationship with her father.

SAGE © 2008 by Sage Publications, Inc.

SAGE Books

Page 20 of 28 SAGE Books - Psychology: Six Perspectives

Instead, things seemed to be reversed. Her relationship with her father remained ascendant over all potential love relationships with peers (Breuer, 1882). If she ever reached this idea in therapy, the interpretations presumably would have revealed Electra themes.

Resistance and Transference

In therapy, the most important interpretations focus on two events: resistance and transference. They suggest promising sites for exploration of the unconscious.

Resistance is understood as patients' unwillingness to examine their behavior. Anything that patients do to obstruct access to their unconscious constitutes resistance. Because of shame, distrust, or any other reason, patients may prevent further progress in therapy by remaining silent, rejecting the analyst's views, missing appointments, arriving late, forgetting things, speaking to other issues instead, or becoming more disturbed and thereby avoiding the responsibilities of free association. These acts arise when their confrontations with the unconscious become too intense. They are the ego's attempts to maintain repression.

The analyst aims to clarify these avoidances in patients' free associations. More subtle resistances involve various defense mechanisms of the ego. They make interpretation a challenging task. If interpretation becomes abrupt, confrontational, or highly speculative, it may simply increase, rather than diminish, patients' resistance.

When successful, the interpretation of resistance increases patients' awareness of themselves and competence in free association. At the same time, it increases the sphere of activity outside therapy (Schwartz, 2003).

If Bertha had been in psychoanalysis during her illness, some of her bodily symptoms might have been interpreted as resistance. They would have prevented her from engaging in therapy, as they did at times with Breuer. When Bertha could hardly speak, even in her native tongue, she certainly could not have entered into a psychoanalytic dialogue. When she became intermittently deaf and blind and unable to move, she was shielded from family activities, potential topics of conversation in therapy. Her extensive loss of memory would have further precluded participation in therapy (Noshpitz, 1984). These massive, inexplicable adjustment reactions suggested a resistance not only to therapy but also to life itself.

Resistance and transference can be usefully compared. In resistance, patients hold back. They do not confront their problems. The existence and nature of those problems are inferred on the basis of patients' avoidance reactions. In transference, patients express their problems, consciously and unconsciously. They re-enact earlier issues, using the therapist as a substitute for other people.

Bertha's fantasy pregnancy probably did not occur, but other evidence suggests that she developed a strong affection for Breuer. The pregnancy myth dramatizes the intimacy in the patient-therapist relationship, which creates the potential for transference—a subject of intense interest in psychoanalysis.

“This personal influence is our most powerful dynamic weapon,” said Freud, speaking of that relationship (Freud, 1926). He was referring to transference, a process in which patients direct toward the analyst emotional reactions originating with other people in their lives, often their parents. The analyst does nothing explicit to provoke these reactions. But by maintaining an appropriate reserve, the analyst creates opportunities for transference.

Most analysts readily accept transference. The patient needs to re-experience some unresolved emotional problems, and the transference relationship supplies an opportunity to do so. It meets earlier needs still active in the patient.

To facilitate this process, the analyst maintains neutrality, engaging in neither scorn nor praise, not taking sides in any expression of conflict. Under these conditions, the patient's unconscious concerns are most likely to emerge. The analyst also refrains from self-disclosure, which may obstruct transference and thereby hinder the analytic process. Even sitting face to face during the therapy sessions may diminish the analyst's

SAGE © 2008 by Sage Publications, Inc.

SAGE Books

Page 21 of 28 SAGE Books - Psychology: Six Perspectives

neutrality. Bertha developed a transference reaction toward Breuer who, in fact, did go beyond the bounds of neutrality. Today the therapist is expected to keep a certain distance from the patient, but the transference relationship develops anyway, regardless of age, gender, or social class. It is a compulsive kind of love, anger, admiration, fear, or whatever, expressed toward the therapist.

“One would have thought that the patient's relation to the analyst calls for no more than a certain amount of respect, trust, gratitude, and human sympathy,” Freud continued. “Instead, there is this falling in love, which itself gives the impression of being a pathological phenomenon” (Freud, 1926).

