| Austrian neurologist, founder of psychoanalysis.
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.
Early life and training
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 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 example, 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 was 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 biography of Freud 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 his marriage 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 a 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 behaviour.
Psychoanalytic theory
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.
Psychoanalytic theory
Screen memories
At first, however, Freud was uncertain about the precise
status of the sexual component in this dynamic conception
of the psyche. His patients seemed to recall actual experiences
of early seductions, often incestuous in nature. Freud's
initial impulse was to accept these as having happened.
But then, as he disclosed in a now famous letter to Fliess
of Sept. 2, 1897, he concluded that, rather than being memories
of actual events, these shocking recollections were the
residues of infantile impulses and desires to be seduced
by an adult. What was recalled was not a genuine memory
but what he would later call a screen memory, or fantasy,
hiding a primitive wish. That is, rather than stressing
the corrupting initiative of adults in the etiology of neuroses,
Freud concluded that the fantasies and yearnings of the
child were at the root of later conflict.
The absolute centrality of his change of heart in the subsequent
development of psychoanalysis cannot be doubted. For in
attributing sexuality to children, emphasizing the causal
power of fantasies, and establishing the importance of repressed
desires, Freud laid the groundwork for what many have called
the epic journey into his own psyche, which followed soon
after the dissolution of his partnership with Breuer.
Freud's work on hysteria had focused on female sexuality
and its potential for neurotic expression. To be fully universal,
psychoanalysis—a term Freud coined in 1896—would
also have to examine the male psyche in a condition of what
might be called normality. It would have to become more
than a psychotherapy and develop into a complete theory
of the mind. To this end Freud accepted the enormous risk
of generalizing from the experience he knew best: his own.
Significantly, his self-analysis was both the first and
the last in the history of the movement he spawned; all
future analysts would have to undergo a training analysis
with someone whose own analysis was ultimately traceable
to Freud's of his disciples.
Freud's self-exploration was apparently enabled by a disturbing
event in his life. In October 1896, Jakob Freud died shortly
before his 81st birthday. Emotions were released in his
son that he understood as having been long repressed, emotions
concerning his earliest familial experiences and feelings.
Beginning in earnest in July 1897, Freud attempted to reveal
their meaning by drawing on a technique that had been available
for millennia: the deciphering of dreams. Freud's contribution
to the tradition of dream analysis was path-breaking, for
in insisting on them as “the royal road to a knowledge
of the unconscious,” he provided a remarkably elaborate
account of why dreams originate and how they function.
The interpretation of dreams
In what many commentators consider his master work, Die
Traumdeutung (published in 1899, but given the date of the
dawning century to emphasize its epochal character; The
Interpretation of Dreams), he presented his findings. Interspersing
evidence from his own dreams with evidence from those recounted
in his clinical practice, Freud contended that dreams played
a fundamental role in the psychic economy. The mind's energy—which
Freud called libido and identified principally, but not
exclusively, with the sexual drive—was a fluid and
malleable force capable of excessive and disturbing power.
Needing to be discharged to ensure pleasure and prevent
pain, it sought whatever outlet it might find. If denied
the gratification provided by direct motor action, libidinal
energy could seek its release through mental channels. Or,
in the language of The Interpretation of Dreams, a wish
can be satisfied by an imaginary wish fulfillment. All dreams,
Freud claimed, even nightmares manifesting apparent anxiety,
are the fulfillment of such wishes.
More precisely, dreams are the disguised expression of
wish fulfillments. Like neurotic symptoms, they are the
effects of compromises in the psyche between desires and
prohibitions in conflict with their realization. Although
sleep can relax the power of the mind's diurnal censorship
of forbidden desires, such censorship, nonetheless, persists
in part during nocturnal existence. Dreams, therefore, have
to be decoded to be understood, and not merely because they
are actually forbidden desires experienced in distorted
fashion. For dreams undergo further revision in the process
of being recounted to the analyst.
The Interpretation of Dreams provides a hermeneutic for
the unmasking of the dream's disguise, or dreamwork, as
Freud called it. The manifest content of the dream, that
which is remembered and reported, must be understood as
veiling a latent meaning. Dreams defy logical entailment
and narrative coherence, for they intermingle the residues
of immediate daily experience with the deepest, often most
infantile wishes. Yet they can be ultimately decoded by
attending to four basic activities of the dreamwork and
reversing their mystifying effect.
