Why Freud? Because the mind is complicated.
Tags: Philosophy, Freud, Psychology, Science, Sociology

People are heavily drawn to peace of mind and comfort, which constitutes an appeal for simplicity, it brings a feeling Illusion of certainty, black and white slates. Ask the average man about capitalism and communism and look at the embarrassing simplistic understanding of these 2 economic and political systems and their relation to society.

Matter of fact is, simplicity is an indication that we need psychoanalysis, people aren’t looking for the truth, they just want confirmation for their Bias

This is where simplicity affects people, everyone’s attracted to it. Because thinking a person with mistakes can be good is too complicated, It’s better to just be black and white so you don’t Have to trouble your brain with complications about him probably having the potential to be good. It’s too complicated to think that a person with a different skin Color or a religion is similar to you, it troubles you to think who You conceive as inferior is equal, wouldn’t it be simple to just rely on the fact that our visible differences differentiate us

Most advocates for psychoanalysis will highlight therapy in order to draw positivity to the method due to the relentless criticism it’s subjected to, while it’s also been proven to be applicable in helping people, psychoanalysis as a method is also a way to understand people and yourself and with that, the world, literature, cinema, your own culture In today’s civilization.

As for therapy? there is no cure. A certain amount of anxiety or neurosis is what it means to be human living among other Miserable humans. The goal of psychoanalysis for me is to move from absolute trauma to everyday misery by making conscious your unconscious thoughts and motives. It’s also important to remember that we live in the age of Prozac; it’s much easier to send a patient home with a bottle of pills than to identify the problem and help them reconcile with it by talking things out.

Ask yourself, Why do people do the things that they do? Before you know anything, know yourself first. Why did you do the things that you did? Why did you steal, hurt, cheat, lie, deny, over-compliment, hate? Have you ever self analyzed your own motives behind the actions you committed, did your rage or sexual desires override your self that made you commit such an act? Why do you feel bad about it after you did it, where does this feeling of guilt come from.

These are only questions that are asked for the self yet they tell us a lot about others As well, not everyone is the same, but most of us share the same psychic processes which we are oblivious of. Empirical science can’t tell us what our wife or friends or unconscious self thinks about/us unconsciously, so here psychoanalysis works as an observational science that works like detecting a friend had just used a logical fallacy and still insists on it, only psychoanalysis will go a step further to tell you the reason he did that is because he’s arguing for the sake of arguing. Knowing the motives behind the act through what is observable.

the genius of Psychoanalysis lies in it’s ability to detect the unconscious, the unconscious’s existence however has been proven and was even popularized by Freud but how do we gain insight to it if we’re unconscious of it by just talking? I will answer that but before I do, I’d rather quote the Father of Psychoanalysis himself first in his book “A general Introduction to Psychoanalysis”:

“The uneducated relatives of our patients — persons who are impressed only by the visible and tangible, preferably by such procedure as one sees in the moving picture theatres — never miss an opportunity of voicing their scepticism as to how one can “do anything “for the malady through mere talk.” Such thinking, of course, is as shortsighted as it is inconsistent. For these are the very persons who know with such certainty that the patients “merely imagine” their symptoms. Words were originally magic, and the word retains much of its old magical power even to-day. With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair; by words the teacher transfers his knowledge to the pupil; by words the speaker sweeps his audience with him and determines its judgments and decisions. Words call forth effects and are the universal means of influencing human beings. Therefore let us not underestimate the use of words in psychotherapy, and let us be satisfied if we may be auditors of the words which are exchanged between the analyst and his patient.”

While it is difficult to measure what exists in the unconscious, we know that even fleeting perceptions can leave lasting imprints on the unconscious mind long before one becomes aware of them. Like the fact a bad relationship affected your behavior and future handling of relationships, you see What lives in the unconscious mind can also eek out at any time, in different ways, from misspoken comments (Freudian slips) the usual “sorry I didn’t mean to say that” when you did mean it because it’s what has been on your unconscious mind. to random behaviors such as getting irked by a comment made that wasn’t aimed at you but since it was used on you in the past, you unconsciously responded to it negatively. From these unconscious “leaks/slips” one may gain a clearer understanding of his inner state and deeper motivations.

Everything you say, the way you said it, how you said it, why you said it, your reaction to what is being said, your response to what is said to you, your denial to what is said, your defensiveness to what has been said, is a window to your unconscious self, drives & motives. But In order to detect the unconscious and make it conscious, Freud constructed theories that better shape the human mind than our average perception of it can. These theories are tools to help our psychoanalysis to be more thorough and accurate in the process of unveiling the unconscious.