This love grows insistent, resulting in affection and satisfaction, called positive transference. It shows its opposite as well, a readiness to hostility and revenge if thwarted, known as negative transference. In both instances, the patient displaces or projects onto the analyst unconscious thoughts and feelings originating with earlier figures in his or her life and intimately connected with the origins of personal problems. The transference process, another form of symbolic behavior, brings this repressed material into awareness, where it can be reconsidered and understood, intellectually and emotionally.

By responding emotionally to the undemonstrative analyst, patients reveal formerly hidden aspects of their reactions toward other people. They reproduce them tangibly, as if they were occurring at the moment, rather than arising through memory.

By his age and experience, Breuer partly replaced the father that Bertha had so recently lost. Providing sleep, nourishment, and the occasion for bedtime stories, he also replaced a nurturing mother. As a devoted, appealing personality, he offered the image of an imagined lover. With this potential for meeting several unmet needs in Bertha, it was almost inevitable that she would displace onto him all sorts of feelings originating with her father, mother, Wilhelm, and other important persons in her life. If Breuer had remained as therapist and allowed this positive transference to continue, Bertha might have experienced differently that traumatic dream about the snakes at her father's bedside. In addition, she might have perceived in new ways scenes from her childhood—scenes in which she experienced anger over Wilhelm's preferential treatment, resentment of the restrictions on her social life, fear of separation from her father, hostility toward her mother, and perhaps guilt over the deaths of her sisters, all likely remnants of repressed childhood conflict.

When successfully interpreted and incorporated by the patient, transference, like resistance, increases the person's self-awareness and competence. It creates psychological freedom, especially when there are opportunities for practice outside the psychoanalytic setting (Schwartz, 2003).

But transference had not been recognized in Breuer's time. He had no idea that he had accidentally discovered this condition, a most fundamental phenomenon in psychoanalysis and commonly observed in many psychotherapies today. He thought Bertha's affectionate response was unique to their relationship. He certainly did not view it as a therapeutic opportunity. Had he seen its potential and worked with this powerful opportunity, the whole outcome of her therapy might have been different. Eventually she might have confronted her restricted sexuality as well. Rather than achieving temporary relief from symptoms, she would have gained a more permanent alleviation of her illness.

Instead, Breuer's abrupt departure made Bertha worse. He left her in the midst of these emerging feelings.

Breuer had developed a special affection for Bertha and made a sustained commitment to her, one that increased during the therapy. His final report described her “remarkably shrewd powers of reasoning … highly developed gifts of fantasy and poetry … and very lively compassion” (Breuer, 1882). His interest in her went beyond the normal call of duty.

Such reactions on the part of the analyst may impede the treatment process. In countertransference, the therapist develops a strong emotional reaction to the patient, experiencing feelings aroused by the patient. These responses may disrupt the therapist's neutrality. As the therapist's reaction to the patient's transference, countertransference is not a therapeutic technique. It can become a serious obstacle in therapy.

But the analyst who can manage countertransference may find it useful. By observing his or her own

SAGE © 2008 by Sage Publications, Inc.

SAGE Books

Page 22 of 28 SAGE Books - Psychology: Six Perspectives

feelings, the analyst may gain insight into the reactions the patient arouses in other people. The analyst may understand how the patient makes others feel when they become associated with that person.

In any case, the therapeutic relationship is not intended to be romantic or sexual. In fact, there is tacit agreement that it must be asexual. If it becomes sexual, it changes dramatically and irreparably. A therapist who becomes a lover cannot be endowed with other roles according to the patient's diverse needs.

“To yield to the demands of the transference,” Freud cautioned the therapist, referring to its sexual potential, “… is not only justly forbidden by moral considerations but is also completely ineffective as a technical method for obtaining the purpose of the analysis” (Freud, 1926).

Freud spoke here not only about love but also about anger, resentment, and related feelings. The therapist cannot succeed by submitting to these entreaties or by striking some compromise with the patient. The only useful solution is to trace these emotional reactions back to the patient's past, confronting them as they were originally perceived by the patient. As a rule, the prototype of the transference reaction has occurred in the patient's childhood relationship with one or both parents.

Even more than the other techniques in psychoanalysis, transference can foster a catharsis, which is a release of deep emotional tension. A catharsis offers a discharge of anxiety, a purging of feelings, a sense of relief.

