SIGMUND FREUD AND THE CLASSICAL PSYCHOANALYTIC TRADITION
Very deep is the well of the past. . . . For the deeper we sound, the further down into the lower world of the past we probe and press, the more do we find that the earliest foundations of humanity, its history and culture, reveal themselves unfathomable.
—Thomas Mann
In 1873, when Freud was seventeen, the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann put together clues from fragmentary historical and literary sources and located the ancient city of Troy on the coastal plain of what is now Turkey. Perhaps no other event so fired the imagination of Freud, who tended to draw his inspiration from ancient heroes such as Moses and Hannibal. Later, Freud’s consulting room came to resemble the office of an archaeologist, filled with primitive sculptures and relics. The site of Freud’s dig was not the earth but the minds of his patients; the tools he used were not a shovel and brushes but psychoanalytic interpretations. The exhilaration was the same, however. Freud felt he had discovered an important site and had fashioned the necessary technology for exposing the underlying structure of the human mind and for unearthing the archaic history of both the individual patient and all humankind.
The historical development of Freud’s theories is extremely intricate and complex. Since our focus is not intellectual history per se, but an explication of the concepts Freud bequeathed to contemporary psychoanalysis, we will not examine that development in any detail. Yet a broad sketch of the chronological unfolding of Freud’s major concepts is essential to appreciating their origin in the clinical problems his patients presented to him. Unlike Schliemann, who knew precisely what he was looking for, Freud stumbled across his route to the “well of the past,” his access to the depths, as he went, while trying to address his patients’ difficulties in living in the present and on the surface.
FROM BRAIN TO MIND
Freud graduated from medical school at a time when the study of the physical structure of the brain was in its burgeoning infancy. The neuron, the individual nerve cell, had recently been isolated; techniques were being developed for tracing neural pathways; the enormous complexity of the brain was just beginning to be sensed. Freud started out as a researcher in neurophysiology, and when he switched from research to clinical practice, he treated patients suffering from what were understood to be neurological conditions, victims of damaged or weakened nerves. The dramatic demonstrations of the renowned neurologists Jean-Martin Charcot and Hippolyte Bernheim he witnessed during a stay in France sparked his interest in unconscious ideas, fatefully shifting his focus from brain to mind.1
For example, “glove anaesthesia,” the lack of feeling in the hand, makes no sense neurologically. The nerves in the hand extend up the arm; if the nerves themselves were damaged, the numbness would not be limited only to the hand. But glove anaesthesia makes sense psychologically. The idea the patient has of his hand is central to the functional disability. It is not the nerves themselves that are damaged; something is disordered in the patient’s thoughts, thoughts about his hand. The patient may have no direct access to these thoughts; they may be absent from the conscious portion of his mind. Yet they have a powerful effect and result in a physical phenomenon.
Charcot demonstrated not only that ideas, rather than damaged nerves, were responsible for conditions like glove anaesthesia and hysterical paralysis and blindness, but that ideas could also effect (generally temporary) cures. Charcot would place patients in hypnotic trances and, through hypnotic suggestion, induce hysterical symptoms that hadn’t been there before. He might say something like, “When you awake, you will be unable to see, unable to walk.” And, even more startling, he would use hypnotic suggestion to temporarily remove symptoms, to make the hysterically blind see, the hysterically paralyzed walk.
The problem is not in the flesh—the hand, the eyes, the legs are intact. The problem is an idea, out of awareness—the idea that the patient cannot feel, cannot see, cannot walk. That pathogenic idea is counteracted by another idea, the hypnotist’s injunction to feel, to see, to walk. That idea, introduced into the mind of the subject by the hypnotist, can control experience and behavior, despite the fact that it seems to be wholly unknown and inaccessible to the subject herself.
Before Freud, hysterics—patients who suffered from physical disabilities but evidenced no obvious actual physical impairment—were regarded as malingerers, morally suspect fakers, or victims of a generally weakened nervous system that produced random, meaningless disturbances in functioning. Freud, following Charcot, Bernheim, and other practitioners of medical hypnotism, demonstrated that hysterics suffered a disease not of brain but of mind. It was ideas, not nerves, that were the source of trouble.
Why would certain ideas become so different from ordinary ideas in the mind? How do some ideas become inaccessible? How do they develop the capacity for wreaking such havoc?
Some progress was made toward answering these questions by Freud’s first collaborator, Josef Breuer, a highly respected Viennese internist. In 1880 Breuer was treating a brilliant young woman named Bertha Pappenheim, who later became a pioneer in the discipline of social work. While nursing her sick father, Pappenheim had developed a wide array of dramatic symptoms, including paralyses and speech dysfunctions. Breuer tried placing her in a hypnotic trance and, using the experimental procedures of Charcot and others, removing the symptoms through posthypnotic suggestion. Although this attempt proved ineffective, Pappenheim, while in the hypnotic trance, fell into talking about her various symptoms. Breuer, evincing the qualities that were to become crucial in a psychoanalyst—curiosity and a willingness to follow the patient’s lead—allowed her simply to talk. With some encouragement on his part, her associations would lead back to the point at which the symptom originally appeared, inevitably some disturbing, stressful event. Pappenheim and Breuer discovered that this talk and the emotional discharge produced when the memory of the original disturbing incident emerged had a curative effect. Through this process, which she called “chimney sweeping,” the symptoms disappeared (Freud & Breuer, 1895, p. 30).