95 percent of brain activity is beyond our conscious awareness. Numerous cognitive neuroscientists have conducted studies that have revealed that only 5% of our cognitive activities (decisions, emotions, actions, behaviour) is conscious whereas the remaining 95% is generated in a non-conscious manner. This actually aligns with Freud’s analogy of an iceberg to describe the three levels of the mind.

Freud (1915) described conscious mind, which consists of all the mental processes of which we are aware, and this is seen as only the tip of the iceberg with the rest is deeply hidden under the sea. With that 5% you’re able to construct tools that act as accessories of unlocking what you’re unaware of about yourself. Just as man used accessories such as this world’s materials as extensions of himself from discovering fire to now having the ability to wipe out continents, psychoanalysis is an extension of the conscious mind to be more aware of it’s unconscious.

2. Freud’s personality Theory:

According to Freud, the human personality is divided into 3 parts, each I will mention in detail and give examples of.

A) The Id.

The id is the only component of personality that is present from birth, This aspect of personality is entirely unconscious and includes the instinctive and primitive behaviors that get us pleasure, so in this sense the id is the source of all psychic energy (Libido), making it the primary component of personality, the wild horse.

The id is driven by the pleasure principle, which strives for immediate and instant gratification of all desires, wants, and needs. If these needs are not satisfied immediately, the result is a state anxiety or tension.

For example, a young child had just gotten thirsty and the waiter is going to take some time to bring the water, the child will either whine and cry in demand for water to satisfy his thirst or he will drink from someone else’s table.

The id even produces opposing impulses simultaneously, compelling us to both move toward and away from something, or someone. Think of fatty foods, drugs, or an attractive stranger. to pursue rewarding experiences (such as food and sex) and avoid punishing ones (such as pain and rejection).

In an article by Mathew Gullow, he writes that “These days, much of the field has moved on to neuroimaging (“live” scanning of brain activity) and the direct observation of human brain function.”

Giving us insight that, this entirely different approach has also revealed three dissociable (brain) systems:

an approach system

an avoidance system

an inhibition system.

“the approach system responds to perceived rewards in our orbit, compelling us to approach them. It relates to the extraversion trait (sociability, goal-directedness).

Similarly, the avoidance system responds to punishments or threats, compelling us to avoid them. It relates to the neuroticism trait (anxiety-proneness).

The striatum (approach) and the amygdala (avoidance) are key brain structures in these systems. They are evolutionarily “old” structures that reside deep within our brain — areas similar to those of lower mammals, such as monkeys and rats.”

B) The Ego.

We deem taking someone else’s class of water as socially unacceptable, so our reality principle is what imposes itself on us when we can’t always get what we want because that’s reality, if we only acted on the pleasure responsible (Id) then we would have satisfied our urges whenever we felt like it without consideration to other people which means taking someone’s sandwich while he’s eating it, but instead we deal with reality, trying to meet the desires of the id in a way that is socially acceptable in the world. This means delaying gratification and helping to get rid of the tension the id feels if a desire is not met right away.

The reality principle is based upon the tension between the id and the ego. The reality principle is a development of the ego. This ability to defer gratification is a mark of maturity over the pleasure principle, which is the drive to avoid pain and prolong pleasure.

The Ego is commonly misidentified with the concept of egocentrism: the selfish or “bigheaded” personality, which is actually a trait of a person with a weak and undeveloped Ego. In fact this misunderstanding is the result of mis-translation. The definition of Ego in the west was set by Freud. The Ego develops after the Id when the baby realizes that he has to wait for his satisfaction to be met.

Freud compared the id to a horse and the ego to the horse’s rider. The horse provides the power and motion, yet the rider provides the direction and guidance. Without its rider, the horse may simply wander wherever it wished and do whatever it pleased. The rider instead gives the horse directions and commands to guide it in the direction he or she wishes to go

As with the ego, the inhibition system resolves conflict arising from within and between the approach and avoidance systems. It relates to trait impulsivity/constraint. It inhibits neural activity in these lower systems when their impulses conflict with each other, or when it detects that acting on an impulse would lead to negative consequences.

This allows us time to stop and think about a situation before acting, as with the ego. The orbitofrontal cortex and anterior cingulate are key brain structures in this system, located in the evolutionarily “newer”, more advanced frontal regions of the brain.

in many ways, we still view mental illness as being caused by an overwhelmed ego struggling to control a “super-charged” id.

With Neuroscientific theories arguing that addiction and obesity are caused by a weak inhibitory system that cannot control a hyperactive approach system. Anxiety disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and panic disorder are similarly characterised by a weak inhibitory system that cannot control a hyperactive avoidance system. One possible cause of these imbalances is the effects of early childhood stress (Fixation) on the brain, but it is certainly not the only cause.