Metaphorically speaking, the goal in therapy is to give that distracted Londoner, daily passing a memorial to the Great Fire, a prolonged safe cry, enabling him to confront fully his disruptive past. He does so as an adult, yet in the security of a confidential relationship. Under these conditions, he becomes able to understand and accept what has happened and to look to the present and future. He passes the monument without turmoil.

In a therapeutic catharsis, age works in a person's favor. An event from which a childish ego might have retreated in fear years earlier may seem to the stronger, adult ego as far less important, even trivial (Freud, 1926). The anxiety associated with the experience thereby becomes weakened or eliminated.

Through this expressive process, Bertha's ego presumably would have been released from its vigilant repression of childhood conflicts and restored to its command over the id. With her ego freed for more productive adult tasks, she would have become more openly concerned about her delayed sexuality, insistence on control over others, resentment of gender discrimination, and her irrational demand for the sacrificial role. With this increase in self-knowledge, she would have attained greater satisfaction and competence in life.

Breuer's method was cathartic. It enabled Bertha to re-enact the traumatic events in her father's illness, relieving some of her symptoms. But it was not a deep excavation. It did not go into the unconscious origins of her problems, including sexuality. It was not psychoanalysis.

Yet Freud openly regarded Bertha's case as the beginning of psychoanalysis. He and Breuer co-authored a major early book beginning with her case. She is the patient who, as Anna O., prompted the development of depth therapy, thereafter called psychoanalysis. She is the patient who, through Breuer's work and Freud's influence, stimulated the whole broad movement of modern psychotherapy, insight therapy, or personal counseling, as the many different “talking cures” are known today.

“Much is won,” exulted Freud, speaking of his therapy, “if we succeed in transforming hysterical misery into common unhappiness” (Freud, 1895).

But after Breuer's abrupt departure, Bertha experienced more than common unhappiness. She experienced relapses.

Would psychoanalysis have altered this pattern? Would breaking the barrier of repression have alleviated some of Bertha's problems? Of course we cannot know. She never even began psychoanalytic therapy. But Freud, in simple terms, reminds us of its basic goal: to make the unconscious conscious.

SAGE © 2008 by Sage Publications, Inc.

SAGE Books

Page 23 of 28 SAGE Books - Psychology: Six Perspectives

Commentary and Critique

Any effort to understand what has made our conception of humanity in the 20th century distinct from the views in preceding eras must give attention to psychoanalysis. It presented a whole new and dramatic outlook on the human condition. But despite his extensive scientific training and early success in laboratory research, Freud promoted psychoanalysis without the usual scientific caution, even for his day. Perhaps he viewed his unrestrained literary approach as necessary for the prompt response he sought. In any case, this literary approach raises the major objections to psychoanalysis today.

Critics view psychoanalysis as more art than science, and indeed Freud was a gifted writer, who was awarded the Goethe Prize in 1930, recognizing outstanding achievements in literature. Resistance to Freud's science arises largely on three related bases. First, it falls short of the usual standards for empirical research. Second, it appears to be contaminated by investigator effects. Third, it raises the issue of falsifiability.

With regard to research standards, Freud used the time-honored case study, but he collected and reported presumably empirical data in casual fashion. He did not study representative samples of people, collect data rigorously, maintain systematic records, or use statistical measures to evaluate the outcomes. Moreover, he did not show the usual scientific caution in reporting his findings. Rather than using tables and graphs and objective prose, he argued by analogy, metaphor, and storytelling, speculating about unseen forces in the lives of his patients, giving free rein to his creative imagination. His compelling language made persuasive reading for his literary-minded audience, but it raises objections today among more scientifically inclined people.

In fact, Freud's case studies of therapy served as the only evidence of his major findings. But even favorable therapy outcomes do not validate psychoanalysis as a theory or a therapy. A patient can show improved adjustment without any therapy at all—and for any number of other reasons ranging from improved finances to increased friendships. Traditional case studies simply do not include sufficiently controlled conditions to permit substantial scientific conclusions about cause-and-effect relationships.

A second point of resistance to Freud's research methods arises from investigator effects. Without awareness, the investigator may foster the outcomes he or she expects to obtain, making the research results unreliable. They are not attributable solely to the events under investigation.