At one point, for example, Pappenheim found herself unable to drink liquids; she had no idea why, but they had suddenly become repugnant to her. She became dehydrated and began to be seriously ill. Employing the procedure they had developed together, Breuer placed her in a trance and prodded her into talking about her disgust. She felt disinclined to talk about its onset. He pushed her. Overcoming a strong resistance, she remembered recently walking into her room to discover the dog of her “English lady-companion, whom she did not care for” lapping water from a glass (p. 34). She recounted the scene with great anger that, wanting to be polite, she had held back at the time. She then emerged from the trance, and requested a glass of water.
Breuer told an eager Freud about these experiences, and in 1893 the two published the first psychoanalytic essay, “A Preliminary Communication,” which stated, “Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences” (Freud & Breuer, 1895, p. 7). Hysteria was caused by trapped memories and the feelings associated with them, they argued. Those memories and feelings had never been lived through in an ordinary way; they had become split off from the rest of the mind, only to fester and rise to the surface in the form of disconcerting and seemingly inexplicable symptoms. If those symptoms were traced to their origins, their meanings would become apparent and the feelings would be discharged in a cathartic burst. Then the symptoms would disappear. Freud and Breuer added fuller theoretical chapters and extended case histories (including that of Bertha Pappenheim, whom they called Anna O.)2 and published Studies on Hysteria in 1895.
Perhaps the most important question raised by these initial clinical discoveries was: Why do certain experiences generate feelings that become dissociated, split off from the rest of the mind? In this first psychoanalytic work, Freud and Breuer actually wrote separate theoretical chapters, suggesting two very different hypotheses. Breuer argued that the experiences that became dissociated and therefore problematic were those that took place during altered states of consciousness, which he called “hypnoid states.” Pappenheim, for example, was exhausted and overstressed from nursing her sick father. The disturbing events could not be integrated into her ordinary mental processes because they were registered in an altered state of mind, when she was already not herself. By placing her in a trance and encouraging her to relive the memories, the split was healed, normal processing of emotions took place, and the mind was made whole once again. Perhaps, Breuer thought, certain people were more prone to hypnoid states than others and therefore more likely to become hysterics.
Freud introduced a very different hypothesis: The pathogenic memories and feelings were dissociated not because of a prior altered state of consciousness but because the actual content of those memories and feelings was disturbing, unacceptable and in conflict with the rest of the person’s ideas and feelings. It was not that they just happened to be recorded in a different way, to have fallen into a different part of the patient’s mind—they were incompatible with the rest of consciousness and were therefore actively kept out of awareness. The difference between these early hypotheses of Breuer and Freud highlights the features that would become characteristic of Freud’s understanding of mind throughout his subsequent career. Whereas Breuer saw hysterics as people susceptible to altered states of consciousness, to being “spaced out,” Freud saw hysterics as people rent with conflicts and harboring secrets, from themselves as well as from others.
FROM HYPNOSIS TO PSYCHOANALYSIS
From 1895 to 1905 Freud produced a burst of creative theorizing and innovative clinical technique perhaps unrivaled in the history of ideas. The theory was always stimulated by and grounded in his clinical efforts; the theory often led to technical innovations that in turn generated new clinical data, which invariably stimulated more theoretical advances. During this ten-year period, psychoanalysis emerged from hypnotism and became a distinct methodology and treatment in its own right; many of the basic concepts that guide psychoanalytic thought to this day were established.
Freud began to find hypnosis less helpful in gaining access to pathogenic memories and feelings than he and Breuer had initially perceived it to be. As his clinical experience grew, Freud realized that what was most crucial to a permanent removal of symptoms was for the objectionable, unconscious material to become generally accessible to normal consciousness. (For Pappenheim, for example, the unconscious thought might be something like “I hate this woman’s loathsome dog and it angers me that she lets it drink from my glass.”) Troublesome “reminiscences” that emerged during a hypnotic trance slipped beyond reach again as the patient came out of the trance. There was a resistant force in the patient’s mind, which Freud called the defense, that actively kept the memories out of awareness. (A well-bred young woman of Pappenheim’s time and class would not have such unseemly rage about the dog.) The hypnotic trance artificially circumvented the defense, gaining access for the analyst to the festering secrets. But the patient was the one who needed to know, and the patient could not know because the resistance to that particular memory (and similar associatively linked memories) was reinstated when the trance ended. Simply being informed of the secret by the analyst after the trance would give the patient only intellectual, not experiential, awareness of it. (Pappenheim would know, based on her faith in the analyst, that she must hate the dog and possibly the governess too, but she doesn’t feel the hatred and disgust.)
The Topographic Model
Freud’s struggle with this clinical problem led to crucial theoretical and technical advances. In terms of theory, he began to envision a topographical model of the mind, dividing it into three different realms: an unconscious, containing unacceptable ideas and feelings; a preconscious, containing acceptable ideas and feelings that are capable of becoming conscious; and the conscious, containing those ideas and feelings in awareness at any particular time.
The theoretical advances represented in the topographical model were accompanied by technical innovations. The clinical task shifted from the discovery of the hypnotized patient’s secrets by the analyst to the removal of the defenses against those secrets in the patient’s own mind. Freud struggled to find a method that would dismantle or dissolve the defenses rather than temporarily lull them as hypnosis did. Around the turn of the century, he settled on the method of free association, the basic procedure that has been the backbone of psychoanalytic technique ever since.
Free Association
Free association retained some of the trappings of hypnotism. The patient lies comfortably on a couch in a quiet, peaceful setting, a situation intended to induce a state of mind midway between normal waking consciousness and a trance. The analyst is behind the head of the couch, out of direct vision. The patient says whatever comes into her mind, with no effort to screen or select thoughts, and is encouraged to become a passive observer of her own stream of consciousness: “Act as though . . . you were a traveler sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views which you see outside” (Freud, 1913, p. 135).