The first of these activities, condensation, operates through
the fusion of several different elements into one. As such,
it exemplifies one of the key operations of psychic life,
which Freud called overdetermination. No direct correspondence
between a simple manifest content and its multidimensional
latent counterpart can be assumed. The second activity of
the dreamwork, displacement, refers to the decentring of
dream thoughts, so that the most urgent wish is often obliquely
or marginally represented on the manifest level. Displacement
also means the associative substitution of one signifier
in the dream for another, say, the king for one's father.
The third activity Freud called representation, by which
he meant the transformation of thoughts into images. Decoding
a dream thus means translating such visual representations
back into intersubjectively available language through free
association. The final function of the dreamwork is secondary
revision, which provides some order and intelligibility
to the dream by supplementing its content with narrative
coherence. The process of dream interpretation thus reverses
the direction of the dreamwork, moving from the level of
the conscious recounting of the dream through the preconscious
back beyond censorship into the unconscious itself.
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,
along with Richard von Kraft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Albert
Moll, and Iwan Bloch, as a pioneer in the serious study
of sexology. 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.
Sexuality and development
To spell out the formative development of the sexual drive,
Freud focused on the progressive replacement of erotogenic
zones in the body by others. An originally polymorphous
sexuality first seeks gratification orally through sucking
at the mother's breast, an object for which other surrogates
can later be provided. Initially unable to distinguish between
self and breast, the infant soon comes to appreciate its
mother as the first external love object. Later Freud would
contend that even before that moment, the child can treat
its own body as such an object, going beyond undifferentiated
autoeroticism to a narcissistic love for the self as such.
After the oral phase, during the second year, the child's
erotic focus shifts to its anus, stimulated by the struggle
over toilet training. During the anal phase the child's
pleasure in defecation is confronted with the demands of
self-control. The third phase, lasting from about the fourth
to the sixth year, he called the phallic. Because Freud
relied on male sexuality as the norm of development, his
analysis of this phase aroused considerable opposition,
especially because he claimed its major concern is castration
anxiety.
To grasp what Freud meant by this fear, it is necessary
to understand one of his central contentions. As has been
stated, the death of Freud's father was the trauma that
permitted him to delve into his own psyche. Not only did
Freud experience the expected grief, but he also expressed
disappointment, resentment, and even hostility toward his
father in the dreams he analyzed at the time. In the process
of abandoning the seduction theory he recognized the source
of the anger as his own psyche rather than anything objectively
done by his father. Turning, as he often did, to evidence
from literary and mythical texts as anticipations of his
psychological insights, Freud interpreted that source in
terms of Sophocles' tragedy Oedipus Rex. The universal applicability
of its plot, he conjectured, lies in the desire of every
male child to sleep with his mother and remove the obstacle
to the realization of that wish, his father. What he later
dubbed the Oedipus complex presents the child with a critical
problem, for the unrealizable yearning at its root provokes
an imagined response on the part of the father: the threat
of castration.
The phallic stage can only be successfully surmounted if
the Oedipus complex with its accompanying castration anxiety
can be resolved. According to Freud, this resolution can
occur if the boy finally suppresses his sexual desire for
the mother, entering a period of so-called latency, and
internalizes the reproachful prohibition of the father,
making it his own with the construction of that part of
the psyche Freud called the superego or the conscience.
The blatantly phallocentric bias of this account, which
was supplemented by a highly controversial assumption of
penis envy in the already castrated female child, proved
troublesome for subsequent psychoanalytic theory. Not surprisingly,
later analysts of female sexuality have paid more attention
to the girl's relations with the pre-Oedipal mother than
to the vicissitudes of the Oedipus complex. Anthropological
challenges to the universality of the complex have also
been damaging, although it has been possible to redescribe
it in terms that lift it out of the specific familial dynamics
of Freud's own day. If the creation of culture is understood
as the institution of kinship structures based on exogamy,
then the Oedipal drama reflects the deeper struggle between
natural desire and cultural authority.
Freud, however, always maintained the intrapsychic importance
of the Oedipus complex, whose successful resolution is the
precondition for the transition through latency to the mature
sexuality he called the genital phase. Here the parent of
the opposite sex is conclusively abandoned in favour of
a more suitable love object able to reciprocate reproductively
useful passion. In the case of the girl, disappointment
over the nonexistence of a penis is transcended by the rejection
of her mother in favour of a father figure instead. In both
cases, sexual maturity means heterosexual, procreatively
inclined, genitally focused behaviour.
