This week we’re looking mainly at Sigmund Freud, one of the first thinkers in psychoanalysis. It would be wrong to say he was the founder, as philosophers like Schopenhauer looked at that side of human behaviour before him; but you could say he was the mother, I mean father of the psychoanalytical movement of the late 1800’s and into the 20th century.
As in last week’s lecture I think one of the most important aspects of Freud’s work to look at is the idea of a tripartite self. Freud looks at human behaviour in much the same way as Plato and Marx but where Plato had reason, spirit and desire as his three parts of the self, with reason controlling desire, Freud saw it as weak because people are irrational. Plato used the allegory of the chariot rider to explain how he saw the self, with desire and the spirit as the horses and reason as the rider, reining them in. I think, seeing the pessimistic way in which Freud tended to approach life, he would either reason as a weak rider, or desire at the reins, driving human behaviour like his Id. More of which later.
Freud’s theories are all encompassing; you cannot just take one aspect, as his psychoanalysis is a theory of everything, or at least it attempts to understand everything. In today’s psychology, Freud has less relevance to its practical application but in the lecture Brian pointed to a quote which sadly I forgot to note down who said it, “We all speak Freud now.” The influence of Freud on popular culture and media, even down to certain rules from society that we now take for granted, is we all have a similar construct now in our minds if we think about a therapist, we see the patient on a couch and some pseudo-Freud character sitting back asking odd questions until suddenly it’s about your mother. It was this, his obsession with infancy and sex being the cause of all psychological traumas that led to a breach with a former colleague Joseph Breuer. It was around this time, in isolation from his medical colleagues, that he published what Anthony Kenny calls the “most important of his works”, The Interpretation of Dreams. In this he argued that dreams were nothing more than neurotic symptoms which were actually a coded expression of sexual desires that we are repressing. The usual assumption here is that once again, as it’s Freud, all interpretations of dreams must be sexual, Freud himself debunked this saying, “The assertion that all dreams require a sexual interpretation, against which critics rage so incessantly, occurs nowhere in my Interpretation of Dreams ... and is in obvious contradiction to other views expressed in it.”According to the citation on the website where I found this quote, it was printed in the back of his 1919 edition of The Interpretation of Dreams.
When it comes to interpreting the pattern of the unconscious mind however, Freud goes back on all the nice things I’ve said and goes straight back to sex, and more importantly sexual development. Yes, we’re getting onto all things Oedipus and phallic. Freud believed sexual development is the key to the pattern of the unconscious mind. He looked at infantile sexuality, something the Daily Mail would get you done for, and concluded that it starts with an oral phase, in which pleasure is focused on the mouth. An anal stage follows, although this is not entirely explained in Kenny’s book. A little focused internet searching and a feeling of gladness that I didn’t just type “Anal Stage” into Google, turned up this “Toilet training is the child's key anal-stage experience, occurring at about the age of two years, and results in conflict between the Id (demanding immediate gratification) and the Ego (demanding delayed gratification) in eliminating bodily wastes.” If you’ve ever really enjoyed dropping the kids off at the pool, then this is why. Thanks Freud! He went on to say that the parental demands put on the child at this stage will affect them later in life. So if the parents make immoderate demands of the child, by over-emphasizing toilet training, it might lead to the development of a compulsive personality, a person too concerned with neatness and order. Toilet training can make you OCD, you heard it here last. We’ve now made it to the phallic stage where the child becomes focused on its genitals where, according to Freud, we suddenly become attracted to our mothers, jealous at our father’s possession of her. This is generally the most ridiculed of Freud’s ideas but he’d probably just say it was an unconscious desire, and the Ego is preventing the Id from getting what it wants. Fortunately for us, (and our mums), our hostility towards our fathers eventually makes us worry that he’ll castrate us, so we abandon any designs we might have on our mothers, (are you freaked out yet?) and gradually identify with our fathers. Freud did recognize that there was almost certainly a feminine equivalent of the Oedipus complex but it was never fully worked out in a convincing manner. I think he was right though, based purely on the fact that his own daughter Anna followed him into psychoanalysis to finish the work he started.
If Freud did anything he helped pioneer a philosophy of mind, he probably wouldn’t thank us for including him in a course where philosophy is the key topic, but like the empiricists he tried to understand everything and so his place here is valid. Freud would have seen himself as a scientist rather than a philosopher although when his theories have been made precise enough to allow for experimental testing, they have been shown to lack foundation. In Kenny’s book he claims that medical professionals disagree how far psychoanalytic techniques are effective forms of therapy and, if they are, where they derive their worth from. Freud has had an enormous effect on society though, in our understanding of mental illness, our appreciation of art and literature, and on interpersonal relationships of many kinds. All of us directly or indirectly have taken in a good deal of psychoanalytic theory. We often, with friends or with family, have talked unself-consciously of repression and sublimation. People who have never read Freud can quite easily identify their own and others’ Freudian slips. Kenny claims that no philosopher since Aristotle has made a greater contribution to the everyday vocabulary of psychology and morality and says that it is hard to fault the judgement of W.H. Auden who mourned Freud’s death in 28 intricate quatrains one of which he quotes and that is how I’ll end my seminar.
“If often he was wrong, and, at times, absurd,
To us he is no more a person
Now but a whole climate of opinion.”
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