As a strategic device, free association helps the analyst discern the patient’s secrets, the unconscious wishes, while the defenses remain active and can be addressed. By encouraging the patient to report on all fleeting thoughts, the analyst hopes to get the patient to bypass the normal selection process that screens out conflictual content. Yet the patient is fully awake and can be shown that her unintended flow of thoughts contains disguised ideas and feelings that she has been keeping out of awareness.
Transference and Resistance
Free association is impossible to do for very long, Freud discovered. The defenses block the emergence of thoughts too closely linked to the repressed secrets. Furthermore, conflictual thoughts and feelings that constitute the center of the patient’s difficulties are soon transferred to the person of the analyst, who becomes an object of intense longing, love, and/or hate. The patient refuses to speak of embarrassing or seemingly trivial thoughts, particularly because those thoughts often pertain to the analyst; the patient often finds she has no thoughts at all. The resistance to particular free associations is the very same force, Freud began to speculate, that drove the original memories out of consciousness in the first place. It is precisely this transference and this resistance that need to be exposed, identified, and dissolved. By analyzing the patient’s free associations and resistances to free associations, Freud believed, he could gain access to both sides of the pathogenic conflict: (1) the secret feelings and memories and (2) the defenses—the thoughts and feelings rejecting those secret feelings and memories.
We can see this conflict in the case of Gloria. A lawyer in her twenties who grew up in an upper-middle-class family in a large Western city, she sought analytic treatment because she was paralyzed in trying to decide whether to marry the man she had been living with for some time. “I just don’t know if he is Mr. Right,” she said. Marriage was not the only area in which Gloria was indecisive, analytic inquiry began to reveal. Although she herself had never quite articulated it, even to herself, a pervasive doubt shadowed all important areas of her life. Virtually every activity seemed to expose her to lurking dangers. It was very difficult for her to allow herself to act spontaneously in any circumstances, and her life was consequently constricted and fretful. Each step of the way, she envisioned the worst possible scenario, and then combed her world for clues as to its likelihood.
In the initial months of analysis, these doubts, ruminations, and fears were traced increasingly further back in her childhood. She remembered being very worried that something disastrous would happen to her parents and other relatives. She would make up games with imagined predictive powers: if an even number of cars came around the corner in the next two minutes, everything would be all right; an odd number meant disaster was sure to strike.
Gloria agreed to begin her analytic sessions in much the same way Freud’s patients began theirs—by reporting on whatever she found herself experiencing. This soon became problematic, however. She had great difficulty in knowing what it was she felt she “should” talk about; she headed off the horrifying possibility of having nothing to say by preparing detailed agendas for the sessions ahead of time. Sometimes she stopped speaking altogether. With some coaxing on the part of the analyst, she revealed that she had begun to feel anxious because she was having trouble grasping and using whatever the analyst said back to her. The analyst’s questions and statements seemed complicated and confusing; his responses seemed “too big” and her mind seemed too small.
Among Freud’s most important clinical observations was that the patient’s difficulties in the analytic situation (the resistance and transference) are not an obstacle to the treatment but the very heart of it. Over the course of many months, it became apparent that Gloria’s fears about free-associating and the analyst’s interpretations derived from the same fears that had dominated her childhood and underlay her anxious, inhibited adulthood. If she allowed her ideas simply to flow, she was convinced, dangerous and deeply conflictual thoughts and fantasies would emerge. Her feelings, her bodily processes, her imagination—these were dangerous, likely to get out of control; they needed to be reined in at all costs. Without realizing it, she was constantly monitoring and scrutinizing her experience and inhibiting her mental processes.
What was most helpful to patients like Gloria, Freud found, was not circumventing her defenses (through hypnotism) to discover her secrets, but exploring those very defenses as they manifested themselves in the analytic situation. The central focus of the analytic process shifted to the analysis of transference (the displacement onto the analyst of the patient’s conflictual feelings and wishes) and the analysis of resistance (the impediments to free association).
DREAMS
Among the associations generated by Freud’s patients were their dreams. Freud treated dreams like any other associations: they were likely to contain hidden thoughts and links to earlier experiences.
Freud himself was a prolific dreamer. He also had certain troublesome neurotic symptoms. Soon, his most important patient became himself. He immersed himself in the new technique he had created, associating to the elements in his own dream life and communicating his self-discoveries in feverish letters to a physician friend in Berlin, Wilhelm Fliess, who functioned, at that considerable distance, as Freud’s quasi-analyst. By 1895, Freud felt he had grasped the secret of dream formation.
Dreams are disguised fulfillments of conflictual wishes, Freud became convinced (Freud, 1900). In sleep, the dynamic force (the defenses) that ordinarily keeps forbidden wishes from gaining access to consciousness is weakened, as in a hypnotic trance. If the wish were simply represented directly in the dream, sleep would likely be disrupted. A compromise is struck between the force that propels the wish into consciousness and the force that blocks access to consciousness. The wish may appear in the dream only in a disguised form, an intruder dressed up to look as though he belongs. The true meaning of the dream (the latent dream thoughts) undergoes an elaborate process of distortion that results in the dream as experienced (the manifest content of the dream). Condensation, displacement, symbolism—all are employed in the dream work to transform the unacceptable latent dream thoughts into acceptable, although apparently meaningless, disconnected images, which are strung together into a story (secondary elaboration), to throw the dreamer even further off the track.
