Introducing Freud: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides)

by Oscar Zárate

1. Each symptom disappeared when traced back to its first occasion. 2. Symptoms were removed by recalling forgotten unpleasant events. 3. A symptom emerged with greatest force when it was being talked away.

1. Hysterics suffer from painful, unpleasant memories of a traumatic nature (trauma, Greek for ‘wound’). 2. Traumatic memories are pathogenic, disease-creating. This was a revolutionary anti-mechanist notion which implied that a psychical (strictly mental) agent directly influences the physical processes of the body. 3. Traumatic memories do not ‘wear away’ normally but remain an active and unconscious force motivating behaviour. (What cannot be remembered cannot be left behind.) 4. Banishment of painful, emotionally-charged memories from consciousness requires an active repressing mechanism operating at an unconscious level of mental life.

Since negative, unconscious memories cannot be expressed normally, their emotional energy or affect is dammed up — strangulated. 6. The strangulated affect is ‘converted’ into the physical symptoms of hysteria by unconscious stimulus. 7. Symptoms stimulated by the unconscious will disappear if abreaction occurs. Abreaction is the process of releasing a repressed emotion about a previously forgotten event. The problem of therapy is to get the patient to relive the original traumatic experience which caused the symptom. 8. Therapy will be difficult because every symptom is over-determined. It is caused by, and is the characteristic of, several psychological events.

1892–96: THE PRESSURE TECHNIQUE For the first time Freud uses a couch. He presses his hand on the patient’s forehead and asks questions.

propose a seduction theory. 1. Repressed memories nearly always revealed seduction or sexual molestation by a parent or adult. 2. This traumatic event in childhood operates in a delayed way. The repressed memory becomes a pathogenic idea which can cause hysterical symptoms after puberty.

THE FREE ASSOCIATION TECHNIQUE Patients must be free, without censorship or urging …

The clue to neurotic symptoms is hidden in the patient’s unconscious. The patient doesn’t know what’s repressed in the unconscious. And yet, only the patient can lead the therapist to its discovery and relief.

Dreams are only a partial or censored expression of a wish. 2. The latent content of the dream (which contains the unconscious sexual wish) is only allowed to appear if it is disguised as manifest content.

Neuroses aren’t simple diseased abnormalities — but rather another sort of mental functioning.

Freud divides the mind into 2 parts: 1. the preconscious which contains all the ideas and memories capable of becoming conscious 2. the unconscious made up of desires, impulses or wishes of a mostly sexual and sometimes destructive nature. These unconscious wishes get their energy from the primary physical instincts. Freud also called this primary wish-fulfilment drive by another name …

Parapraxis is the official term for the famous ‘Freudian slip.’ It refers to slips of the tongue, pen or memory, which occur in normal life. Errors are symbolic of unconscious attitudes and wishes. There are no errors in the mind!

This neurotic resistance to wishful ‘perverse’ urges is what led Freud back to childhood sexuality.

Here’s what happens: 1. Fixation (arrested development) of the libido may occur at a particular childhood stage (oral, anal, Oedipal). 2. Regression (a return) to this early “fixated” level can take place, leading to various forms of adult neuroses.

Neurotics are literally in “a fix,” in “a bind.” Anal fixation, for instance, shows up in all sorts of inhibited behaviour.

FREUD’S 3rd REVOLUTION: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

Only a small part of what is mental is conscious. The rest is unconscious, made up of inadmissible and involuntary ideas which motivate behaviour. you mean the human mind is irrational?

Freud attracted followers and pioneer psychoanalysts between 1902–08.

But what is the therapist to do about it? How can the patient be made conscious of the unconscious?

What about love of self as one would wish it to be? Is that normal too? Yes. Freud called this the EGO-IDEAL.

Defense acts as a compromise between wish and reality.

instinctual impulses ‘travel’ from the id along channels to the ego where these are either (a) discharged in action, (b) inhibited, (c) directed by defence mechanisms or (d) sublimated.

Inhibiting agencies are usually the ego or super-ego; the inhibited process is usually an instinctual impulse. Inhibition can be seen as a symptom.

Super-ego is formed by introjection of parental/authority figures.

Freud first thought of libido as energy attached to specific sexual instincts.

Freud’s discovery is that neurosis is a disorder of the personality, not a disease of the nervous system;

PSYCHE: originally the ‘soul’; psychologically, the mind, mental apparatus.

PSYCHIATRY: branch of medicine treating mental illnesses. Unlike psychoanalysis (the theory and therapeutic treatment of neuroses) psychiatry (a) treats illnesses of known physical origin,

Psychology is defined as ‘science of mind’ or today ‘science of behaviour’

PSYCHOSIS: used by both psychiatry and psychoanalysis to describe mental illnesses which may lead to total loss of reality and control over behaviour;

The 3 functional psychoses recognized by both branches are schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis and paranoia.