Overview
- Psychoanalytic theory originated with Freud, who developed the idea of the “dynamic unconscious.”
- Three core ideas that make up the psychoanalytic perspective are repression, free association, and an “archeological” approach to the contents of the mind.
- The psychoanalytic perspective includes ideas about the value of dreams for understanding human desire
- Historically, Freud and other psychoanalytic thinkers pondered ways in which psychoanalytic theory might tell us something about human civilization and social organization
- In clinical practice, the psychoanalytic perspective views symptoms as having meaning, and differs from short-term supportive therapies in striving for greater depth of understanding
Freud and the Origins of the Psychoanalytic Perspective
Sigmund Freud lived from 1856 until 1939. He trained as a physician, specializing in neurology, and went on to found psychoanalysis. The key and novel insight behind the psychoanalytic perspective is that of the dynamic “unconscious.” To say that people have an unconscious in the way that psychoanalysis envisions is to say that we can interpret people as having motivations of which we are not aware but which influence our behavior. This is a frightening idea for many of us because we don’t like to think of ourselves as lacking knowledge about why we do what we do.
Freud clearly recognized the shocking nature of the psychoanalytic perspective. In a passage from A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, he describes this as an affront to our “self-love”:
Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages upon its naive self-love. The first was when it realized that our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable; this is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus, although Alexandrian doctrines taught something very similar. The second was when biological research robbed man of his peculiar privilege of having been specially created, and relegated him to a descent from the animal world, implying an ineradicable animal nature in him: this transvaluation has been accomplished in our own time upon the instigation of Charles Darwin, Wallace, and their predecessors, and not without the most violent opposition from their contemporaries. But man’s craving for grandiosity is now suffering the third and most bitter blow from present-day psychological research which is endeavoring to prove to the ego of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind. We psycho-analysts were neither the first nor the only ones to propose to mankind that they should look inward; but it appears to be our lot to advocate it most insistently and to support it by empirical evidence which touches every man closely.
Freud is suggesting that the revolutionary character of psychoanalysis puts it on par with Copernican and Darwinian intellectual revolutions. The idea of the unconscious is revolutionary in the history of ideas. If it is true, then we are forced to confront the reality that we are not “masters” in our own house and can only take away the “scraps of information” about what is going on in our minds.
The Psychoanalytic Perspective: 3 Core Ideas
The notion of the dynamic unconscious is perhaps the single most important idea underlying classical psychoanalytic theory and the psychoanalytic perspective, more generally. What characterizes psychoanalysis is the way it invokes the unconscious in explanations of human behavior. It is what distinguishes psychoanalysis from other prominent theories, including cognitive psychology, behaviorism, and humanistic psychologies.
Other core psychoanalytic ideas follow from the starting point of the unconscious. These include the following important elements.
1. Repression
Recent research suggests that efforts to avoid unwanted experiences – such as consciously (intentionally) suppressing thoughts, memories, or emotions – can lead to increased psychological suffering.
A central aim of psychoanalysis has always been to help people identify and process mental contents which have been kept out of awareness. But from a psychoanalytic perspective, not all avoidance is conscious or intentional. The word “repression” refers to a person’s unconsciously keeping mental contents out of awareness. In other words, we can be avoiding thoughts, wishes, and emotions, without even being aware that we’re doing so.
2. Free Association
In psychoanalysis, the method of free association is used to enable us to broaden the ways we’re able to think about ourselves. By saying what comes to our minds without censoring, we can gain insight into our ways of employing repression. In The Language of Psychoanalysis, Laplanche and Pontalis describe this process as
bringing out the unconscious meaning of the words, the actions and the products of the imagination … of a particular subject. The method is founded mainly on the subject’s free associations, which serve as the measuring-rod of the validity of the interpretations.
This definition is very much in line with a longstanding view of what psychoanalysis is about. It captures some of the central elements of psychoanalysis, including free association, the unconscious, and the emphasis on constructing interpretations that seek to explain ways in which repression may operate for a given individual.