The technique for interpreting dreams follows from this conception of their formation. Each element of the manifest content of the dream is isolated and associated to. The associations to the various elements lead in different directions, exposing the different memories, thoughts, and feelings that had created them (through condensation, displacement, and symbolization). Eventually the various lines of association coalesce in the nodal latent dream thoughts. Dream interpretation reverses the process of dream formation, tracing the path from the disguised surface to the hidden secrets lying beneath.
The form that Freud delineated in his theory of dreams became the central structural pattern for his understanding of all important psychic phenomena. The structure of neurotic symptoms, slips of the tongue (Freudian slips), and motivated errors in general are all identical to the structure of the dream: a compromise is struck between an unacceptable thought or feeling and the defense against it. The forbidden material is allowed access into conscious experience only in disguised form.
An early dream of Gloria’s can be analyzed from this perspective.
She dreamed that she was five years old, waiting with great excitement for her father to return home from work. When he arrived, it was discovered that he had something disgusting on his shoe, probably some dog feces he had stepped in. But there was something ominous about whatever this was he had brought in. The dream ended with a feeling of spooky uneasiness (rather like the feelings generated by the alien pods of the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers).
As with all important dreams, new associations and meanings emerged repeatedly over the course of the analysis. Some of Gloria’s associations with particular relevance to Freud’s early theories of dream formation include the following:
When she was five years old a brother was born. She remembered having a vague understanding of her father’s role in impregnating her mother and eventually remembered feeling quite jealous of the father’s having given the mother, rather than her, a baby. She had many memories of baby dolls, which she valued highly, and also many horrible memories of her early relationship with her brother, whose arrival she came to regard as a virtual disaster.
Viewed from the perspective of Freud’s theory of dream formation, the dream might be understood as follows:
As a little girl, and even as a grown woman, Gloria was intensely attached to her father and his penis. (The erotic excitement of her relationship to her father is condensed into the image of his eagerly awaited return home, and her interest in his penis is displaced onto and symbolized by his shoe.) Her brother was a piece of shit, she believed, and his arrival marred her erotic relationship with her father. She was unable to blame her father directly for this event that deeply enraged her, so she tended to regard it as an accident outside his control. The manifest content of the dream, a puzzling, odd story, conceals the latent dream thoughts beneath: childhood wishes, rage, and fears. The dream is a disguised composite of her deepest childhood wishes and her defenses against those wishes, woven together (through “secondary elaboration”) into a bizarre narrative.
CHILDHOOD SEXUALITY
The other fateful discovery during those same years when Freud was establishing the significance of dreams concerned the type of memories and disturbing secrets he was reaching in his psychic excavations. As his clinical experience expanded, Freud found that symptoms thought to have been removed with the cathartic method (adapted from Breuer’s treatment of Pappenheim) often returned. When he inquired into these symptoms further, it turned out that the event that was considered to be the origination of the symptom concealed an earlier unpleasant experience. Unless the symptom was traced to the earlier episode, the symptom was likely to recur. Often there was a series of associatively linked episodes, beginning in early childhood, all of which needed to be exhumed. Current conflicts and symptoms were invariably tied, Freud began to suspect, to events in early childhood.
Freud found that many of his patients, not just hysterics, were suffering from troubling memories of earlier experiences. If each exposed memory was examined to see whether it concealed earlier prototypes, all symptoms could be traced to traumatic incidents during early childhood (before the age of six). Even more surprising, these incidents invariably had to do with a precocious involvement with sexuality.
Gloria and her analyst gradually discovered the central importance of Gloria’s early relationship with her father, whom she found both exciting and terrifying. She had many memories, which emerged over the course of treatment, of her father’s flaunting his semi-nakedness. She was both fascinated and repulsed by his penis, which seemed huge and demonic. In her early struggles with the information she had been able to gather about sexuality and reproduction, she could not imagine how her small vagina could ever accommodate such a penis. Sexuality in general and her father in particular seemed both intensely exciting and profoundly dangerous. The analytic situation itself, like all important and anxiety-provoking areas of her life, was organized (in the transference) around this central, traumatic configuration: the analyst’s interpretations, like her father’s penis, seemed huge, both intensely exciting and extremely dangerous; her mind, like her vagina in childhood, was small and vulnerable; she longed to take in the interpretations, but was afraid they would destroy her.
A final aspect of Freud’s early clinical discoveries was even more startling: If the memories of childhood sexuality were systematically peeled back to their troublesome core, they were invariably connected to an actual sexual encounter of one sort of another. These discoveries led Freud to the controversial theory of infantile seduction: The root cause of all neurosis is the premature introduction of sexuality into the experience of the child.3 The child, whose natural innocence allows her no way to process the experience, becomes victimized by it again when her own sexuality naturally blossoms at puberty. The new, intense feelings of adolescence rekindle the earlier memories and feelings, trapped in their unprocessed form beneath the surface of the child’s mind, creating a powerful pressure that produces neurotic symptoms.
This early theory would suggest that Gloria’s memories of her feelings and fears with respect to her father must conceal an actual instance of seduction by the father. And indeed, Gloria had many memories not of explicit molestation, but of what she perceived as her father’s frightening, intense interest in her sexuality: he would barge into her room despite her demands for privacy, noting and commenting on her physical maturation in a way she found extremely uncomfortable and embarrassing.
Freud expanded and developed his theory of infantile seduction, despite considerable criticism from his medical colleagues. At the same time, he wrestled, through the interpretation of his dreams, with his own past.
