THE CHILD AND
ADOLESCENT LEARNERS
AND LEARNING PRINCIPLES
JOEY V. LORICA JR JOHN CAVIN RODIL
BSED-FIL INSTRUCTOR
SIGMUND FREUD
(Neurologist)
I. INTRODUCTION
Sigmund Freud, (born May 6, 1856, Freiberg, Moravia, Austrian Empire
—died September 23, 1939, London, England), an Austrian neurologist
and the the father of psychoanalysis, was a physiologist, medical doctor,
psychologist and influential thinker of the early twentieth century.
Working initially in close collaboration with Joseph Breuer, Freud
elaborated the theory that the mind is a complex energy-system, the
structural investigation of which is the proper province of psychology. He
articulated and refined the concepts of the unconscious, infantile sexuality
and repression, and he proposed a tripartite account of the mind’s
structure—all as part of a radically new conceptual and therapeutic frame
of reference for the understanding of human psychological development
and the treatment of abnormal mental conditions. Notwithstanding the
multiple manifestations of psychoanalysis as it exists today, it can in
almost all fundamental respects be traced directly back to Freud’s original
work.
Freud’s innovative treatment of human actions, dreams, and indeed of
cultural artifacts as invariably possessing implicit symbolic significance
has proven to be extraordinarily fruitful, and has had massive
implications for a wide variety of fields including psychology,
anthropology, semiotics, and artistic creativity and appreciation.
However, Freud’s most important and frequently re-iterated claim, that
with psychoanalysis he had invented a successful science of the mind,
remains the subject of much critical debate and controversy.
Freud may justly be called the most influential intellectual legislator of
his age. His creation of psychoanalysis was at once a theory of the human
psyche, a therapy for the relief of its ills, and an optic for the
interpretation of culture and society. Despite repeated criticisms,
attempted refutations, and qualifications of Freud’s work, its spell
remained powerful well after his death and in fields far removed from
psychology as it is narrowly defined. If, as the American sociologist
Philip Rieff once contended, “psychological man” replaced such earlier
notions as political, religious, or economic man as the 20th century’s
dominant self-image, it is in no small measure due to the power of
Freud’s vision and the seeming inexhaustibility of the intellectual legacy
he left behind.
II. REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
Freud’s father, Jakob, was a Jewish wool merchant who had been married
once before he wed the boy’s mother, Amalie Nathansohn. The father, 40
years old at Freud’s birth, seems to have been a relatively remote and
authoritarian figure, while his mother appears to have been more
nurturant and emotionally available. Although Freud had two older half-
brothers, his strongest if also most ambivalent attachment seems to have
been to a nephew, John, one year his senior, who provided the model of
an intimate friend and hated rival that Freud reproduced often at later
stages of his life.
In 1859 the Freud family was compelled for economic reasons to move to
Leipzig and then a year after to Vienna, where Freud remained until the
Nazi annexation of Austria 78 years later. Despite Freud’s dislike of the
imperial city, in part because of its citizens’ frequent anti-Semitism,
psychoanalysis reflected in significant ways the cultural and political
context out of which it emerged. For instance, Freud’s sensitivity to the
vulnerability of paternal authority within the psyche may well have been
stimulated by the decline in power suffered by his father’s generation,
often liberal rationalists, in the Habsburg empire. So too his interest in
the theme of the seduction of daughters was rooted in
complicated ways in the context of Viennese attitudes toward female
sexuality.