This is also similar to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of personality, ego strength is the ability of the ego to deal effectively with the demands of the id, the superego, and reality. Those with little ego strength may feel torn between these competing demands while those with too much ego strength can become too unyielding and rigid. Ego strength helps us maintain emotional stability and cope with internal and external stress.

C) The SuperEgo.

The superego develops last, and is based on morals and judgments about right and wrong.

Morals are formed out of a person’s values. Values are the foundation of a person’s ability to judge between right and wrong. Morals build on this to form specific, context-driven rules that govern a person’s behavior. They’re formed from a person’s life experience and environment and are subject to opinion.

There are two parts of the superego:

The ego ideal which includes the rules and standards for good behaviors set by parental and other authority figures. Obeying these rules leads to feelings of pride, value, and accomplishment 2. The conscience includes information about things that are viewed as bad by parents and society.

Even though the superego and the ego may reach the same decision about something, the superego’s reason for that decision is based more on moral values, while the ego’s decision is based more on what others will think or what the consequences of an action could be on the individual.

So the kid’s ego knows drinking someone’s water is morally deemed wrong but he also knows if no one is looking there will be no consequences, the only thing that could stop the kid from doing something immoral is the Superego, the Superego imposes itself on the Ego to not do what’s deemed immoral or he will be tormented by his conscience/ego ideal (Superego).

Over the past 8 years, there’s been increasing research on metacognition, which is, quite simply, knowing that we know. In other words, metacognition is an awareness of our conscious thought processes. A clear-cut example is a contestant on a quiz show making a judgment about the extent to which she’s confident of her answer — she is thinking about her own thoughts.

While Freud’s concept of the superego played a more ethical role, encouraging the id and ego to follow moral rules, its role (much like metacognition) was to impose order. In a recent lecture on metacognition at this year’s Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness conference in Buenos Aires, cognitive psychologist Axel Cleeremans pointed out that Freud’s Id-Ego-Superego structure roughly matches onto the Unconscious-Conscious-Metacognition structure of the mind studied in neuroscience today.

Social rules and abstract notions such as fairness and morality are processed by parts of the inhibition system, thereby resembling the superego.

D) Clash of the Titans:

The id, ego and superego work together to create human behavior. The id creates the demands, the ego adds the needs of reality to meet those demands, and the superego adds morality to the action which is taken to meet those demands.

an imbalance between these elements would lead to a maladaptive personality.

An individual with an overly dominant id, for example, might become impulsive, uncontrollable, or even criminal. This individual acts upon his or her most basic urges with no concern for whether the behavior is appropriate, acceptable, or legal. Constituting weak and underdeveloped Ego and Superego

An overly dominant superego, on the other hand, might lead to a personality that is extremely moralistic and possibly judgmental. This person may be very unable to accept anything or anyone that he or she perceives as “bad” or “immoral.” And we can only imagine the level of psychological torment they’d inflict on their own if they ever committed an immoral act.

An excessively dominant ego can also result in problems. An individual with this type of personality might be so tied to reality, rules, and appropriateness that they are unable to engage in any type of spontaneous or unexpected behavior. This individual may seem very concrete and rigid, incapable of accepting change and lacking an internal sense of right from wrong.

After understanding the human personality in a Freudian perspective, understand that they’re not set in stone rules but you’re able to draw conclusions and theories from them for they one day may be proved accurate by testing or subjective analysis or even neuroscience.

3. I’m not denying that, but you’re wrong. (Defense Mechanisms)

In our self analysis or attempts at psychoanalyzing people, whether it’s facing ourselves with an unpleasant truth or in a discussion with someone, we notice that the unconscious is kept or held back by mechanisms used in a slightly visible way by the Ego to help protect the person from harm, these mechanisms are referred to in the psychoanalytic theory as “Defense Mechanisms.”

Defense mechanisms are psychological strategies that are unconsciously used to protect a person from anxiety arising from unacceptable thoughts or feelings.

We use defense mechanisms to protect ourselves from feelings of anxiety or guilt, which arise because we feel threatened, or because our id or superego becomes too demanding. They are not under our conscious control, and are non-voluntaristic.

Ego-defense mechanisms are natural and normal. But When they get out of proportion (i.e., used with frequency), neuroses develop, such as anxiety states, phobias, obsessions, or hysteria.

There are a large number of defense mechanisms;

We shall explore as much Defense mechanisms as possible with examples to better identify when a person could be blocking us from discovering the unconscious motives.