In 1896, his father died, and Freud had a series of dreams that revealed feelings about his parents which were surprising to him. Freud had wondered about the possibility of a sexual encounter in his own childhood. If all neurosis begins with seduction, and he himself had neurotic symptoms, he himself must have been seduced. Yet he had not uncovered any such memories. The dreams about his father seemed to suggest something else: As a small boy, he’d had sexual longings for his mother; he had regarded his father as a dangerous rival; he felt a triumph in connection with his father’s recent demise. It seemed as if Freud had not been seduced as a child, but rather, he had longed to be seduced!
Freud’s surprising self-discoveries were coterminous with his growing doubts about the theory of infantile seduction. Neurotic symptoms were very common. Was it possible that so many upper-middle-class Viennese children were routinely abused by their caretakers? Ironically, the more data Freud accumulated in support of his theory (the more patients recovered what appeared to be memories of childhood sexual experiences), the less probable the theory appeared. Putting these strands together, Freud arrived at the momentous conclusion, which he announced in a letter to Fliess in 1897, that many of the encounters probably had never taken place, that what he had taken for memories of events were memories of wishes and longings (Freud, 1985, pp. 264–66).4
It was a particular hallmark of Freud’s genius to turn apparent setbacks into opportunities for further exploration. The collapse of his theory of infantile seduction forced him to grapple with his clinical data in a very different way. He had shared the general assumption of his day that children, left to their own devices, were sexually innocent. Sexuality was something that emerged in the hormonal changes of puberty. The theory of infantile seduction had seemed so compelling because it accounted for the introduction of sexuality into the innocence of childhood by an adult seducer. But if the seductions never happened, if analysis was uncovering not memories of events but memories of wishes and longings, the whole assumption of childhood innocence needed to be rethought. The collapse of the theory of infantile seduction led in 1897 to the emergence of the theory of infantile sexuality. The impulses, fantasies, and conflicts that Freud uncovered beneath the neurotic symptoms of his patients derived not from external contamination, he now believed, but from the mind of the child itself.
Freud became increasingly convinced that intensely conflictual sexuality dominates the childhood not only of future neurotics, but of all men and women. Further, the sexuality hidden in the symptomatology of neurotics is not limited to conventional heterosexual intercourse but is more like the sexuality of perversions. Body parts other than the genitals, such as the mouth and the anus, and bodily processes other than coitus, such as sucking, defecating, and even looking, are involved. This wide array of interests and activities characteristic of the sexuality of both neurosis and perversion can be traced, Freud increasingly felt, to the natural sexuality of childhood. But why is sexuality such a powerful motivator of difficulties in living? Freud’s clinical discoveries led him to rethink the nature of sexuality and its role in the mind in general.
The Theory of Instinctual Drive
The theory of sexuality that Freud developed over the next several years (1905b) is based on the notion of instinctual drive, which became Freud’s fundamental building block for all his subsequent theorizing.
The mind, Freud reasoned, is an apparatus for discharging stimuli that impinge upon it.5 There are two kinds of stimuli, external (such as a threatening predator) and internal (such as hunger). External stimuli can be avoided; internal stimuli keep mounting. The mind becomes structured so as to contain, control, and, if possible, discharge internal stimuli.
Central among the internal stimuli are the sexual instincts. These appear as a broad array of tensions arising from different body parts, demanding activity to effect their discharge, Freud believed. Thus, for example, oral libido arises in the oral cavity (its source), creates a need for sucking activity (its aim), and becomes targeted toward and attached to something (generally external to the person) such as the breast (its object), which is required for satisfaction. The source and aim are inherent properties of the drive, Freud believed; the object is discovered through experience. Thus in feeding for purposes of self-preservation, the infant discovers that the breast is a source of libidinal pleasure; hence, through experience, the breast becomes the first libidinal object.
The concentration of nerve endings in particular organs underlies their function as the source of libidinal drives. These “erogenous zones” always have the potential for sexual excitation, but at different points during childhood one or another zone has prominence, Freud believed, and activity involving that zone becomes the central organizing focus of the child’s emotional life. Freud proposed a sequence of psychosexual stages, through which one or another body part and its accompanying libidinal activity assumes prominence: oral, anal, phallic, and genital.6
If psychoanalysis in general was like an archaeological dig, the development and elaboration of Freud’s vision of human sexuality had all the intensity and excitement of the expeditions of early explorers searching for the source of the Nile. Freud began with the main channel, adult sexuality and its central and obvious role in human experience. But where does it begin? What does it look like at its source? Freud’s patients’ associations to their present experience and the progressively earlier memories they revealed provided Freud with the vessel he needed to move backward in time, to earlier and earlier experiences, fantasies, wishes. The main channel divided repeatedly. There was not a singular beginning of sexuality, in either a sudden awakening or a specific trauma (as the theory of infantile seduction had suggested). Sexuality has many, many tributaries (Freud called them “component instincts”). It does not begin as genitality, but in a diffuse sensuality, located in many different body parts, stimulated through the many different activities in the first years of life.
The impulses of childhood sexuality survive in adulthood disguised (neurotic symptoms) and undisguised (sexual perversions), Freud believed. Some of them persist as foreplay, having been subsumed under the ultimate goal of genital intercourse. But most of the pieces of infantile sexual experience are objectionable to the socialized adult mind. Under the best of circumstances they are channeled into sublimated, aim-inhibited forms of gratification. Many of the drive impulses are too objectionable to be allowed any gratification at all; elaborate defenses are built to keep them repressed or to divert them into harmless activities. Thus the river of adult experience is composed of the continuous flow from its infantile sources, now merged, disguised, blended together into what appears to be a transparent whole.