In 1873 Freud graduated from the Sperl Gymnasium and, apparently
inspired by a public reading of an essay by Goethe on nature, turned to
medicine as a career. At the University of Vienna, he worked with one of
the leading physiologists of his day, Ernst von Brücke, an exponent of the
materialist, antivitalist science of Hermann von Helmholtz. In 1882 he
entered the General Hospital in Vienna as a clinical assistant to train with
the psychiatrist Theodor Meynert and the professor of internal medicine
Hermann Nothnagel. In 1885 Freud was appointed lecturer in
neuropathology, having concluded important research on the brain’s
medulla. At this time he also developed an interest in the pharmaceutical
benefits of cocaine, which he pursued for several years. Although some
beneficial results were found in eye surgery, which have been credited to
Freud’s friend Carl Koller, the general outcome was disastrous. Not only
did Freud’s advocacy lead to a mortal addiction in another close friend,
Ernst Fleischl von Marxow, but it also tarnished his medical reputation
for
a time. Whether or not one interprets this episode in terms that call into
question Freud’s prudence as a scientist, it was of a piece with his
lifelong willingness to attempt bold solutions to relieve human suffering.
Freud’s scientific training remained of cardinal importance in his work,
or at least in his own conception of it. In such writings as his “Entwurf
einer Psychologie” (written 1895, published 1950; “Project for a
Scientific Psychology”) he affirmed his intention to find a physiological
and materialist basis for his theories of the psyche. Here a mechanistic
neurophysiological model vied with a more organismic, phylogenetic one
in ways that demonstrate Freud’s complicated debt to the science of his
day.
In late 1885 Freud left Vienna to continue his studies of neuropathology
at the Salpêtrière clinic in Paris, where he worked under the guidance of
Jean-Martin Charcot. His 19 weeks in the French capital proved a turning
point in his career, for Charcot’s work with patients classified as
“hysterics” introduced Freud to the possibility that psychological
disorders might have their source in the mind rather than the brain.
Charcot’s demonstration of a link between hysterical symptoms, such as
paralysis of a limb, and hypnotic suggestion implied the power of mental
states rather than nerves in the etiology of disease. Although Freud was
soon to abandon
his faith in hypnosis, he returned to Vienna in February 1886
with the seed of his revolutionary psychological method implanted.
Several months after his return Freud married Martha Bernays, the
daughter of a prominent Jewish family whose ancestors included a chief
rabbi of Hamburg and Heinrich Heine. She was to bear six children, one
of whom, Anna Freud, was to become a distinguished psychoanalyst in
her own right. Although the glowing picture of their marriage painted by
Ernest Jones in his study The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud (1953–
57) has been nuanced by later scholars, it is clear that Martha Bernays
Freud was a deeply sustaining presence during her husband’s tumultuous
career.
Shortly after getting married, Freud began his closest friendship, with the
Berlin physician Wilhelm Fliess, whose role in the development of
psychoanalysis has occasioned widespread debate. Throughout the 15
years of their intimacy Fliess provided Freud an invaluable interlocutor
for his most daring ideas. Freud’s belief in human bisexuality, his idea of
erotogenic zones on the body, and perhaps even his imputation of
sexuality to infants may well have been stimulated by their friendship.
A somewhat less controversial influence arose from the partnership Freud
began with the physician Josef Breuer after his return from Paris. Freud
turned to clinical practice in neuropsychology, and the office he
established at Berggasse 19 was to remain his consulting room for almost
half a century. Before their collaboration began, during the early 1880s,
Breuer had treated a patient named Bertha Pappenheim—or “Anna O.,”
as she became known in the literature—who was suffering from a variety
of hysterical symptoms. Rather than using hypnotic suggestion, as had
Charcot, Breuer allowed her to lapse into a state resembling
autohypnosis, in which she would talk about the initial manifestations of
her symptoms. To Breuer’s surprise, the very act of verbalization seemed
to provide some relief from their hold over her (although later scholarship
has cast doubt on its permanence). “The talking cure” or “chimney
sweeping,” as Breuer and Anna O., respectively, called it, seemed to act
cathartically to produce an abreaction, or discharge, of the pent-up
emotional blockage at the root of the pathological behavior.
