When1: 1895
When2: 1939
Who: Sigmund Freud [Freud, Sigmund]
What: psychoanalyst
Where: Austria
works\ Studies in Hysteria [1895: with Marcel Breuer]; Project for a Scientific Psychology [1898 to 1899]; Interpretation of Dreams [1900]; Psychopathology of Everyday Life [1901]; Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious [1905]; Three Contributions to the Theory of Sexuality [1906]; Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis [1909]; Totem and Taboo [1913]; Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis [1915 to 1917]; Beyond the Pleasure Principle [1920]; Ego and the Id [1923]; Question of Lay Analysis [1926]; Civilization and Its Discontents [1930]; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis [1933]; Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety [1936]; Moses and Monotheism [1939]; Outline of Psycho-Analysis [1939]
Detail: He lived 1856 to 1939. He invented a psychodynamic topographic mental model [1900], with rational conscious awareness, rational preconscious memories, and irrational unconscious desires. Later [1926 to 1933], he invented a psychodynamic structural model, with id ("it" in German), ego ("I" in German), and superego ("above-me" in German).
Dreams have meaning, can be about infantile wishes and thoughts, and have understandable symbols. Dream has images {manifest dream content}. Dreams have underlying ideas {latent dream content}, which are wishes, memories, and fantasies about emotional reactions that happened in early infancy. Latent content transforms into manifest content by condensation, displacement, dramatization, and representation, followed by secondary elaboration or revision {dream work}. Dream work tries to evade latent-content censorship by choosing acceptable manifest content. Dream transforms many or separated ideas into one image {condensation, dream}. Dream can attribute emotional significance to unimportant object {displacement, dream}. Dream can transpose thought into imagery. Dream can represent abstract ideas metaphorically by concrete images {representation, dream}. Dreams further distort or elaborate after waking {secondary elaboration}. Symbolic representations {primal symbolism} can be consistent in human dreams. Such symbols always have censored meaning, independent of manifest content, for example, symbols for male and female genitalia. Repetitive dreams reenact traumatic episode in recent experience.
In diagnosing hysteria, he used free association to reveal unconscious desires and used proper interpretation to find hysteria causes. Neurosis can result as people actively try not to remember painful, distressing, or stressful events or try to repress desires, typically sexual desires {libido, Freud}, and become unconscious of their motivations {repression, Freud}. Desires begin in infantile sexual molestation {seduction theory}, incestual feelings, or sexual desire {polymorphous perversity}.
However, many supposed experiences are imaginary fantasies that started in early years, even in infancy.
Morals block instinctual motivations, causing conflict, which causes repression of motive into unconscious. Mind can repress memories, fantasies, and thoughts associated with painful, embarrassing, or anxious emotions. Mind breaks links between ideas and emotions, but mind cannot repress emotions, which build up unless released. From fear of punishment, drives cause anxiety. Repression causes desires to express in unusual or pathological ways. Repression of bad memories becomes available after age five.
Repression causes amnesia about childhood.
In neuroses, instinctual energy expresses itself in hysteria. If people can perceive what the ways actually mean, using analysis supplied by trained person, pathology can stop {psychoanalysis, Freud}. Revealing underlying emotion and drive can treat hysteria {abreaction, Freud}. He treated hysteria using hypnosis. Hypnosis can reenact experiences that cause hysteria, to express emotions freely {catharsis, emotion}. In psychoanalysis, hypnosis involves identification.
Humor is mixture of incongruity, relief, and conflict theories [1905].
Sexual development starts in infancy with oral phase, then anal phase, and then sexual phase. Development can stop at any stage. Young children love opposite-sex parent and hate same-sex parent {Oedipus complex, Freud}. Child development can stop if rivalry with same-sex parent does not resolve through identification with parent. Child development can stop if sexual feelings for opposite-sex parent do not transfer to sexual partner outside family. Relationship between mother and child before this development stage affects oedipal impulses.
People start with unconscious instinctual energy {id}, for needs, drives, impulses, and emotions, which uses no logic, ignores external reality, and depends on the pleasure principle. They develop rational conscious mental structures and processes {ego, Freud}, which reject id, from id and adapt to maximize pleasure and minimize unpleasant. They consciously learn morality, social values, and unconscious identification with parents and their values, which cause conscience, shame, guilt, and internal standard that regulates moral conduct {super-ego} {ego-ideal}, which represses bad thoughts and gets energy from id. Superego is part of ego and develops before age five or six {oedipal period}. Judgments and prohibitions internalize {introjection, Freud} in early childhood, before child is able to question them. Feelings of hostility towards either or both parents neutralize. Conscience originates in identifying with parents and repudiating childhood. Later, teachers, admired friends, and social and moral education influence superego. Successful personality development {ego strength} depends on defenses against instinctual drives and on adaptations to social situations. People can learn to accept society external authority more than their internal drives and values {adaptation, society}.
Unconscious mind contains repressed fantasies, memories, and thoughts, which can be self-destructive. Unconscious impulses {death-wish} can wish to end individual existence.
People have instinctual sexual-drive libido. Sexual energy builds up in body with unmet biological needs {cathexis}. Pleasure results when biological-need gratification discharges stored energy {pleasure principle}. Frustrating gratification builds stored energy {hypercathexis} and causes unpleasure. Failure to protect peripheral receptors from excessive or prolonged stimulation can cause unpleasure. Libido can channel into socially acceptable behavior {sublimation, desire}.
Theology
Eros is life instincts of sex libido, hunger, and thirst. Thanatos is death instincts of aggression, self-destruction, and sadism. Totems represent father, in oedipal conflict. Taboos represent, at first, renunciating incest. Religion involves love and fear of God. God is like father to religious believers, who are like his children. People wish this state to be true and so have illusion.
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Date Modified: 2022.0224