Consider anal eroticism. The anus, with its aggregate of nerve endings and its central role during the years of toilet training, is an important erogenous zone. The child has intense wishes to defecate when and where he wants, to maximize the sensual pleasures of elimination, to manipulate and stimulate the anus, to mess, and to generate fecal odors. Socialization requires a complex set of inhibitions and restrictions of these wishes. Defecation must be regulated and controlled; it is permissible only in specific circumstances. Some degree of tidiness must become established; basic principles of bodily hygiene are developed.
What happens to anal erotic impulses? Freud came to the conclusion that there is a continuous flow of anal as well as oral and phallic impulses into adult experience, and that a great deal of adult functioning is constructed either to provide disguised forms of gratification or effective defenses or, most often, complex combinations of gratification and defense.
There are people, for example, who are expert at spreading disorder. They cannot tolerate tidiness, which they experience as repressive and suffocating. As guests, they always leave your house a good deal messier than when they arrived. In terms of Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality, they are perpetually finding outlets for slightly disguised anal erotic impulses to soil, to smell up.
Their counterparts are those whose lives are dedicated to order and tidiness, who cannot tolerate mess. These are the people for whom everything has a place. “Where does this go?” is their perpetual question. Dinner dishes are washed, dried, and out of sight before food is digested. Surfaces are all scrubbed. As guests, they always leave your house a bit more organized than when they arrived. (Places have been found for things that had no regular place.) In terms of Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality, they are dedicated to shoring up defenses against anal erotic impulses. Departures from their regime are dangerous. If dirt or mess is tolerated at all, defecation will no longer be containable in the bathroom, and an explosive nightmare will result.
The Oedipus Complex
The centerpiece of Freud’s theory of development was the Oedipus complex. Freud believed that the various elements of sexuality converge around the age of five or six in a genital organization, in which the component pregenital instincts (such as orality and anality) are subsumed under a genital hegemony. The aim of all the child’s desires becomes genital intercourse with the parent of the opposite sex. The parent of the same sex becomes a dangerous, feared rival. (Later Freud [1923] introduced the concept of the negative Oedipus complex, in which the child takes as her object the parent of the same sex and the parent of the opposite sex becomes the rival.) Like Sophocles’s Oedipus, each child is destined to follow her desires and thereby become caught in a powerful, passionate drama with no easy resolution. The coloration of the Oedipus complex for each child depends considerably on the course of the earlier, pregenital organizations. For the child with a strong oral fixation, genitality will take on oral themes (sexuality becomes infused with dependency issues). For the child with a strong anal fixation, genitality will take on anal themes (sexuality is pervaded with images of domination and control).
The Oedipus complex is resolved, Freud believed, through the threat of castration anxiety. A boy wants to remove the threat posed by his rival by castrating him, and assumes that his father will punish him in like fashion. It is only because of the threat of castration that the child’s oedipal ambitions are renounced. In 1923, Freud introduced the concept of the superego, a key component of which is the ego-ideal, as “the heir of the Oedipus complex” to account for the internalization of parental values that accompanies the resolution of the oedipal struggle and holds infantile sexuality in check. Freud had a great deal of difficulty accounting for the resolution of the Oedipus complex and the establishment of the superego in girls, for whom, presumably, castration would pose less of a threat. (We will consider the issue of differential developmental pathways for boys and girls more fully in chapter 8.)
The details and texture of the Oedipus complex depend on both constitutional and experiential factors and differ for each individual. But for all of us, Freud suggested, the central themes of childhood sexuality become organized in the Oedipus complex, and that organization becomes the underlying structure for the rest of life. As the psychoanalytic scholar Jay Greenberg (1991) has put it,
For Freud, the Oedipus complex was both the nodal event of normal development and the core conflict of the neuroses; the interplay of psychic forces in both mental health and psychopathology becomes comprehensible in its context. It is an extraordinary analytic invention, a framework for conceptualizing family dynamics and their residue in the psychic life of the child. (p. 5)
The Oedipus complex has always been the concept most widely associated with Freudian psychoanalysis. Greenberg (1991) has argued that the meaning of this concept has changed remarkably over decades of psychoanalytic theorizing and that Freud’s vision of sexual possession and rivalry has been vastly broadened to include an array of different kinds of motivations and various constellations of family dynamics. However, the identity of a “Freudian” is generally contingent on the integration of various theoretical and technical innovations into an expanded vision of the Oedipus complex. Thus even a theoretician as critical of classical drive theory as Roy Schafer (see chapter 7) notes that “for us the most adaptable, trustworthy, inclusive, supportable, and helpful storyline of them all [is] the Oedipus complex in all its complexity and with all its surprises” (1983, p. 276).
Psychic Conflict
The terms Freud introduced in presenting his theories of the unconscious, infantile sexuality and instinctual drive have become so commonplace, it is difficult to appreciate just how revolutionary his understanding of the psyche was and how striking it remains today. What we experience as our minds, Freud suggests, is merely a small portion of it; the rest is by no means transparent to our feeble consciousness. The real meaning of much of what we think, feel, and do is determined unconsciously, outside our awareness. The mind has elaborate devices for regulating the instinctual tensions that are the source of all motivation and that exert a continuous pressure for discharge. The apparent transparency of mind is an illusion; the psyche and the personality are highly complex, intricately textured layers of instinctual impulses, transformations of those impulses, and defenses against those impulses. Freud wrote:
What we describe as a person’s “character” is built up to a considerable extent from the material of sexual excitations and is composed of instincts that have been fixed since childhood, of constructions achieved by means of sublimation, and of other constructions, employed for effectively holding in check perverse impulses which have been recognized as being unutilizable. (1905, pp. 238–39)
For Freud, the very stuff of personality is woven out of impulses and defenses.