III. PRESENTATION OF THE THEORIST
Psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud
Freud, still beholden to Charcot’s hypnotic method, did not grasp the full
implications of Breuer’s experience until a decade later, when he
developed the technique of free association. In part an extrapolation of
the automatic writing promoted by the German Jewish writer Ludwig
Börne a century before, in part a result of his own clinical experience
with other hysterics, this revolutionary method was announced in the
work Freud published jointly with Breuer in 1895, Studien über Hysterie
(Studies in Hysteria). By encouraging the patient to express any random
thoughts that came associatively to mind, the technique aimed at
uncovering hitherto unarticulated material from the realm of the psyche
that Freud, following a long tradition, called the unconscious. Because of
its incompatibility with conscious thoughts or conflicts with other
unconscious ones, this material was normally hidden, forgotten, or
unavailable to conscious reflection.
Difficulty in freely associating—sudden silences, stuttering, or the like—
suggested to Freud the importance of the material struggling to be
expressed, as well as the power of what he called the patient’s defenses
against that expression. Such blockages Freud dubbed resistance, which
had to be broken down in order to reveal hidden conflicts. Unlike Charcot
and Breuer, Freud came to the conclusion, based on his clinical
experience with female hysterics, that the most insistent source of resisted
material was sexual in nature. And even more momentously, he
linked the etiology of neurotic symptoms to the same struggle
between a sexual feeling or urge and the psychic defenses against it.
Being able to bring that conflict to consciousness through free association
and then probing its implications was thus a crucial step, he reasoned, on
the road to relieving the symptom, which was best understood as an
unwitting compromise formation between the wish and the defense.
Further theoretical development
In 1904 Freud published Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens (The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life), in which he explored such seemingly
insignificant errors as slips of the tongue or pen (later colloquially called
Freudian slips), misreadings, or forgetting of names. These errors Freud
understood to have symptomatic and thus interpretable importance. But
unlike dreams they need not betray a repressed infantile wish yet can
arise from more immediate hostile, jealous, or egoistic causes.
In 1905 Freud extended the scope of this analysis by examining Der Witz
und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten (Jokes and Their Relation to the
Unconscious). Invoking the idea of “joke-work” as a process comparable
to dreamwork, he also acknowledged the double-sided quality of jokes, at
once consciously contrived and unconsciously revealing. Seemingly
innocent phenomena like puns or jests are as open to interpretation as
more obviously tendentious, obscene, or hostile jokes. The explosive
response often produced by successful humour, Freud contended, owes
its power to the orgasmic release of unconscious impulses, aggressive as
well as sexual. But insofar as jokes are more deliberate than dreams or
slips, they draw on the rational dimension of the psyche that Freud was to
call the ego as much as on what he was to call the id.
In 1905 Freud also published the work that first thrust him into the
limelight as the alleged champion of a pansexualist understanding of the
mind: Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (Three Contributions to the
Sexual Theory, later translated as Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality), revised and expanded in subsequent editions. The work
established Freud as a pioneer in the serious study of sexology, alongside
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Albert Moll, and Iwan Bloch.
Here he outlined in greater detail than before his reasons for emphasizing
the sexual component in the development of both normal and
pathological behaviour. Although not as reductionist as popularly
assumed, Freud nonetheless extended the concept of sexuality beyond
conventional usage to include a panoply of erotic impulses from the
earliest childhood years on. Distinguishing between sexual aims (the act
toward which instincts
strive) and sexual objects (the person, organ, or physical entity eliciting
attraction), he elaborated a repertoire of sexually generated behaviour of
astonishing variety. Beginning very early in life, imperiously insistent on
its gratification, remarkably plastic in its expression, and open to easy
maldevelopment, sexuality, Freud concluded, is the prime mover in a
great deal of human behaviour.
Toward a general theory of
Sigmund Freud
If the troubled history of its institutionalization served to call
psychoanalysis into question in certain quarters, so too did its founder’s
penchant for extrapolating his clinical findings into a more ambitious
general theory. As he admitted to Fliess in 1900, “I am actually not a man
of science at all…. I am nothing but a conquistador by temperament, an
adventurer.” Freud’s so-called metapsychology soon became the basis for
wide-ranging speculations about cultural, social, artistic, religious, and
anthropological phenomena. Composed of a complicated and often
revised mixture of economic, dynamic, and topographical elements, the
metapsychology was developed in a series of 12 papers Freud composed
during World War I, only some of which were published in his lifetime.
