Psychoanalysis


Psychoanalysis is a set of theories and techniques to discover unconscious processes and their influence on conscious thought, emotion and behavior. Based on dream interpretation, psychoanalysis is also a talk therapy method for treating mental disorders. Established in the early 1890s by Sigmund Freud, it takes into account Darwin's theory of evolution, neurology findings, ethnology reports, and, in some respects, the clinical research of his mentor Josef Breuer. Freud developed and refined the theory and practice of psychoanalysis until his death in 1939. In an encyclopedic article, he identified four foundational beliefs: "the assumption that there are unconscious mental processes, the recognition of the theory of repression and resistance, the appreciation of the importance of sexuality and of the Oedipus complex."
Two of Freud's early colleagues, Alfred Adler and Carl Jung, soon developed their own methods, individual and analytical psychology, respectively, which he said were not forms of psychoanalysis. After the author's death, neo-Freudian thinkers like Erich Fromm, Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan created some subfields. Jacques Lacan, whose work is often referred to as Return to Freud, described his metapsychology as a technical elaboration of the three-instance model of the psyche and examined the language-like structure of the unconscious.
Psychoanalysis has been a controversial discipline from the outset. While evidence suggests psychoanalysis, especially long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy, can be effective for certain disorders, its overall efficacy remains contested. It may have benefits in the long term over other psychotherapies. Its influence on psychology and psychiatry is undisputed. Psychoanalytic concepts are also widely used outside the therapeutic field, for example in the interpretation of neurological findings, myths and fairy tales, philosophical perspectives such as Freudo-Marxism and in literary criticism.

Overview

One of Freud's central claims is that the contents of the unconscious largely determine cognition and behavior, describing this as the third insult to mankind. The first was the cosmic discovery by Copernicus that the Earth revolved around the Sun, the second was the biological discovery by Darwin that humans evolved from apes, and the third psychological affront was the discovery by Freud that the narcissistically affected ego was not even master of its own home.
Freud found that many of the drives are repressed into the unconscious, which the structural model locates in the 'id', as a result of traumatic experiences during childhood. Attempts to integrate them into the conscious perception of the ego triggers resistance. The individual 'wants' to maintain the repression through defense mechanisms—including censorship, internalized fear of punishment or mother-love withdrawal—while the affected instincts resist. An inner war rages between the id and the ego's conscious values, which manifests as more or less conspicuous mental disorders. Importantly, Freud did not equate the most common behavior as 'healthy'. "Health can only be described in metapsychological terms".
He discovered that the instinctive impulses are expressed most clearly in the symbols of dreams and in the symptomatic detours of neuroticism and Freudian slips. Psychoanalysis was developed in order to clarify the causes of disorders and to restore mental health by enabling the ego to become aware of the id's needs and to find realistic, self-controlled ways to satisfy them. Freud summarized this goal of his therapy in the demand "Where id was, ego shall became", defining the underlying libido as driving energy of all innate needs and equating it with the Eros of Platonic philosophy.

Oedipus rising

Freud attached great importance to coherence of his structural model. The metapsychological specification of the functions and interlocking of the three instances was intended to ensure the full connectivity of this 'psychic apparatus' with biological sciences, in particular Darwin's theory of evolution of species, including mankind with his natural behavior, thinking ability and technological creativity. Such a model of health is indispensable for the diagnostic process, but Freud had to be modest. He came to the conclusion that he had to leave his metapsychological-based model of the soul in the unfinished state of a torso because – as he stated one last time in Moses and Monotheism – there was no well-founded primate research in the first half of 20th century. Without knowledge of the instinctively formed group structure of our genetically closest relatives in animal kingdom, his thesis of the Darwinian primordial horde as presented for discussion in Totem and Taboo cannot be tested and, where necessary, replaced by a realistic model.
Darwin's horde life and its abolition through the introduction of monogamy embodies the evolutionary and the cultural-historical core of psychoanalysis. The aspect of violent elimination of natural horde life is decisive for Freud's Unease in Culture; his assumption of the outbreak of the Oedipus complex in human history is based on it. It led to the formulation of rules of behavior such as the prohibition of adultery and incest, and thus to the beginning of totemic cultures. Manifested in this kind of customs, traditions and ritual education, some of them changed through intermediate stage of feudalism to modern nations, endowed with their monotheism, power-hierarchical structures of military, trade and politics.
Freud's thesis of the violent introduction of monogamous cohabitation stands in contrast to the religiously enigmatic narrative about the origin of first human couples on earth as an expression of divine will, but closer to the ancient trap to pacify political conflicts among the groups of Neolithic mankind. Examples include Prometheus' uprising against Zeus, who created Pandora as a fatal wedding gift for Epimetheus to divide and rule this Titanic brothers; Plato's myth of the spherical people cut into isolated individuals for the same reason; and the similarly resolved revolt of inferior gods in the Flood epic Atra-Hasis. Nonetheless, without examination in the light of modern primate research, as demanded by Freud, his idea of an artificial origin of monogamy remains an unproven hypothesis of paleoanthropology, merely a "just so story as a not unpleasant English critic wittily called it. But I mean it honours a hypothesis if it shows the capability of creating context and understanding in new areas."
According to Freud, this hypothesis explains the present-day son's conflict with his father over his mother, naming this view after Sophocles' tragedy Oedipus, and supplementing it with case studies such as the genital Phobia of a five-year-old boy. However, the author not only discovered this complex and the 'oral fixatet' Syndrom of Narzissos' regress back into amniotic fluid, but also devised a hypothesis of healthy emotional development, which presupposes the natural relationships of Homo sapiens from birth and takes place in three successive stages: the oral, anal and genital phases. Whereby the sexual drive of the latter takes a no less genetically determined 'latency' break – the Sleeping Beauty – between the ages of about 7 and 12 for the benefit of social-intellectual growth.

