Sigmund (1856–1939), Austrian neurologist and psychologist, the founder of psychoanalysis. Starting with the study of hysteria in late nineteenth-century Vienna, Freud developed a theory of the mind that has come to dominate modern thought. His notions of the unconscious, of a mind divided against itself, of the meaningfulness of apparently meaningless activity, of the displacement and transference of feelings, of stages of psychosexual development, of the pervasiveness and importance of sexual motivation, as well as of much else, have helped shape modern consciousness. His language (and that of his translators), whether specifying divisions of the mind (e.g. id, ego, and superego), types of disorder (e.g. obsessional neurosis), or the structure of experience (e.g. Oedipus complex, narcissism), has become the language in which we describe and understand ourselves and others. As the poet W. H. Auden wrote on the occasion of Freud’s death, ‘if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd, / to us he is no more a person / now but a whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our different lives. . . .’ Hysteria is a disorder involving organic symptoms with no apparent organic cause. Following early work in neurophysiology, Freud (in collaboration with Josef Breuer) came to the view that ‘hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences,’ in particular buried memories of traumatic experiences, the strangulated affect of which emerged (in conversion hysteria) in the distorted form of physical symptoms. Treatment involved the recovery of the repressed memories to allow the cathartic discharge or abreaction of the previously displaced and strangulated affect. This provided the background for Freud’s seduction theory, which traced hysterical symptoms to traumatic prepubertal sexual assaults (typically by fathers). But Freud later abandoned the seduction theory because the energy assumptions were problematic (e.g., if the only energy involved was strangulated affect from long-past external trauma, why didn’t the symptom successfully use up that energy and so clear itself up?) and because he came to see that fantasy could have the same effects as memory of actual events: ‘psychical reality was of more importance than material reality.’ What was repressed was not memories, but desires. He came to see the repetition of symptoms as fueled by internal, in particular sexual, energy. While it is certainly true that Freud saw the working of sexuality almost everywhere, it is not true that he explained everything in terms of sexuality alone. Psychoanalysis is a theory of internal psychic conflict, and conflict requires at least two parties. Despite developments and changes, Freud’s instinct theory was determinedly dualistic from beginning to end – at the beginning, libido versus ego or self-preservative instincts, and at the end Eros versus Thanatos, life against death. Freud’s instinct theory (not to be confused with standard biological notions of hereditary behavior patterns in animals) places instincts on the borderland between the mental and physical and insists that they are internally complex. In particular, the sexual instinct must be understood as made up of components that vary along a number of dimensions (source, aim, and object). Otherwise, as Freud argues in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), it would be difficult to understand how the various perversions are recognized as ‘sexual’ despite their distance from the ‘normal’ conception of sexuality (heterosexual genital intercourse between adults). His broadened concept of sexuality makes intelligible sexual preferences emphasizing different sources (erotogenic zones or bodily centers of arousal), aims (acts, such as intercourse and looking, designed to achieve pleasure and satisfaction), and objects (whether of the same or different gender, or even other than whole living persons). It also allows for the recognition of infantile sexuality. Phenomena that might not on the surface appear sexual (e.g. childhood thumbsucking) share essential characteristics with obviously sexual activity (infantile sensual sucking involves pleasurable stimulation of the same erotogenic zone, the mouth, stimulated in adult sexual activities such as kissing), and can be understood as earlier stages in the development of the same underlying instinct that expresses itself in such various forms in adult sexuality. The standard developmental stages are oral, anal, phallic, and genital.