3. “Archeological” Perspective on the Mind
From a psychoanalytic perspective, we must all contend with a range of difficult realities throughout our lives. These include navigating the complex and sometimes disappointing social world of personal, family, and romantic relationships and facing illness and mortality.
People typically establish ways of coping with life’s challenges when they are young. For many people, approaches to coping from earlier in life persist into the present. The trouble is that these ways of coping do not always serve the individual very well. For example, children are not capable of and are generally not expected to deal in direct ways with the difficult realities of life. So ways of coping that persist from childhood and are applied in adulthood may contain unrealistic and fantasy elements and may not be helpful.
Psychoanalysts sometimes make this point by saying that people will often unconsciously seek out “substitutive satisfactions.” The ways in which an individual sought pleasure and the avoidance of displeasure when they were young continue into the present, even though these do not necessarily correspond to the individual’s current capacity for dealing with the realities of life. As a consequence, they find that they are struggling with one or more aspects of life, and they may be experiencing common symptoms of psychological distress such as depression, anxiety, bad conscience, guilt, or a low sense of self-worth.
Understanding an individual’s life history and course of development is central to psychoanalysis. This includes the strategies the individual might have unconsciously developed to deal with past events which were difficult or painful.
This means that the work we do in psychoanalysis is in some ways similar to archaeology, excavating experiences that have gone before in a person’s life and which have led the person to deal the way they do with the difficult realities of life. As Freud wrote,
[The psychoanalyst’s] work of construction, or, if it is preferred, of reconstruction, resembles to a great extent an archaeologist’s excavation of some dwelling-place that has been destroyed and buried or of some ancient edifice.
How far back in an individual’s life do we go in the course of an analysis? This depends on the nature of the individual’s difficulties and the thoroughness of the analysis they are seeking. But we know from experience that early material does tend to surface in an analysis. For many people, early memories can include experiences of fear, shame, physical pain, illnesses, deaths, and the births of brothers and sisters.
The Psychoanalytic Perspective on Dreams
Why Subject Dreams to Analysis?
It is strange to have a dream which makes little sense to us. Yet, there are often just enough elements of our dreams that are familiar to us to lead us to suspect that there is some meaning to be found. Psychoanalysis has always taken the dream to be a meaningful mental event. We can subject our dreams to analysis, element by element, to come up with interpretations of what the meanings could be.
Desire As the Starting of Dream Analysis in Psychoanalysis
Classical psychoanalysis takes human desire as its starting point – and in the history of the discipline, dreams have played a fundamental role in the exploration of desire.
Psychoanalytic dream interpretation is arguably similar to more commonplace instances of interpretation in which the interpreter seeks out what the agent of meaning may desire “beneath” the surface of what is presented. This includes the interpretation of intentional action (Hopkins, 1991) and the interpretation of texts, such as poems, and other artworks. Paul Ricoeur suggests that dream interpretation is in some sense a paradigm case of the interpretation of agents’ desires: “[i]f dream interpretation can stand as the paradigm for all interpretation it is because dreams are in fact the paradigm of all the strategems of desire” (Ricoeur, 1970, p. 160).
Freud on the Manifest and Latent Content of Dreams
In Freudian terms, what lies beneath the surface or “manifest” content of a dream is its “latent” content; the latent content include’s the agent’s desires of which he or she will not be consciously aware. Freud suggests that beginning with this distinction naturally raises fundamental challenges about how manifest and latent contents might be related:
We are … confronted for the first time with a problem which has not before existed, that of examining and tracing the relations between the latent dream thoughts and the manifest dream content, and the processes through which the former have grown into the latter. (Freud, 1913, p. 260)
The problem which Freud raises here is that of articulating an account of the processes by which desire may be transformed, from its latent into its manifest forms, in the dreams of human subjects. Freud describes this process of transformation as the “dream-work.”