Investigator effects stem from three types of errors. In errors of observation, even conscientious and careful investigators may make mistakes, seeing whatever they hope or expect to see, rather than what actually happens. In errors of interpretation, they may unintentionally reach conclusions not warranted by the data, such as Freud's overgeneralizations from his own self-analysis. And in errors through cueing, investigators' personal style and nonverbal activities, without their awareness, may inform the participants about the responses they seek and anticipate. Thus, critics have declared that, amid the compelling setting of his consulting room and his determination to develop an extensive system of psychological thought, Freud could not avoid guiding his patients' thinking, making suggestive comments or inquiries, and recalling their monologues in a manner consistent with his own thinking. These errors were most likely in discussions about sexuality, which Freud deemed most important in the development of personality (Crews, 1998). And they become evident through the feminist critique of the gender bias in Freudian theory.

Resistance to Freud's science also arises from some of his hypotheses and theories, apart from his research methods. Here we encounter the third problem, testing his ideas. Some cannot be verified or refuted. This condition, called the falsifiability problem, occurs when there is no possibility of demonstrating that a particular hypothesis or concept may be wrong. There is no way to test the hypothesis. It is untestable.

The potential for refutation, or falsification, plays a central role in research. A testable hypothesis can be shown to be true or false. Consider this hypothesis, “The devil can dance on the head of a pin.” That untestable and therefore irrefutable hypothesis has no place in scientific inquiry. It demonstrates the falsifiability problem. No scientific procedure can show it to be incorrect.

Behind every dream, Freud hypothesized, lies an unfulfilled childhood wish. He knew this dramatic statement

SAGE © 2008 by Sage Publications, Inc.

SAGE Books

Page 24 of 28 SAGE Books - Psychology: Six Perspectives

about childhood and childhood sexuality would be criticized. And that has been the case; it raises the falsifiability problem. Imagine the difficulty in demonstrating that an adult dream does not inevitably date back to some obscure, unfulfilled wish in childhood.

The concept of repression, in particular, limits the falsifiability of certain psychoanalytic ideas. If someone behaves aggressively, she has a problem with aggression; repression has been unsuccessful. If a person never displays even a mild form of aggression, then she too may have a problem—which has been repressed. If someone shows a normal amount of aggressive behavior, then repression has produced a balance between aggressive and socially constructive impulses. The concept of repression has stimulated much research on unconscious mental processes, and that stands in its favor. But with no clear limits, it cannot be readily refuted.

Broadly accepted among the public, repression has received only mixed empirical support. Many difficult experiences are remembered quite clearly, suggesting that repression is not an automatic phenomenon. Difficult to test experimentally, it tends to be more impressive in postdiction—explaining something after the fact—than in prediction, one of the basic aims of science.

Without firm, empirical support, a perspective tends to lose its focus. Rationalism then proceeds in diverse directions. Psychoanalysis became increasingly fragmented on this basis and has been evolving since Freud's day. Numerous divergent theories now contribute to this perspective, as noted in the works of Jung, Horney, Adler, and Erikson.

In fact, the most substantial modification of psychoanalytic thought today lies in object relations theory, which emphasizes the emotional bond that human beings form with other “objects”—anything in real life or fantasy, including other people. Object relations include the capacity for loving relationships with other human beings, juxtaposed to self-interest and self-love. But the specific influences of this concept become difficult to assess because it is used in so many different ways and different contexts. In psychoanalytic theory, it represents a shift away from Freud's basic drives of sex and aggression toward the importance of relationships with others. In practice, the movement is away from the analyst's remote neutrality and toward a therapeutic alliance, recognizing the emotion in the therapeutic relationship and the here-and-now experience in this one-to-one encounter (Mitchell, 2000).

Today these derivative viewpoints, including those of neo-Freudians, stand as testimony to the influence of Freud's thought. Collectively called psychodynamic theory, they comprise a loose collection of approaches to personality and human development evolving from psychoanalysis. Compared with traditional psychoanalysis, they are primarily concerned with adult life, as opposed to childhood, and with the whole range of social responses, as opposed to the primacy of sexuality. The term psychodynamic is used broadly today to refer to any concern with the urging and checking forces in unconscious motivation, within or apart from theory or therapy. In this respect, modern psychoanalytic thinking is no longer the work of one person—Sigmund Freud.