Neuroses, which Freud saw as ‘the negative of perversions’ (i.e., the same desires that might in some lead to perverse activity, when repressed, result in neurosis), could often be traced to struggles with the Oedipus complex: the ‘nucleus of the neuroses.’ The Oedipus complex, which in its positive form postulates sexual feelings toward the parent of the opposite sex and ambivalently hostile feelings toward the parent of the same sex, suggests that the universal shape of the human condition is a triangle. The conflict reaches its peak between the ages of three and five, during the phallic stage of psychosexual development. The fundamental structuring of emotions has its roots in the prolonged dependency of the human infant, leading to attachment – a primary form of love – to the primary caregiver, who (partly for biological reasons such as lactation) is most often the mother, and the experience of others as rivals for the time, attention, and concern of the primary caregiver. Freud’s views of the Oedipus complex should not be oversimplified. The sexual desires involved, e.g., are typically unconscious and necessarily infantile, and infantile sexuality and its associated desires are not expressed in the same form as mature genital sexuality. His efforts to explain the distinctive features of female psychosexual development in particular led to some of his most controversial views, including the postulation of penis envy to explain why girls but not boys standardly experience a shift in gender of their primary love object (both starting with the mother as the object). Later love objects, including psychoanalysts as the objects of transference feelings (in the analytic setting, the analyst functions as a blank screen onto which the patient projects feelings), are the results of displacement or transference from earlier objects: ‘The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it.’ Freud used the same structure of explanation for symptoms and for more normal phenomena, such as dreams, jokes, and slips of the tongue. All can be seen as compromise formations between forces pressing for expression (localized by Freud’s structural theory in the id, understood as a reservoir of unconscious instinct) and forces of repression (some also unconscious, seeking to meet the constraints of morality and reality). On Freud’s underlying model, the fundamental process of psychic functioning, the primary process, leads to the uninhibited discharge of psychic energy. Such discharge is experienced as pleasurable, hence the governing principle of the fundamental process is called the pleasure principle. Increase of tension is experienced as unpleasure, and the psychic apparatus aims at a state of equilibrium or constancy (sometimes Freud writes as if the state aimed at is one of zero tension, hence the Nirvana principle associated with the death instinct in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle [1920]). But since pleasure can in fact only be achieved under specific conditions, which sometimes require arrangement, planning, and delay, individuals must learn to inhibit discharge, and this secondary process thinking is governed by what Freud came to call the reality principle. The aim is still satisfaction, but the ‘exigencies of life’ require attention, reasoning, and judgment to avoid falling into the fantasy wishfulfillment of the primary process. Sometimes defense mechanisms designed to avoid increased tension or unpleasure can fail, leading to neurosis (in general, under the theory, a neurosis is a psychological disorder rooted in unconscious conflict – particular neuroses being correlated with particular phases of development and particular mechanisms of defense). Repression, involving the confining of psychic representations to the unconscious, is the most important of the defense mechanisms. It should be understood that unlike preconscious ideas, which are merely descriptively unconscious (though one may not be aware of them at the moment, they are readily accessible to consciousness), unconscious ideas in the strict sense are kept from awareness by forces of repression, they are dynamically unconscious – as evidenced by the resistance to making the unconscious conscious in therapy. Freud’s deep division of the mind between unconscious and conscious goes beyond neurotic symptoms to help make sense of familiar forms of irrationality (such as selfdeception, ambivalence, and weakness of the will) that are highly problematical on Cartesian models of an indivisible unitary consciousness. Perhaps the best example of the primary process thinking that characterizes the unconscious (unconstrained by the realities of time, contradiction, causation, etc.) can be found in dreaming.
Freud regarded dreams as ‘the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious.’ Dreams are the disguised fulfillment of unconscious wishes. In extracting the meaning of dreams through a process of interpretation, Freud relied on a central distinction between the manifest content (the dream as dreamt or as remembered on waking) and the latent content (the unconscious dreamthoughts). Freud held that interpretation via association to particular elements of the manifest content reversed the process of dream construction, the dream-work in which various mechanisms of distortion operated on the day’s residues (perceptions and thoughts stemming from the day before the dream was dreamt) and the latent dream-thoughts to produce the manifest dream. Prominent among the mechanisms are the condensation (in which many meanings are represented by a single idea) and displacement (in which there is a shift of affect from a significant and intense idea to an associated but otherwise insignificant one) also typical of neurotic symptoms, as well as considerations of representability and secondary revision more specific to dream formation. Symbolism is less prominent in Freud’s theory of dreams than is often thought; indeed, the section on symbols appeared only as a later addition to The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Freud explicitly rejected the