Dream Analysis Focusing on Condensation and Displacement
Freud isolates several specific transformations which might occur, including those of “condensation” and “displacement.” These two are central to the psychoanalytic approach to dreams; as Freud puts it, “[d]ream displacement and dream condensation are the two craftsmen to whom we may chiefly attribute the moulding of the dream” (Freud, 1913, p. 286).
When simply describing the content of a dream, Freud suggests, only half a page may be required. By contrast, “the analysis, in which the dream thoughts are contained, requires six, eight, twelve times as much space” (Freud, 1913, p. 261). This difference results because the content of the dream can be condensed in various ways. Condensation can consist, for example, in the uniting of the features of several people in single dream images, resulting in “collective and composite persons” (Freud, 1913, p. 274). Freud describes a figure in his own dream of Irma’s injection as being, in just this way, a composite of Dr. M and Freud’s brother.
Next, in the case of displacement, Freud claims that dreaming can be “eccentric” in the sense that “[t]hat which is clearly the essential thing in the dream thoughts need not be represented in the dream at all” (Freud, 1913, p. 283). For example, his dream of the botanical monograph is at the level of manifest content merely about his leafing through the book. However, he suggests that various dream thoughts are displaced, including thoughts concerning “complications and conflicts which result from services rendered among colleagues which put them under obligations to one another,” and his own self-reproach that he is in the habit of sacrificing too much to his hobbies (Freud, 1913, p. 284).
Broadly speaking, then, the Freudian view is that transformations such as condensation and displacement mask over a subject’s desire as represented at the level of latent content – and a task that psychoanalysis sets for itself is to imagine what this desire might have been like prior to such transformations.
“Civilization and Its Discontents”
By “civilization” (german Kultur), Freud means “the sum of the achievements and institutions which differentiate our lives from those of our animal forebears and serve two purposes, namely, that of protecting humanity against nature and of regulating the relations of human beings among themselves” (1930, pp. 49-50). Civilization and Its Discontents pursues, among other things, the thesis that there is a close connection between civilization, in this sense, and certain commonly observed psychological problems and experiences of malaise.
As Freud knew quite well, this general thesis itself was not uniquely psychoanalytic. A version of the thesis had been advanced, for instance, by the American neurologist George Beard. Beard popularized the diagnostic concept of “neurasthenia,” a disorder which was thought to include a great variety of symptoms, including fatigue, anxiety, and depression. Beard was of the view that neurasthenia was caused by the pace of modern industrialized civilization, which overtaxed modern subjects and left them depleted of their “nervous energy.” Beard and others who pursued the diagnosis and treatment of neurasthenia typically recommended such therapies as rest cures, including, for instance, time spent at spas (this is not unlike the currently widespread practice of offering education in relaxation strategies to patients seeking help for stress, anxiety, and depression).
However, Freud and Beard differ in crucial ways. For Freud focuses on a particular class of nervous illnesses which, although in his view are caused by civilization, are not caused in the way that Beard envisions. Instead of resulting from the pace of modern civilization, the illnesses which most interest Freud are those which result from a kind of psychological repression which, in his view, is connected with the standards that civilization imposes on those who inhabit it.
To this end, Freud distinguishes between the “psychoneuroses,” which he takes to be bound up with this kind of repression, and other nervous conditions or the “neuroses proper” which are not. Because of their connection with repression, the psychoneuroses will not, Freud predicts, be treatable through rest cures and other similar therapies. Instead, Freud’s well-known position is that a particular kind of talking cure which pursues repressions themselves is required. This cure, of course, is psychoanalysis. Freud writes:
Careful clinical observation allows us to distinguish two groups of nervous disorders: the neuroses proper and the psychoneuroses. In the former the disturbances (the symptoms), whether they show their effects in somatic or mental functioning, appear to be of a toxic nature. They behave exactly like the phenomena accompanying an excess or a deprivation of certain nerve poisons…. With the psychoneuroses, the influence of heredity is more marked and the causation less transparent. A peculiar method of investigation known as psycho-analysis has, however, enabled us to recognize that the symptoms of these disorders (hysteria, obsessional neurosis, etc.) are psychogenic and depend upon the operation of unconscious (repressed) ideational complexes. (1908, p. 186)
Freud suggests that civilization contributes to the repression of instinctual life, which in turn causes the clinical pictures characteristic of the psychoneuroses: “[g]enerally speaking, our civilization is built up on the suppression of instincts,” in such a way that “[e]ach individual has surrendered some part of his assets—some part of the sense of omnipotence or of the aggressive or vindictive inclinations in his personality” (1908, p. 186). In Civilization and Its Discontents, he writes: “[w]hen an instinctual trend undergoes repression, its libidinal elements are turned into symptoms, and its aggressive components into a sense of guilt” (1930, p. 139).