Sexual development, however, is prone to troubling maladjustments
preventing this outcome if the various stages are unsuccessfully
negotiated. Fixation of sexual aims or objects can occur
at any particular moment, caused either by an actual trauma
or the blockage of a powerful libidinal urge. If the fixation
is allowed to express itself directly at a later age, the
result is what was then generally called a perversion. If,
however, some part of the psyche prohibits such overt expression,
then, Freud contended, the repressed and censored impulse
produces neurotic symptoms, neuroses being conceptualized
as the negative of perversions. Neurotics repeat the desired
act in repressed form, without conscious memory of its origin
or the ability to confront and work it through in the present.
In addition to the neurosis of hysteria, with its conversion
of affective conflicts into bodily symptoms, Freud developed
complicated etiological explanations for other typical neurotic
behaviour, such as obsessive-compulsions, paranoia, and
narcissism. These he called psychoneuroses, because of their
rootedness in childhood conflicts, as opposed to the actual
neuroses such as hypochondria, neurasthenia, and anxiety
neurosis, which are due to problems in the present (the
last, for example, being caused by the physical suppression
of sexual release).
Freud's elaboration of his therapeutic technique during
these years focused on the implications of a specific element
in the relationship between patient and analyst, an element
whose power he first began to recognize in reflecting on
Breuer's work with Anna O. Although later scholarship has
cast doubt on its veracity, Freud's account of the episode
was as follows. An intense rapport between Breuer and his
patient had taken an alarming turn when Anna divulged her
strong sexual desire for him. Breuer, who recognized the
stirrings of reciprocal feelings, broke off his treatment
out of an understandable confusion about the ethical implications
of acting on these impulses. Freud came to see in this troubling
interaction the effects of a more pervasive phenomenon,
which he called transference (or in the case of the analyst's
desire for the patient, counter-transference). Produced
by the projection of feelings, transference, he reasoned,
is the reenactment of childhood urges cathected (invested)
on a new object. As such, it is the essential tool in the
analytic cure, for by bringing to the surface repressed
emotions and allowing them to be examined in a clinical
setting, transference can permit their being worked through
in the present. That is, affective remembrance can be the
antidote to neurotic repetition.
It was largely to facilitate transference that Freud developed
his celebrated technique of having the patient lie on a
couch, not looking directly at the analyst, and free to
fantasize with as little intrusion of the analyst's real
personality as possible. Restrained and neutral, the analyst
functions as a screen for the displacement of early emotions,
both erotic and aggressive. Transference onto the analyst
is itself a kind of neurosis, but one in the service of
an ultimate working through of the conflicting feelings
it expresses. Only certain illnesses, however, are open
to this treatment, for it demands the ability to redirect
libidinal energy outward. The psychoses, Freud sadly concluded,
are based on the redirection of libido back onto the patient's
ego and cannot therefore be relieved by transference in
the analytic situation. How successful psychoanalytic therapy
has been in the treatment of psychoneuroses remains, however,
a matter of considerable dispute.
Although Freud's theories were offensive to many in the
Vienna of his day, they began to attract a cosmopolitan
group of supporters in the early 1900s. In 1902 the Psychological
Wednesday Circle began to gather in Freud's waiting room
with a number of future luminaries in the psychoanalytic
movements in attendance. Alfred Adler and Wilhelm Stekel
were often joined by guests such as Sándor Ferenczi,
Carl Gustav Jung, Otto Rank, Ernest Jones, Max Eitingon,
and A.A. Brill. In 1908 the group was renamed the Vienna
Psychoanalytic Society and held its first international
congress in Salzburg. In the same year the first branch
society was opened in Berlin. In 1909 Freud, along with
Jung and Ferenczi, made a historic trip to Clark University
in Worcester, Mass. The lectures he gave there were soon
published as Über Psychoanalyse (1910; The Origin and
Development of Psychoanalysis), the first of several introductions
he wrote for a general audience. Along with a series of
vivid case studies—the most famous known colloquially
as “Dora” (1905), “Little Hans” (1909),
“The Rat Man” (1909), “The Psychotic Dr.
Schreber” (1911), and “The Wolf Man” (1918)—they
made his ideas known to a wider public.
