Week 2 Psychoanalytic Theory Fall 09
You will sometimes hear psychoanalysis referred to as depth psychology – the study of man and all that pertains to him in terms of the magnitude of the human personality and the dimensions of the life experience that underlie and transcend consciousness. It is also called the First Force in Psychology. Local psychoanalytic society: http://www.asppaustin.org/
Fenichel (1945) wrote “There are many ways to treat neuroses but only one way to understand them – psychoanalysis.”
• Background on psychoanalytic theory
• Freud was considered the father. Jung and Adler broke from Freud and developed own theories. We will talk briefly about Jung today, and will cover Adler in our next class.
• Freud lived 1856-1939. Father had been previously married with children. Freud had a nephew who was older than he was. Father was 20 years older than mother and very authoritarian. Mother was very protective. Lived during Victorian era in Vienna . He was the oldest and considered the favorite. He was a neurologist and became interested in healing mental disorders. He used his own dreams and wishes as material for analysis and grounding for his theory. He had intense friendships, demanded loyalty to his theories, and quickly ended relationships with those who disagreed.
• Psychoanalytic framework is comprised of:
• i. Philosophy of human nature – who we are
• ii. Method of personality development – how we develop
• iii. Method of psychotherapy – how to treat
• Key concepts
• Freud believed human nature is deterministic
• i. Future behavior determined within first 6 years of life
• ii. One's unconscious motivations and instinctual drives determine behavior
• iii. Begins with belief that most people are unhappy and the unhappiness stems from every traumatic or inadequate experience that set up internal conflict
• Instincts
• i. All instincts arrive from 2 basic ones
• Eros – life instincts. Libido – total energy available of Eros. The libido serves to neutralize the destructive tendencies that are also present
• Thanatos – death instinct. Accounts for aggressive drives. Aim of death instinct is to destroy things. Unconscious wish to die or hurt themselves or others. Final aim is to lead what is living into an inorganic state.
• Structure of personality
• i. Individuals psyche contains 3 elements which operate together:
• id – infant is all id. Id is primary source of all psychic energy; contains the instincts. The id seeks pleasure and generally remains in the unconscious.
• ego – serves to mediate between the id and external reality. Postpones and modifies impulses until impulses can be safely expressed. The ego strives to reduce tension (reduction of tension is felt as pleasure). An increase in tension is felt as not pleasurable and this creates anxiety. The ego will withdraw to sleep when it wants to disconnect from external world.
• 3 types of anxiety: Reality – fear of danger from the external world. This is in keeping with degree of real danger. Neurotic – fear that instincts will get out of hand and will do something later regret. Moral – fear of one's own conscience.
• superego – judicial branch of psyche. Serves a moral code, which has been inherited through parents and culture. Strives for perfection whereas the id is influenced from heredity, the influence of the superego is taken over from other people. It serves to limit satisfactions through rewards (pride) and punishment (inferiority and guilt). The superego develops during phallic stage and is linked to the Oedipal complex. Superego develops because of castration anxiety. Women are thought to have inferior moral development because they do not experience castration anxiety.
• Consciousness and unconsciousness
• i. The conscious mind is our awareness, what we know. This is a very small part of the knowledge we have.
• ii. The pre-conscious is that which we have easy access to. Things we knew and forgot or information we can easily retrieve.
• iii. The unconscious is material we do not have easy access to. It is out of awareness, but influences our behavior. Aim of psychoanalysis is to bring what is unconscious, conscious. Called uncovering.
• iv. The amount of effort it takes to make the unconscious conscious is a measure of resistance.
• v. When resistances relax as in sleep, unconscious material can come forward. Dreams therefore give us clues.
• vi. Pre-conscious material can also be cut off by resistances and become hard to reach. This causes neurotic disorders.
• vii. The id is linked to the unconscious, the ego to the preconscious.
Demonstrate Johari's window. Read section from Freud.
• Defense mechanisms: used to protect the ego. They either deny or distort reality and they operate on an unconscious level. Handout.
• i. Repression – involves removal of something from conscious mind
• ii. Regression – revert to early form of behavior
• iii. Reaction formation – express opposite impulse
• iv. Ritual and undoing – performing acts to negate disapproved thought or behavior
• v. Rationalization – intellectualizing, explaining failures/losses
• vi. Denial – distorting thoughts, feelings and perceptions
• vii. Displacement – shift impulses to a safe target
• viii. Projection – attribute one's own unacceptable desires to another
• ix. Sublimation – diverting sexual and aggressive energy to socially acceptable behavior
• x. Introjection – internalizing values/standards of others
• xi. Identification – identify with others to enhance self-worth
• xii. Compensation – masking perceived weakness or develop other traits
Defense mechanisms used in an effort to suppress anxiety. When use gets out of hand, abnormal behaviors develop. Psychotherapy involves strengthening the ego, reducing the superego, and expanding the awareness of the id. Recognize importance of resistance – look for defense mechanisms and try to lower them. Make it safe to face material.
• Defense mechanisms have 3 things in common:
• i. Each person's pattern of “self defense' seems to appear fairly early in life. The mechanisms we use are those we are usually successful with in warding off psychic pain. Defense mechanisms develop out of life's experiences.
• ii. When we say a person “develops” defense mechanisms we do not mean deliberately. Defense mechanisms operate unconsciously and must fool the person using it.
• iii. All of us develop defense mechanisms to protect ourselves from anxiety. The price we pay is the distortion of reality. A certain amount of distortion is normal and necessary but when the distortion is so extreme as to prevent an accurate view of the social world, a person then cannot cope with difficulties realistically and the defense mechanism becomes maladjustment.