The kind of repression of instinctual life that Freud has in mind becomes apparent if one considers various common practices and standards of behaviour. For instance, Freud claims, the pursuit of cleanliness and order can betray a striking contrast with dispositions people have at the instinctual level. “Dirt of any kind” he suggests, “seems to us incompatible with civilization” (1930, p. 55). Yet, in spite of the obvious utility that standards of cleanliness and order can bring, it is clear to Freud that “these aims and endeavours of culture are not entirely to be explained on utilitarian lines; there must be something else at work besides (1930, pp. 56-7).
Freud focuses much of his attention on another kind of standard that accompanies civilization, which he takes to be very closely connected with neurosis. This is the kind of standard set by social morality. In Freud’s view, this, too, will often go beyond what is useful, and, in doing so, makes apparent the contrast with human beings’ instinctual dispositions. Freud describes the commands of social morality as issuing from the “cultural super-ego.”
According to Freud, the cultural super-ego makes demands of people which, given their instinctual dispositions, are unrealistic. Yet, some, will seek to fulfill these demands in a way that is characterized by the repression their instinctual lives. They will, as a consequence, be susceptible to falling ill with a psychoneurosis. Freud writes:
[the cultural super-ego] does not trouble itself enough about the facts of the mental constitution of human beings. It issues a command and does not ask whether it is possible for people to obey it. On the contrary, it assumes that a man’s ego is psychologically capable of anything that is required of it, that his ego has unlimited mastery over his id. This is a mistake; and even in what are known as normal people the id cannot be controlled beyond certain limits. If more is demanded of a man, a revolt will be produced in him or a neurosis, or he will be made unhappy. (1930, p. 139).
Along these lines, Freud also writes, it has been “found that men become neurotic because they cannot tolerate the degree of privation that society imposes on them in virtue of its cultural ideals” (1930, p. 46). In fact, Freud had made a similar point in “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness”:
All who wish to be more noble-minded than their constitution allows fall victims to neurosis; they would have been more healthy if it could have been possible for them to be less good. (1908, p. 191)
An general example of the phenomenon Freud is referring to comes from the 1908 paper:
Let us, for instance, consider the very common case of a woman who does not love her husband, because, owing to the conditions under which she entered marriage, she has no reason to love him, but who very much wants to love him, because that alone corresponds to the ideal of marriage to which she has been brought up. She will in that case suppress every impulse which would express the truth and contradict her endeavours to fulfill her ideal, and she will make special efforts to play the part of a loving, affectionate and attentive wife. The outcome of this self-suppression will be a neurotic illness…. (1908, p. 203)
Of course, those familiar with Freud will know that he has a longstanding interest in the repressions of instinctual trends of the infant, which he explains using the logic of the “Oedipal”; and Freud will often locate the cause of neurosis precisely in the ways in which these repressions have unfolded. Yet, even such early repression is a matter, for Freud, of laws and prohibitions that owe their existence in a very fundamental way to civilization.
Freud claims that he adopts an “impartial” position as to the ultimate value of civilization. In doing so, he is far from taking up what he describes as an “enthusiastic partiality which believes our civilization to be the most precious thing that we possess or could acquire,” thinking that “it must inevitably lead us to undreamed-of heights of perfection” (1930, p. 143). Nor, however, does he follow those who would wish in some way to bring about a state of affairs among human beings that they imagine to have existed prior to civilization (if the notion of such a state of affairs can be made sense of to begin with). What does, without doubt, concern Freud is the primary task of psychoanalysis, as he here envisions it – namely, the task of helping those who experience psychoneurotic distress brought about by the interplay between their instinctual lives and the demands of civilization.
