Featured author. Anne Lise Kjaer. Kjaer Global ltd, London, UK. Latest book. Work in the Age of Data. Start Psychoanalysis, Science or Pseudoscience? Science Research. Brain Health Medicine Research Science. Ventana al Conocimiento Knowledge Window.
Estimated reading time Time 4 to read. Sigmund Freud in the office of his Vienna home looking at a manuscript. For example, the superego can make a person feel guilty if rules are not followed. When there is a conflict between the goals of the id and superego, the ego must act as a referee and mediate this conflict. The ego can deploy various defense mechanisms Freud, , to prevent it from becoming overwhelmed by anxiety. In many cases, the result was some form of neurotic illness.
Freud sought to understand the nature and variety of these illnesses by retracing the sexual history of his patients. This was not primarily an investigation of sexual experiences as such.
Freud believed that children are born with a libido — a sexual pleasure urge. To be psychologically healthy, we must successfully complete each stage. This particular theory shows how adult personality is determined by childhood experiences. Freud considered dreams to be the royal road to the unconscious as it is in dreams that the ego's defenses are lowered so that some of the repressed material comes through to awareness, albeit in distorted form.
Dreams perform important functions for the unconscious mind and serve as valuable clues to how the unconscious mind operates. On 24 July , Freud had his own dream that was to form the basis of his theory. He had been worried about a patient, Irma, who was not doing as well in treatment as he had hoped. Freud, in fact, blamed himself for this, and was feeling guilty. Freud interpreted this dream as wish-fulfillment. He had wished that Irma's poor condition was not his fault and the dream had fulfilled this wish by informing him that another doctor was at fault.
Based on this dream, Freud went on to propose that a major function of dreams was the fulfillment of wishes. Freud distinguished between the manifest content of a dream what the dreamer remembers and the latent content, the symbolic meaning of the dream i. The manifest content is often based on the events of the day. The process whereby the underlying wish is translated into the manifest content is called dreamwork. The purpose of dreamwork is to transform the forbidden wish into a non-threatening form, thus reducing anxiety and allowing us to continue sleeping.
Dreamwork involves the process of condensation, displacement, and secondary elaboration. For example, a dream about a man may be a dream about both one's father and one's lover. A dream about a house might be the condensation of worries about security as well as worries about one's appearance to the rest of the world. Displacement takes place when we transform the person or object we are really concerned about to someone else.
Freud interpreted this as representing his wish to kill his sister-in-law. If the patient would have really dreamed of killing his sister-in-law, he would have felt guilty.
The unconscious mind transformed her into a dog to protect him. Secondary elaboration occurs when the unconscious mind strings together wish-fulfilling images in a logical order of events, further obscuring the latent content. According to Freud, this is why the manifest content of dreams can be in the form of believable events. Some of these were sexual in nature, including poles, guns, and swords representing the penis and horse riding and dancing representing sexual intercourse.
Rather than use data to construct meaningful theory, Freud theorized first, then attempted -- half-heartedly -- to produce data that fit.
In essence, Freud was little more than an armchair psychologist, thought admittedly a well educated and influential one. In Sulloway's opinion, Freud held back psychology. Psychologist Hans Eysenck agreed , calling Freud "a genius, not of science, but of propaganda, not of rigorous proof, but of persuasion, not of the design of experiments, but of literary art.
Kihlstrom furthers. Why Freud Was Not a Scientist. By Ross Pomeroy April 22, Written and presented in a style that makes even the most complex subjects interesting and easy to understand, How It Works is enjoyed by readers of all ages. Live Science. View Deal. See all comments Given that the advertising industry leverages his theories as a foundation for all advertisement, and given that advertising works, I'd say: Yes, his theories are valid.
Watch the documentary "The Century of Self. I'd say that Freud was basically correct, though not in an all encompassing way. With credit to the Firesign Theater, "we are all just Bozo's on this Bus". So there. This is a typical example of the resistance to Freud that has beset psychoanalysis from the outset--and a rather weak attack at that.
A more interesting article would be how Freud was right about almost everything! Here are some of the examples of things Freud was right about: 1 Dreams--still the best theory out there disguised "wish fulfillment" 2 Fundamental and continued attraction to the first love object, usually the mother 3 Persistence of the infantile--e.
The President and his followers. Or, if you like, a one word defense: note the frequent use of the common term for sex with the mother not even allowed to print it here, as well as the term for the woman's genitalia as opposed to the male's.
0コメント