• Development of Personality
• i. Freud developed 5 states of psychosexual development:
• Oral (birth to 1) – sucking is both for nourishment and pleasure. As baby teethes, oral-aggression begins (sadistic impulses). If child doesn't gain enough oral gratification, or if there is anxiety around process, libidinal energy may become permanently attached to oral activities and personality traits such as dependence, passivity, greediness, and indulgence in oral activities could develop.
• Anal (1-3) – issues of independence and power emerge. Experience frustration, discipline. Anal-aggressive personality – disorderliness, cruelty, stems from strict toilet training. Anal-retentive – orderly, stubborn, stingy – comes from too much praise in toilet training.
• Phallic (3-6) sexual activity grows. Child develops unconscious desire for parent of opposite sex. Children form attitudes from parents' response about what is “right' or “wrong”, masculine/feminine behavior. Development of sex-role stereotypes. Oedipal/electra complex.
• Latency (6-12) - period of reprieve from sexual turbulence. Time of developing relationships.
• Genital (12-18/up) – re-experience themes of phallic stage. Develop relationships with others, become responsible. If too much libidinal energy has been fixated in preceding states, ability to shift away from self and parents may not happen.
Case from Corey. Case of Tom. Clip from Sopranos.
• Erikson – developed psychosocial stages. Said that as we develop we establish a balance between social world and ourselves. Crisis happens at any stage, but there are certain developmental crises that move us along in our development.
• i. Infancy – trust vs mistrust (0-1)
• ii. Early childhood – autonomy vs shame and doubt (1-3)
• iii. Preschool age – initiative vs guilt (3-6)
• iv. School age – industry vs inferiority (6-12)
• v. Adolescence – identity vs isolation (12-18)
• vi. Young adult – intimacy vs isolation (18-35)
• vii. Middle age – generativity vs stagnation (35-60)
• viii. Later life – integrity vs despair (60+)
Note: In his later life, Erikson began to think about late-late adulthood and his wife wrote a 9 th stage to address the very old when we often return to a dependent state. She worked through the stages and talked about how as very old people we must face the same issues of trust vs mistrust, etc. because of the loss of our abilities.
In contrast to Freud, Erikson developed stages through adulthood. He believed that development did not stop with childhood. He also developed ego psychology – the ego's ability to gain mastery and cope with life's tasks, vs Freud's id psychology – personality development is shaped by instincts and intrapsychic conflicts.
• Jung – was a contemporary of Freud's. They met in Vienna in 1907 and Freud anointed him as his “scientific son and heir”. By 1913 Freud disowned Jung because Jung would not accept the sexual theory. Jung came from a family that was involved in the occult. His mother was a delusional hysteric with a split personality who believed their house was haunted by ghosts. His father was a minister in a mental hospital. His parents were poor and had an unhappy marriage. Jung was the 13 th child and the first to live past infancy. He was born in 1875 in Switzerland , was introverted, and had mystical visions, including one of God dropping excrement on a cathedral. He studied medicine and brought into his studies mythology, anthropology and religions. He became a psychiatrist and married a very wealthy Swiss heiress, which gave him the freedom to explore his theories. He openly carried on an affair with a former patient whom he called his “other wife”. Local Jungian society has workshops: www.jungsociety.com His theories are different from Freud's in that he believed:
• i. That humans are shaped not just by the past but also influenced by the future. We are constantly changing and growing, and move toward fulfillment.
• ii. We have within us constructive and destructive forces, and to be truly healthy we must integrate the various aspects of our personality.
• iii. The psyche is composed of the ego (center of consciousness), the personal unconscious (everything that has been repressed during your own development) and the non-personal unconscious also call the collective unconscious that is the deepest level of the psyche and includes all experiences of the universe. This collective unconscious is reflected in our dreams, and Jung's dream work is much more symbolic than Freud's. The collective unconscious holds the archetypes – the most important of which are the persona (mask), anima (masculine) and animus (feminine) and the shadow (dark side). Dreams are creative ways for us to express the struggles of the archetypes and move toward integration.
• iv. Mid-life is a time of transformation from a Jungian perspective. It is a transition point in which you realize that you have less time ahead than behind, and move toward greater integration of the other aspects of your psyche. He called this individuation – the integration of the unconscious with the conscious and psychological balance. We become more open to the unconscious forces and deepen the meaning in our lives.
• Psychoanalytic psychotherapy
• i. Primary goal is to make unconscious conscious. Seek growth of ego through analysis of resistance and transference, allowing the ego to solve the unconscious conflicts. Aim is to restructure the personality, not solve current problems.
• ii. Relationship – therapist remains anonymous to allow client to project feelings. Some more current psychoanalytically oriented (Sullivan) therapists are warm but detached. Focus is on resistances and interpretation of resistances. Work through transference feelings. Transference and counter transference – according to Carnavale, “However you are feeling about the client or responding to the client is probably what the client intended.”
• iii. Techniques and procedures – techniques are designed to have client gain insight and surface repressed material. Free association, dream analysis, analyzing and interpreting resistances and transference are used to gain intellectual insight and begin “working through” process. Dreams are the product of two conflicting forces of the mind – the unconscious childhood sexual wishes seeking discharge and the repressive activity of the mind. An inner censor distorts the representation of the unconscious wishes and makes them unintelligible.
• Contributions and limitations
• i. Provides comprehensive explanation of personality. Give unconscious a place and meaning. Highlights early childhood development and gives procedures for tapping into unconscious. Limitations are that it is long, expensive, ignores current problems, provides no action; ignores social/cultural influences. Traditionalist ignore feminist issues.
We are not going to cover the contemporary trends, but please read this section and be prepared to answer test questions from it.
Assignment: Lifestyle Inventory from student manual for next week.
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