In Gloria’s analysis it became apparent that some of the central issues she had struggled with in childhood involved conflicts over wishes and impulses, which subsequently became embedded in her adult personality in different ways.
Gloria’s childhood emerged with increasing vividness over the first several months of treatment. She began to realize that her first full-blown neurotic symptom had appeared around the age of eleven or twelve, when her widespread obsessive ruminations became quite troubling and evolved into a disturbing compulsion. Gloria would lie awake at night, ruminating on patterns of hot and cold. She would go into the bathroom and turn on the hot and cold faucets in sequence: hot-cold-hot-cold; hot-hot-cold-cold; hot-cold-cold-hot-hot-cold-cold-hot. She would be tormented by the problem of how to end the sequence with a sense of finality. Each sequence seemed to have no natural ending; each could be extended in endless repetitions. She would go on and on, searching for closure, until she gave up in a state of unsettled exhaustion.
The onset of Gloria’s symptom coincided with the onset of puberty, when her body, her reactions, and her feelings were changing in ways she found quite frightening. Her developing breasts and her initial menstrual periods attracted great attention from her father, who would make frequent excited, congratulatory comments about both. Her own enhanced capacity for sexual excitement was extremely problematic, because sexuality was so bound up for her with frightening images of damaging surrender to bigger, stronger, intimidating male figures. Perhaps the flow from the faucet represented the eruption of her womanhood and her sexuality, and the hot-cold of the water represented the hot-cold of her feelings. Within Freud’s understanding of symptoms as disguised compromise-formations, Gloria’s struggle with the water faucets was a displaced and camouflaged enactment of her intense conflicts over wanting to be turned on and wanting to turn herself off, her wish to surrender to the natural processes surging in her body and her desperate efforts to gain control and mastery over them.
What happened to this central conflict, this struggle between forbidden impulses and defenses against those impulses, as Gloria grew older? Sex itself had been largely unpleasurable and sometimes painful. It was as if the adult experience of sex was organized along the lines of her childhood fantasies, and the actual discomfort made it an experience to be avoided as much as possible. However, the exciting features of sex were contained in masturbatory fantasies involving abductions, constraints, and domination. Sex as painful surrender was too frightening to give herself over to in actuality; the controllable fantasy (where she turned herself on and off) of sex as painful surrender was safe enough to allow very intense enjoyment.
But it was not only in adult sexuality that the traces of Gloria’s childhood conflicts were discovered. Gloria’s whole life could be understood as a battle that pitted her emerging intelligence, talents, self-expression, and vitality against her desperate efforts to control everything. One of the most vivid examples of this central and pervasive struggle was her difficulty in growing plants. She would buy plants from a nursery and care for them effectively for a while. When new growth began, however, she could not resist a compulsion to manually open the new shoots, thereby stunting all development. Similarly, virtually every area of her own life was constricted by her conviction that she needed to watch and vigilantly control all her natural physical and emotional expressions less they grow out of control and endanger her.
THE AGGRESSIVE DRIVE
From the point at which he abandoned the theory of infantile seduction until 1920, Freud regarded the sexual drive as the source of all conflict and psychopathology. He wrote about other drives besides sexuality (e.g., the self-preservative instincts), but it was, he felt, the impulses and wishes deriving from the sexual drive, in all its complexity and urgency, that created self-fragmentation. Issues involving aggression, sadism, and power found an increasingly important place in Freud’s clinical descriptions during the 1910s; yet in terms of theory, he regarded aggression and sadism as pieces of sexuality, components of the sexual drive (as, for example, in oral sadism or anal sadism).
In 1920 Freud introduced what has come to be known as his dual-instinct theory, which granted aggression equal status with sexuality as a source of the basic instinctual energy that drives mental processes. This was no minor addition. The way a theorist understands motivation, the underlying goals of behavior, imparts a crucial cast to his portrait of the mind and human activity. In his early writings (e.g., 1908) Freud conjured up a vision of people struggling with impulses and wishes that had become forbidden largely because of social conventions concerning sexuality, some of which he regarded as unnecessarily severe and constrictive. He envisioned the products of successful analysis as individuals constructively free of repression, able to use their manifold component sexual instincts for their own pleasure and satisfaction.
Increasingly, and especially after 1920, Freud’s view of human nature darkened.7 What is repressed are not just harmless sexual wishes, he came to believe, but a powerful, savage destructiveness deriving from a death instinct. With this crucial shift in the way Freud envisioned the instincts came an important reformulation of the way he and the early generations of psychoanalysts understood the relation between the individual and society. Repression is not imposed unnecessarily by a restrictive society; repression is a form of social control that saves people from themselves and makes it possible for them to live together without perpetually killing and exploiting one another. Ideal mental health does not entail an absence of repression, but the maintenance of a modulated repression that allows gratification while at the same time preventing primitive sexual and aggressive impulses from taking over. The turn toward a darker vision of instincts brought a more appreciative attitude toward social controls, which he now regarded as necessary to save people from themselves. Freud thus moved from an early implicit political philosophy that was Rousseauian in tone to one more darkly Hobbesian. In his most widely read book on culture, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud painted a picture of man requiring culture for survival but, because of the instinctual renunciation it entailed, necessarily always being dissatisfied in some fundamental fashion.8
FROM TOPOGRAPHY TO STRUCTURE
Another major innovation, introduced in 1923, concerned the basic categories into which Freud distributed various pieces of experience.