Traditional setting

Psychoanalysts emphasize the importance of early childhood experience and try to overcome infantile amnesia. In a traditional Freudian setting, the patient lies on a couch, and the analyst sits just behind or somehow out of sight. The patient should express all their thoughts, all secrets and dreams, including free associations and fantasies. In addition to its task of strengthening the ego with its ability to think dialectically – Freud's primacy of the intellect – therapy also aims to induce transference. The patient often projects onto the analyst the parental figures internalized in his superego during early childhood. As he once did as a baby and little child, he experiences again the feelings of helpless dependence, all the futile longing for love, anger, rage and urge for revenge on the failing parents but now with the possibility of processing these contents that have shaped his persona.
The term countertransference refers to the analyst's projection onto their patient. This poses a potential problem for the analyst who has to go to their own analyst if they have not yet been able to help themself due to inexperience.
From the sum of what is shown and communicated, the analyst deduces unconscious conflicts with imposed traumas that are causing the patient's symptoms, his persona and character problems, and works out a diagnosis. This explanation of the origin of loss of mental health and the analytical processes as a whole confronts the patients ego with the pathological defense mechanisms, makes him aware of them as well as the instinctive contents of the id that have been repressed by them, and thus helps him to better understand himself and the world in which he lives, was born and educated – according to Freud, the indispensable prerequisite for any consciously sought change in behavior that has therapeutically beneficial effects on interpersonal relationships.
Freud recognized during his pre-psychoanalytic research that hypnosis does not contribute to patients' understanding of the causes of their disorders and has therefore proven ineffective.

Metapsychology

Though distinct from the common practice of psychoanalysis, its neurological branch, neuropsychoanalysis, has recently provided evidence that the brain stores experiences in specialized parts of its neural network and that the ego performs its highest focus of conscious thinking in frontal lobe. Some regard Freud as the founder of this vein of research. However, early in the development of psychoanalysis, he turned away from it, arguing that consciousness is directly given and cannot be explained by insights into physiological connections. Essentially, in the study of the living soul, only two things were accessible: the brain with its nervous system extending over the entire organism and the acts of consciousness. In Freud's view, therefore, any number of phenomena can be integrated between "both endpoints of our knowledge", but this only contributes to the spatial "localization of the acts of consciousness" in the brain, not to their understanding.
Referencing Descartes, contemporary neuropsychoanalysts draw a dichotomy between mind and body : the physical matter as the object, and the mentally conscious ego as the subject, which cannot objectify itself in itself but only via the 'reflective' diversions of its corporal matter. With regard to Freud's libido they call this dichotomy the "dual-aspect monism". It touches on the point of psychoanalysis that is most difficult to grasp with the means of empirically based sciences – in fact, only under Immanuel Kant's assumption that living systems always make judgements about the phenomena they perceive with regard to the satisfaction of their immanent needs. Freud therefore conceptualized the libido as a teleological element of his threefold model of the soul, as a desiring energy that links cause and purpose, and not as a mere 'effect'. The libido, as universally desiring energy like Plato's Eros, embodies both the psychic drive source of all instinctual needs of living beings and the first cause of their physical development. In this way, sexual behavior realizes Darwin's law of natural selection by favoring the best-fitting and aesthetically well-proportioned body forms in reproduction. Freud was no less familiar with the energetic-economic aspect of evolution and psychological processes than with the transcendentally unified trinity of Plato's philosophy, according to which Truth expresses the Good and the Beauty in equal measure, anchored in the proportions of the golden ratio.