Their general findings appeared in two books in the 1920s: Jenseits des
Lustprinzips (1920; Beyond the Pleasure Principle) and Das Ich und das
Es (1923; The Ego and the Id).
In these works, Freud attempted to clarify the relationship between his
earlier topographical division of the psyche into the unconscious,
preconscious, and conscious and his subsequent structural categorization
into id, ego, and superego. The id was defined in terms of the most
primitive urges for gratification in the infant, urges dominated by the
desire for pleasure through the release of tension and the cathexis of
energy. Ruled by no laws of logic, indifferent to the demands of
expediency, unconstrained by the resistance of external reality, the id is
ruled by what Freud called the primary process directly expressing
somatically generated instincts. Through the inevitable experience of
frustration the infant learns to adapt itself to the exigencies of reality. The
secondary process that
results leads to the growth of the ego, which follows what Freud called
the reality principle in contradistinction to the pleasure principle
dominating the id. Here the need to delay gratification in the service of
self-preservation is slowly learned in an effort to thwart the anxiety
produced by unfulfilled desires. What Freud termed defense mechanisms
are developed by the ego to deal with such conflicts. Repression is the
most fundamental, but Freud also posited an entire repertoire of others,
including reaction formation, isolation, undoing, denial, displacement,
and rationalization.
The last component in Freud’s trichotomy, the superego, develops from
the internalization of society’s moral commands through identification
with parental dictates during the resolution of the Oedipus complex. Only
partly conscious, the superego gains some of its punishing force by
borrowing certain aggressive elements in the id, which are turned inward
against the ego and produce feelings of guilt. But it is largely through the
internalization of social norms that the superego is constituted, an
acknowledgement that prevents psychoanalysis from conceptualizing the
psyche in purely biologistic or individualistic terms.
Freud’s understanding of the primary process underwent a crucial shift in
the course of his career. Initially he counterposed a libidinal drive that
seeks sexual pleasure to a self-preservation drive whose telos is survival.
But in 1914, while examining the phenomenon of narcissism, he came to
consider the latter instinct as merely a variant of the former. Unable to
accept so monistic a drive theory, Freud sought a new dualistic
alternative. He arrived at the speculative assertion that there exists in the
psyche an innate, regressive drive for stasis that aims to end life’s
inevitable tension. This striving for rest he christened the Nirvana
principle and the drive underlying it the death instinct, or Thanatos,
which he could substitute for self-preservation as the contrary of the life
instinct, or Eros.
Religion, civilization, and discontents
Freud’s bleak appraisal of social and political solidarity was replicated, if
in somewhat more nuanced form, in his attitude toward religion.
Although many accounts of Freud’s development have discerned debts to
one or another aspect of his Jewish background, debts Freud himself
partly acknowledged, his avowed position was deeply irreligious. As
noted in the account of Totem and Taboo, he always attributed the belief
in divinities ultimately to the displaced worship of human ancestors. One
of the most potent sources of his break with former disciples like Jung
was precisely this skepticism toward spirituality.
In his 1907 essay “Zwangshandlungen und Religionsübungen”
(“Obsessive Acts and Religious Practices,” later translated as “Obsessive
Actions and Religious Practices”) Freud had already contended that
obsessional neuroses are private religious systems and religions
themselves no more than the obsessional neuroses of humankind. Twenty
years later, in Die Zukunft einer Illusion (1927; The Future of an
Illusion), he elaborated this argument, adding that belief in God is a
mythic reproduction of the universal state of infantile helplessness. Like
an idealized father, God is the projection of childish wishes for an
omnipotent protector. If children can outgrow their dependence, he
concluded with cautious optimism, then humanity may also hope to leave
behind its immature heteronomy.