From his earliest differences with Breuer on the cause of repressed memories, Freud regarded conflict as the central clinical problem underlying all psychopathology. His favorite metaphors for the mind (and the analytic process) were military. One part of the mind was at war with another part of the mind, and the symptoms were a direct, although masked, consequence of this hidden, underlying struggle. Freud’s theoretical models of the psyche were all efforts to portray the patient’s conflict, which was at the heart of analytic treatment.
By the early 1920s, the topographical model (of the unconscious, with its inaccessible, repressed wishes, impulses, and memories, at odds with the more acceptable conscious and preconscious) was proving insufficient as a map of conflict. Growing clinical experience and conceptual sophistication led Freud to theorize that the unconscious wishes and impulses are in conflict with the defenses, not with the conscious and preconscious, and that the defenses cannot possibly really be conscious or accessible to consciousness. If I know I am keeping myself from knowing something, I must also know what it is that I am keeping myself from knowing. Freud’s patients not only did not know their own secrets, they also did not know that they had secrets. Not just the impulses and wishes were unconscious, but the defenses seemed to be unconscious as well.
Freud had discovered something else in the unconscious: guilt, prohibitions, self-punishments. Gloria’s masochistic longings for her father, for example, were linked with a sense of self-blame—she deserved the punishment she imagined herself receiving at the hands of her fantasied abusers. Her unconscious contained not just forbidden wishes, but also defenses against them, as well as self-accusations and punishments for them.
As Freud’s early notion of the unconscious had become increasingly complex, everything that was interesting, certainly everything involved in psychodynamic conflict, could be assigned a place there. When Freud began to perceive the basic conflictual seam in the psyche as not between conscious and unconscious but inside the unconscious itself, a new model, the structural model, became necessary to delineate the primary constituents of mind.
The structural model puts all the major components of the self in the unconscious, and the significant boundaries are between the id, ego, and superego. These are not topographical regions, but rather three very different kinds of agencies: The id is a “cauldron full of seething excitations” (1933, p. 73) of raw, unstructured, impulsive energies; the ego is a collection of regulatory functions that keep the impulses of the id under control; the superego is a set of moral values and self-critical attitudes, largely organized around internalized parental imagoes.
Drawing heavily on the Darwinian metaphors of his day, Freud portrayed humankind as only incompletely evolved, as torn by a fundamental rift between bestial motives and civilized conduct and demeanor, between an animal nature and cultural aspirations. And the very process of socialization entailed self-alienation and self-deception. Consistent with Freud’s understanding of animal nature (drawn from the zoology and animal psychology of his day) was his view of people as “driven” to seek pleasure in a single-minded and rapacious fashion. In order to become acceptable, both to others and to oneself, one has to conceal from oneself these purely hedonic motives. The ego, with the aid of the internalized parental presences in the superego, represses and regulates bestial impulses in the id to maintain safety in a world of other people, Freud proposed. The result is a mind largely unknown to itself, filled with secrets and disavowed impulses, sexual and aggressive. It is the pressure of those impulses in the “return of the repressed” that creates the neurotic symptoms whose code Freud felt he had broken.
FREUD’S LEGACY
Freud always regarded his discovery of the meaning of dreams to be his greatest contribution. This is because hidden in the story of the dream are secrets that pertain to human subjectivity in general. Subsequent psychoanalytic authors were to demonstrate that all the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are secondary elaborations, woven from a broad and varied range of fragments of past and present psychic life: wishes and longings, fantasies and perceptions, hopes and dreads.
Freud kept close watch and a tight rein on psychoanalysis as a quasi-political movement, as well as a science (Grosskurth, 1991). There were several important theoreticians whom Freud broke with (or who broke with Freud) early on, including Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Otto Rank, and Sandor Ferenczi. Many of their concepts and sensibilities, although developed outside the Freudian mainstream, found their way back into psychoanalytic thinking decades later, generally without credit to the pioneer dissidents. For example, Adler’s early claim for the primacy of aggression and power was picked up by Freud himself in his introduction of the aggressive drive, and Adler’s emphasis on social and political factors anticipated important developments by “culturalists” such as Harry Stack Sullivan, Erich Fromm, and Karen Horney. Jung’s early concern with the self has been continued in the fields of self psychology (chapter 6) and object relations (chapters 4 and 5) over the past several decades. Jung’s other major concern, spirituality, was reviled for decades within Freudian theory because of Freud’s repugnance toward religion (1927). But it has returned in a form of contemporary psychoanalytic theorizing that integrates psychodynamics and spirituality (Sorenson, 1994). Rank’s groundbreaking work on the will strongly anticipated more current explorations of agency (see chapter 7). And Ferenczi’s radical thought and clinical experimentation both greatly prefigured and, in some cases, actually influenced recent developments in interpersonal psychoanalysis (chapter 3) and object relations theories (chapters 4 and 5).
Cosmologists believe that slight variations emerged in the extraordinarily compact density of matter in the initial moments following the big bang. Without those variations, the universe would necessarily always be uniform and evenly distributed. They made possible the congealing of matter into separate galaxies and the worlds that developed within them. Freud’s discoveries gave birth to the universe of psychoanalysis just as exclusively and completely as the big bang gave birth to the universe we find ourselves in. Freud’s contributions were remarkably rich and dense, and second-generation theorists developed different facets of them. These were slight variations in their day, but, fortunately for us, these kinds of differences evolved into the fertile abundance of schools of contemporary analytic thought that we will consider in the chapters that follow.9