As might be expected of a movement whose treatment emphasized
the power of transference and the ubiquity of Oedipal conflict,
its early history is a tale rife with dissension, betrayal,
apostasy, and excommunication. The most widely noted schisms
occurred with Adler in 1911, Stekel in 1912, and Jung in
1913; these were followed by later breaks with Ferenczi,
Rank, and Wilhelm Reich in the 1920s. Despite efforts by
loyal disciples like Ernest Jones to exculpate Freud from
blame, subsequent research concerning his relations with
former disciples like Viktor Tausk have clouded the picture
considerably. Critics of the hagiographic legend of Freud
have, in fact, had a relatively easy time documenting the
tension between Freud's aspirations to scientific objectivity
and the extraordinarily fraught personal context in which
his ideas were developed and disseminated. Even well after
Freud's death, his archivists' insistence on limiting access
to potentially embarrassing material in his papers has reinforced
the impression that the psychoanalytic movement resembled
more a sectarian church than a scientific community (at
least as the latter is ideally understood).
Toward a general theory
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.
Social and cultural studies
Freud's mature instinct theory is in many ways a metaphysical
construct, comparable to Bergson's élan vital or
Schopenhauer's Will. Emboldened by its formulation, Freud
launched a series of audacious studies that took him well
beyond his clinician's consulting room. These he had already
commenced with investigations of Leonardo da Vinci (1910)
and the novel Gradiva by Wilhelm Jensen (1907). Here Freud
attempted to psychoanalyze works of art as symbolic expressions
of their creator's psychodynamics.
The fundamental premise that permitted Freud to examine
cultural phenomena was called sublimation in the Three Essays.
The appreciation or creation of ideal beauty, Freud contended,
is rooted in primitive sexual urges that are transfigured
in culturally elevating ways. Unlike repression, which produces
only neurotic symptoms whose meaning is unknown even to
the sufferer, sublimation is a conflict-free resolution
of repression, which leads to intersubjectively available
cultural works. Although potentially reductive in its implications,
the psychoanalytic interpretation of culture can be justly
called one of the most powerful “hermeneutics of suspicion,”
to borrow the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur's phrase,
because it debunks idealist notions of high culture as the
alleged transcendence of baser concerns.
Freud extended the scope of his theories to include anthropological
and social psychological speculation as well in Totem und
Tabu (1913; Totem and Taboo). Drawing on Sir James Frazer's
explorations of the Australian Aborigines, he interpreted
the mixture of fear and reverence for the totemic animal
in terms of the child's attitude toward the parent of the
same sex. The Aborigines' insistence on exogamy was a complicated
defense against the strong incestuous desires felt by the
child for the parent of the opposite sex. Their religion
was thus a phylogenetic anticipation of the ontogenetic
Oedipal drama played out in modern man's psychic development.
But whereas the latter was purely an intrapsychic phenomenon
based on fantasies and fears, the former, Freud boldly suggested,
was based on actual historical events. Freud speculated
that the rebellion of sons against dominating fathers for
control over women had culminated in actual parricide. Ultimately
producing remorse, this violent act led to atonement through
incest taboos and the prohibitions against harming the father-substitute,
the totemic object or animal. When the fraternal clan replaced
the patriarchal horde, true society emerged. For renunciation
of individual aspirations to replace the slain father and
a shared sense of guilt in the primal crime led to a contractual
agreement to end internecine struggle and band together
instead. The totemic ancestor then could evolve into the
more impersonal God of the great religions.
A subsequent effort to explain social solidarity, Massenpsychologie
und Ich-analyse (1921; Group Psychology and the Analysis
of the Ego), drew on the antidemocratic crowd psychologists
of the late 19th century, most notably Gustave Le Bon. Here
the disillusionment with liberal, rational politics that
some have seen as the seedbed of much of Freud's work was
at its most explicit (the only competitor being the debunking
psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson he wrote jointly with
William Bullitt in 1930, which was not published until 1967).
All mass phenomena, Freud suggested, are characterized by
intensely regressive emotional ties stripping individuals
of their self-control and independence. Rejecting possible
alternative explanations such as hypnotic suggestion or
imitation and unwilling to follow Jung in postulating a
group mind, Freud emphasized instead individual libidinal
ties to the group's leader. Group formation is like regression
to a primal horde with the leader as the original father.
Drawing on the army and the Roman Catholic Church as his
examples, Freud never seriously considered less authoritarian
modes of collective behaviour.
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