The simple Enlightenment faith underlying this analysis quickly elicited
critical comment, which led to its modification. In an exchange of letters
with the French novelist Romain Rolland, Freud came to acknowledge a
more intractable source of religious sentiment. The opening section of his
next speculative tract, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930; Civilization
and Its Discontents), was devoted to what Rolland had dubbed the
oceanic feeling. Freud described it as a sense of indissoluble oneness with
the universe, which mystics in particular have celebrated as the
fundamental religious experience. Its origin, Freud claimed, is nostalgia
for the pre-Oedipal infant’s sense of unity with its mother. Although still
rooted in
infantile helplessness, religion thus derives to some extent from the
earliest stage of postnatal development. Regressive longings for its
restoration are possibly stronger than those for a powerful father and thus
cannot be worked through by way of a collective resolution of the
Oedipus complex.
Civilization and Its Discontents, written after the onset of Freud’s
struggle with cancer of the jaw and in the midst of the rise of European
fascism, was a profoundly unconsoling book. Focusing on the prevalence
of human guilt and the impossibility of achieving unalloyed happiness,
Freud contended that no social solution of the discontents of humankind
is possible. All civilizations, no matter how well planned, can provide
only partial relief. For aggression among people is not due to unequal
property relations or political injustice, which can be rectified by laws,
but rather to the death instinct redirected outward.
Even Eros, Freud suggested, is not fully in harmony with civilization, for
the libidinal ties creating collective solidarity are aim-inhibited and
diffuse rather than directly sexual. Thus, there is likely to be tension
between the urge for sexual gratification and the sublimated love for
humankind. Furthermore, because Eros and Thanatos are themselves at
odds, conflict and the guilt it engenders are virtually inevitable. The best
to be hoped for is a life in which the repressive burdens of civilization are
in rough balance with the realization of instinctual gratification and the
sublimated love for humankind. But reconciliation of nature and culture
is impossible, for the price of any civilization is the guilt produced by the
necessary thwarting of human instinctual drives. Although elsewhere
Freud had postulated mature, heterosexual genitality and the capacity to
work productively as the hallmarks of health and urged that “where id is,
there shall ego be,” it is clear that he held out no hope for any collective
relief from the discontents of civilization. He only offered an ethic of
resigned authenticity, which taught the wisdom of living without the
possibility of redemption, either religious or secular.
REFLECTION
Regardless of the reaction and understanding of Sigmund Freud’s
scientific legacy, the fact that his name is directly associated with the
progress in psychology leads us to believe that Sigmund Freud had a
significant impact not only on the field of psychology but other branches
of science as well. Generally speaking, his findings and theories, even
receiving a large amount of denial in the post-Freudian era by other
practicing psychologists, served as an impetus in the development of the
more relevant and accurate theories in the area of psychology that we
know today.
In conclusion, as it was noted by a number of modern psychologists,
many aspects of Freudian theory are indeed out of date (Westen, 1998).
However, this notion can only be attributed to the general scientific
progress of psychology. Freud died in 1939, and his legacy was only
revised and reasserted in the aftermath, bringing new notions and
sharpening the ones that we have already established. In that sense, the
critique of Freud’s work could be seen as a form of evolving in the
context of scientific thought, as from Freudian views of the 1920s many
theories and ideas gained a chance to be studied with the implementation
of the modern-day technologies and methodology. Freud’s work
contributed to our understanding of the continuity of personality and the
role of childhood experiences, the notion of unconscious, human
development, thus, providing a vast ground for many psychologists of
today to establish further accuracy in the investigation of the human
psyche.
REFERENCES
Abramson, J.B. Liberation and Its Limits: The Moral and Political Thought of Freud.
New York: Free Press, 1984.
Bettlelheim, B. Freud and Man’s Soul. Knopf, 1982
Schafer, R. A New Language for Psychoanalysis. Yale University Press, 1976.
Whitebrook, J. Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical
Theory. MIT Press, 1995.
MacIntyre, A.C. The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis. Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1958.