A) Identification with the Aggressor

A focus on negative or feared traits. I.e., if you are afraid of someone, you can practically conquer that fear by becoming more like them.

An extreme example of this is the Stockholm Syndrome, where hostages identify with the terrorists. E.g.,

Surprisingly this certain defense mechanism can even be a collective phenomena and possibly to not just an individual or a small group but an entire society, but that’s more food for thought for later articles.

B) Repression

This was the first defense mechanism that Freud discovered, and arguably the most important. Repression is an unconscious mechanism employed by the ego to keep disturbing or threatening thoughts from becoming conscious.

Thoughts that are often repressed are those that would result in feelings of guilt from the superego. For example, For example, a person who has repressed memories of abuse suffered as a child may later have difficulty forming relationships.

But we must not completely blind ourselves here, repression isn’t an inherently bad thing, by abstaining from punching someone in the face, you’re repressing your aggressive animal urges and avoiding the consequences of that act. We must remember that repression is as well an indication of civility.

C) Projection

This involves individuals attributing their own thoughts, feelings, and motives to another person (A. Freud, 1936).

Thoughts most commonly projected onto another are the ones that would cause guilt such as aggressive and sexual fantasies or thoughts.

For instance, you might hate someone, but your superego tells you that such hatred is unacceptable. You can ‘solve’ the problem by believing that they hate you. Or you can admit to yourself now while you’re reading this, How often have you judged and belittled another woman/man whose physical appearance/intellect/behavior was somehow displeasing to you? You might have felt an immense sense of distaste and dislike for this person, when in fact this hate is a protection mechanism veiling your own deeper self or body-image issues. Likely, you are deeply insecure about your own intellect, personality or body, and thus unconsciously project this loathing onto others.

D) Displacement

Displacement is the redirection of an impulse (usually aggression) onto a powerless substitute target (A. Freud, 1936).

The target can be a person or an object that can serve as a symbolic substitute. Someone who feels uncomfortable with their sexual desire for a real person may substitute a fetish.

Someone who is frustrated by his or her superiors may go home and kick the dog, beat up a family member, or engage in cross-burnings. This is actually becoming acknowledged more and more widely as we can tell lately by the Young people in China venting their frustration in an “anger room”, which allows them to smash up wine bottles and mannequins to release tension.

E) Sublimation

This is similar to displacement, but takes place when we manage to displace our emotions into a constructive rather than destructive activity (A. Freud, 1936). This might, for example, be artistic.

Many great artists and musicians have had unhappy lives and have used the medium of art of music to express themselves. Sport is another example of putting our emotions (e.g., aggression) into something constructive.

Sex is pleasurable; the desire for sexual pleasure, according to Freud, is one of the oldest and most basic urges that all people feel. However, we cannot have sex every time we desire. If we did, we could not accomplish the work we need to complete and maintain appropriate social behaviors and relationships. Therefore, we have to sublimate most of our desires for sexual pleasure, and turn that sexual energy into something else — such as writing a paper, or playing sports. Freud tells us that, without the sublimation of our sexual desires into more productive realms, there would be no civilization.

F) Denial

Anna Freud (1936) proposed denial involves blocking external events from awareness. If some situation is just too much to handle, the person just refuses to experience it.

As you might imagine, this is a primitive and dangerous defense — no one disregards reality and gets away with it for long. It can operate by itself or, more commonly, in combination with other, more subtle mechanisms that support it.

For example, my favorite way of seeing Denial unfold before my eyes is telling weed smokers that it’s a drug and addictive

G) Regression

This is a movement back in psychological time when one is faced with stress (A. Freud, 1936). When we are troubled or frightened, our behaviors often become more childish or primitive.

A child may begin to suck their thumb again or wet the bed when they need to spend some time in the hospital. Also from a social perspective I find that ‪Reminiscing the past and longing for it is actually an indication of being ignorant about and incapable of dealing with the present, it’s not about being knowledgeable about the past.

The inability to deal and cope with present reality results into mankind using the defense mechanism of regression

like someone under deep stress wishing to be a kid again because it was pure and nice as a child when it’s now in the present hard and cruel, mankind wishes to go back to “simpler times” even though their visualization of the past is biased and completely untrue ‬and doesn’t help the status quo

H) Rationalization

Rationalization is the cognitive distortion of “the facts” to make an event or an impulse less threatening (A. Freud, 1936). We do it often enough on a fairly conscious level when we provide ourselves with excuses.

But for many people, with sensitive egos, making excuses comes so easy that they never are truly aware of it. In other words, many of us are quite prepared to believe our lies.