In therapy, Freud expected to assist people in a matter of months, without requiring daily sessions. But shortly after his time, analysts began meeting their patients for several 50-minute sessions each week over a period of years. Recently, insurance companies and others have demanded a shorter, less extensive, less expensive therapy. Many contemporary analysts therefore have adopted modified psychoanalytic procedures. Known as psychodynamic therapy, most of these modified procedures are based on the assumption that awareness of unconscious conflict is essential to improvement in adjustment. However, these procedures focus more on the patient's present situation and less on the past, more on everyday relationships and less on early sexual matters, a therapy sometimes called “re-parenting.” These therapists often abandon the couch, partly to observe better the patient's gaze and body movements. But whatever the patient's demeanor, the emphasis on unconscious conflicts—the so-called depth factors—continues as the hallmark of this therapy.

Freud's supporters point to these diverse accomplishments, saying that it was not his purpose to develop an empirically based system of thought. That approach to human understanding was too slow for him. He left systematic research to others. In a more speculative style, he preferred to ask the right questions rather than to engage in the painstaking task of finding well-supported answers. His contributions lie in the first of the

SAGE © 2008 by Sage Publications, Inc.

SAGE Books

Page 25 of 28 SAGE Books - Psychology: Six Perspectives

idealized stages of modern science: forming hypotheses. His major ideas focused on unconscious mental processes, a broad and lively concern in current psychological research; childhood experiences, considered in the Western world today to have a long-lasting impact on the adult personality; and the inescapable role of conflict in the adult personality. He had no intention of completing the second and third of the idealized stages himself, testing and verifying these hypotheses. He laid the rational groundwork for countless follow- up investigations, an essential condition for successful science.

A pair of examples illustrates current empirical research on unconscious mental life. In the first, focusing on unconscious emotion, investigators interviewed 50 college students individually about their attachment experiences in childhood. Throughout each interview, which lasted approximately an hour, each participant wore a small, painless skin-conductance device on the dominant hand, yielding a completely unobtrusive measure of emotional arousal during discussions of childhood experiences. These discussions included early relationships with parents, incidents of distress, separation from parents, rejection by parents, and the consequences of these experiences on their personality. A careful debriefing followed, and as predicted, many participants who seemed most unperturbed, overtly indicating that they had no difficulties with parental separations and rejections, showed substantial physiological reactions to these questions. The investigators concluded that such participants effortfully engaged in activities to diminish awareness of disruptive earlier experiences (Dozier & Kobak, 1992). But the unconscious emotion apparently became expressed inwardly, if not outwardly.

A second illustration focuses on unconscious motivation, the thrust of psychoanalytic inquiry. Here college students completed individually a priming task, identifying among a list of words those related to achievement, such as “strive” and “success,” or to affiliation, such as “sociable” and “friend.” Then each participant worked as a partner with another person, presumably another participant, searching for unrelated words in five additional lists. But that “teammate,” an accomplice of the experimenter, intentionally performed at a very low level, seeming to become more humiliated as the experiment progressed, thereby placing the actual participant in a conflict situation. Each participant could attain a high achievement score by working hard alone or could respond to affiliation needs by slowing down to the pace of the presumed teammate. The results showed that the participants primed earlier with achievement-related words performed at a much higher level on the teamwork task than did the participants primed with affiliation-related words. Moreover, during the debriefing process, the participants showed no awareness that the priming task perhaps influenced their performance (Bargh, 1997).

As suggested by these experiments, Freud established major beachheads for many new lines of inquiry, ranging from the role of the unconscious in everyday life to childhood influences on the adult personality. More rational than empirical, he developed many hypotheses, but he did not test them in any substantial way. To expect him to accomplish the extensive, often tedious empirical research as well, after producing this provocative view of humanity, is asking too much of one human being. Freud did not promote psychoanalysis as a scientific enterprise. He described the grounds on which he arrived at his psychoanalytic conclusions.