Examples of the Psychoanalytic Perspective in Clinical Practice
How is the psychoanalytic perspective, which starts from the notion of the unconscious, applied in clinical practice?
1. Psychoanalytic Approach to Symptoms
To begin with, there is a specific idea of a “symptom” that operates in classical psychoanalysis. A symptom is seen to be meaningful and in some way puzzling to the individual. It seems alien to a person’s self-understanding. Sebastian Gardner discusses one of Freud’s well-known patients:
[he suffers from] compulsive impulses… groundless fears that terrible things will happen to the people he loves, and corresponding obsessive desires to protect them… chronic indecision (over his choice of marriage partners); absurd, ill-conceived projects… and barely intelligible, violent, and emotionally overwhelming trains of thought, that he finds foreign and repugnant, on themes of death and torture. We call such things symptoms because they are such aberrant kinds of psychological phenomena. [His] feelings appear to ‘lack all reason’… [they] strain [his] ordinary way of viewing himself, and create a corresponding need for self-explanation” (Irrationality and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis).
The types of phenomena which we call “symptoms” are prevalent, and they can contribute to a great deal of misery for their sufferers. At different points in their lives, many people will experience symptoms of varying degrees of intensity. For example, it is common to find people who, in their romantic relationships, seem mysteriously drawn to partners who happen to share a particular characteristic. Yet, this very characteristic practically guarantees that the relationship will go badly for the person.
When a person sees themselves as in the grip of such seemingly irrational behavior, they struggle to understand themselves, and desire an explanation.
2. Contrast With Short-Term Supportive Therapies
One thing that has always made psychoanalysis unique is that it is one of the most thorough forms of talk therapy available. In this way, it differs from short-term supportive therapy.
In short-term supportive therapy, the therapist takes on a role similar to a friend or family member the individual wishes they could have. Their function is mainly to offer encouragement, unconditional support for the individual’s point of view, and sometimes even tips or education on healthy living. People sometimes go into short-term therapy if they are going through an unusually tough time in life (often connected with symptoms like anxiety or depression, or reduced functioning) and are just looking for a bit of encouragement.
Everyone needs support sometimes. In fact, being in psychoanalysis itself can feel very safe and supportive. But psychoanalysts aim to help people deal with problems that have roots earlier in their lives. This is important since many people face a series of related stresses or crises over the course of their lives which continue to arise because they have never had the chance to address the root of the problem.
In order to be able to move beyond earlier ways of dealing with life, it is important but generally not enough merely to have an intellectual understanding of the details of one’s life history. It is also necessary to “work through” or “process” what has been avoided.
For this to occur, psychoanalysts place a unique emphasis on the resurfacing of phenomena from the past within the psychoanalytic treatment. We are looking for “repetitions” that occur in the analysis itself. This is most likely to become evident when there is a framework of regularly scheduled sessions. An individual will come to sessions frequently enough to cover everything that needs to be said, and so that observations can be made about what is happening in the here and now of the analysis itself.
Sometimes people will come to psychoanalysis after they have tried less intensive therapies since they realize that they are now looking for more thorough self-exploration and deeper change.
References and Further Reading
Anzieu, D. (1986). Freud’s self-analysis. International Universities Press.
Hopkins, J., (1991). The Interpretation of Dreams. In. Jerome Neu (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Freud, S. (1908). “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume IX (1906-1908): Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ and Other Works, 177-204.
Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and Its Discontents. (J. Riviere Trans.). The Hogarth Press.
Lacan, J. (2007). The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious. In B. Fink (Trans.), Ecrits: The first complete edition in English.(1st ed.). New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud And Philosophy: An Essay On Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press.