In psychology and logic, rationalization or rationalisation (also known as making excuses) is a defense mechanism in which controversial behaviors or feelings are justified and explained in a seemingly rational or logical manner to avoid the true explanation, and are made consciously tolerable — or even admirable and superior — by plausible means. It is also regarded as an informal fallacy of reasoning.

I) Reaction Formation

This is where a person goes beyond denial and behaves in the opposite way to which he or she thinks or feels (A. Freud, 1936).

By using the reaction formation, the id is satisfied while keeping the ego in ignorance of the true motives.

Conscious feelings are the opposite of the unconscious. Love — hate. Shame — disgust and moralizing are reaction formation against sexuality.Usually, a reaction formation is marked by showiness and compulsiveness.

A person with beliefs that people of other ethnicities, cultures or races are inferior to their own may go out of their way to support and publically advocate for “minority” groups. Alternatively, someone who feels shame for their own culture may seek acceptance from another culture by adopting their beliefs and values.

Or a woman with temptations towards another man may act overly loving and caring towards her husband out of feeling guilty from the sense of shame she’s being subjected to by her conscience, so she compensates it with insincere exaggeration of affection.

Vaillant’s categorization:

Psychiatrist George Eman Vaillant introduced a four-level classification of defence mechanisms:

Level I — pathological defences (psychotic denial, delusional projection)

Level II — immature defences (fantasy, projection, passive aggression, acting out)

Level III — neurotic defences (intellectualization, reaction formation, dissociation, displacement, repression)

Level IV — mature defences (humour, sublimation, suppression, altruism, anticipation).

A reply to a skeptic article critiquing Freud:

“There is ample evidence that to have memories requires extensive development of the frontal lobes, which infants and young children lack.”

In classical psychoanalytic theory, the Oedipus complex for example occurs during the phallic stage of psychosexual development (age 3 — 6 years), when also occurs the formation of the libido and the ego; yet it might manifest itself at an earlier age.

But young children do remember facts in the moment such as who their parents are, or that one must say “please” before mom will give you candy. This is called “semantic memory.”

Until sometime between the ages two and four, however, children lack “episodic memory” — memory regarding the details of a specific event. Therefore The timeline for the development of Freud’s theory is aligned with the existence of an episodic memory

A reply to “psychoanalytic therapy is based on a search for what probably does not exist (repressed childhood memories), an assumption that is probably false (that childhood experiences cause the patient’s problems) and a therapeutic theory that has nearly no probability of being correct (that bringing repressed memories to consciousness is essential to the cure).”

A researcher named Ricky Kharawala did a study in which he investigated both cognitive and brain reactions that are connected with what he called “cognitive flexibility.” By cognitive flexibility, he was referring to the ability to update one’s behavior when one receives new information. He knew about research that showed that children who experienced early stressors in their lives tended in their adulthood to suffer from a great many mental health disorders. He wondered whether there was a link between such disorders and cognitive flexibility.

He did an experiment using teen-aged children who reported having suffered from emotional stress in their early childhoods. They were shown objects on a monitor that were linked with reward. Later they were shown the same objects, but they were now linked with punishment.

The children who had suffered from stress in early childhood showed signs of cognitive inflexibility and were unable to update their response to the objects. They also had a control group of children who hadn’t suffered early childhood stress, and they had more cognitive flexibility.

Writing about the result of the experiment with children who had cognitive inflexibility, Kharawala noted, “Their difficulties were especially obvious when they had to change their responses. Once they had learned the links between context, action and outcome, they had a hard time updating and adjusting their behavior when the situation changed — like when an event that had been linked to reward became linked to punishment, or vice versa.”

He and his colleagues then used a technique called “functional magnetic resonance imaging” to measure which areas of the subjects’ brains were active. “When abused teens saw pictures that led to reward, the putamen and anterior cingulate cortex — two regions of the brain that help people learn associations between their actions and outcomes — were less active.” He pointed out that researchers have found similar patterns of reduced brain activity with regard to rewards in people who have psychological disorders such as depression.

What Kharawala calls cognitive inflexibility may be another way of saying the children had fixations.

References:

Sigmund Freud, The Ego & The Id.

Anna Freud, The Ego & The mechanisms of defense.

McLeod, S. A. (2017, May 05). Defense mechanisms. Retrieved from https://www.simplypsychology.org/defense-mechanisms.html.

Sigmund Freud, Beyond The pleasure Principle.

“Freud’s Theory Has Been Validated” By Gerald Schoenewolf, Ph.D.

Sigmund Freud, A general Introduction to Psychoanalysis.