Summary

Background of Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis emerged through the work of Sigmund Freud around the beginning of the 20th century, largely through his interpretation of the memories and dreams reported by people who lay on a couch as patients in psychotherapy. For Freud, a historical monument to some tragedy serves as a metaphor for psychoanalysis, which focuses on unconscious mental processes. The event is long past and poorly remembered, but it may evoke deep feelings, much as the unconscious memories of private difficulties can disrupt the routines of an individual's everyday life.

Key Terms: psychoanalysis, neo-Freudians, unconscious mental processes, unconscious cognition, unconscious motivation, conflict, repression, fixation, collective unconscious

Structure of Personality

SAGE © 2008 by Sage Publications, Inc.

SAGE Books

Page 26 of 28 SAGE Books - Psychology: Six Perspectives

1.

In traditional psychoanalysis, personality emerges from the interactions among three intrapsychic forces or components: the id, with its biological requirements; the superego, imposing social goals and restrictions; and the ego, which is the executive director of the personality, responsible for solving problems and thereby preserving the individual. The ego faces a clear challenge. It must deal with the demands of the id, standards of the superego, and also the limits of a specific external environment.

Key Terms: id, ego, superego

Development of Personality

Psychoanalysis emphasizes the importance of childhood experiences in the development of the adult personality. Among them, the tasks associated with sexual development become particularly influential because our greatest sensitivities and pleasures lie with sexuality, which develops through a series of early stages: oral, anal, and Oedipus/Electra. The child's frustrations in these developmental tasks, if repressed, can become fixations, establishing patterns of unconscious motivation in later life, extending into adult personal relationships and the various psychosocial crises.

Key Terms: psychosexual stages, oral stage, anal stage, feminine psychology, Oedipus complex, Electra complex, individual psychology, identification, psychosocial crises

Expressions of the Unconscious

Unconscious motivation arises from three sequential events often occurring in childhood: conflict, repression, and fixation. When a conflict or other traumatic event cannot be managed directly, it may be managed indirectly by the individual through unconscious forgetting, called repression. But repression is not complete and occurs at a cost. The repressed conflict seeks expression in disguised or symbolic form in everyday behavior: through dreams, inexplicable mistakes, defense mechanisms, adjustment reactions, and even the individual's lifestyle.

Key Terms: symbolic behavior, latent content of dreams, Freudian slip, defense mechanism, adjustment reaction, lifestyle

Psychoanalysis as a Therapy

In psychoanalytic therapy, the patient uses free association to say whatever thoughts come to mind, no matter how repugnant, with the aim of bringing forth repressed conflicts. By interpreting these free associations, the patient attempts to understand their deeper, personal significance. The patient's resistance to discussing certain events and his or her transference of emotional reactions onto the analyst provide promising pathways into the unconscious conflicts. The overall aim is to enable the patient to break the barrier of repression, making the unconscious conscious and thereby leading a freer life with less tension.

Key Terms: free association, interpretation, resistance, transference, countertransference, catharsis

Commentary and Critique

The view of humanity presented in traditional psychoanalysis arose through doubtful science, based on informal ways of collecting and reporting the data in case studies and with the potential for investigator effects influencing the research results. In addition, certain psychoanalytic theories raise the falsifiability problem, for they are untestable. They cannot be demonstrated as correct or incorrect.

Key Terms: falsifiability problem, object relations theory, psychodynamic theory, psychodynamic therapy

Critical Thinking

To enhance team unity, a professional baseball team recently posted this sign:“No egos allowed in this clubhouse.” Based on Freud's original conception of the ego, indicate your reaction to this

SAGE © 2008 by Sage Publications, Inc.

SAGE Books

Page 27 of 28 SAGE Books - Psychology: Six Perspectives

2.

3.

prohibition. A man in psychoanalytic therapy becomes angry with his analyst about an irrelevant, minor issue. What process may be taking place? How may it foster the therapeutic goal? Does the falsifiability problem seem more prevalent in psychoanalysis or in biological psychology? Support your opinion.

• psychoanalysis • defense mechanisms • patients • personality • conflict • motivation • sexuality • ego • unconscious • persons

http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452224862.n4

SAGE © 2008 by Sage Publications, Inc.

SAGE Books

Page 28 of 28 SAGE Books - Psychology: Six Perspectives