The Study of the Conscious & Unconscious Mind

• Alternatives to Structuralism

– Act Psychology

– Gestalt Psychology

• Freud and the Unconscious Mind

– Studies in Hysteria

• Seduction Theory

– Interpretation of Dreams

– Oedipus/Electra Complexes

– The Freudian Mind

Franz Brentano (1838-1917)

• He obtained a doctorate in philosophy in 1862 from the University of Tubingen and two years later was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest.

– He left the church when the doctrine of papal infallibility was announced and was a professor at the University of Vienna

• He argued that ‘what is in the mind’ is less important than ‘what the mind does’

• His ‘Act Psychology’ focussed on three key mental activities

– Recall: remembering or having an idea of an object– Judging: affirming or denying the object– Feeling: developing an attitude to the object

• The mind is ordered in its behaviour because the world is not because of the weight of associations or the imposition of structure by the mind

Gestalt Psychology

• Gestalt psychology critiqued the ‘Way of Ideas’ philosophy

– The Bundle Hypothesis: the objects of consciousness are made up of fixed, atomic elements.

– The Constancy Hypothesis: each conscious sensory object corresponds directly to a physical stimulus’ impact on a sensory organ

• Wertheimer’s study of the phi phenomenon (e.g. ‘apparent motion’)

– Those who follow the ‘Way of Ideas’ described this as an illusion or an error of consciousness

– The Gestalt psychologists argued that indeed the ‘motion’ was real, as real as any other motion, but it did not correspond to a moving physical stimulus

• Gestalt psychologists developed organizing principles of conscious experience

– The law of similarity, the law of Prägnanz, etc…

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

Freud’s mini-Biography

• Born in Freiberg, Moravia, then part of the Austro-Hungerian Empire

• He was the son of a wool merchant (Jakob Freud) and his father’s much younger, second wife (Amalie, née Nathanson)

• He had two elder brother by his father’s first marriage and 7 younger siblings by the marriage to his mother

• He studied medicine at the University of Vienna from 1873 to 1881

• He published original and pioneering work on nerve cells and continued to work ‘scientifically’.

Freud: the Biologist of the Mind

• Perhaps the most intriguing book about Freud and Freudian Psychoanalysis is:

Freud, biologist of the mind : beyond the psychoanalytic legend

by Frank J. Sulloway

Available in the Hallward Library

• It demonstrates how Freudian psychology was influenced by the changing world view that followed the Darwinian revolution and the impact of physical theories of dynamics on the development of psychoanalysis

Freud, Charcot & Breuer – Studies in Hysteria

• In 1885 Freud was awarded a small grant to study with Jean Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière asylum in Paris studying hysteria (from the greek hystera)

– Only women could suffer the paralysis, hallucinations, loss of speech, etc. associated with hysteria

• Caused by ‘irritation’ of the female sexual organs

• Mere play acting

– Not associated with physical damage

• Charcot only accepted mechanistic physical explanations

• Freud wrote a paper on male hysteria…

• Breuer told Freud about the case of Anna O

– Each symptom disappeared when its source was identified through recollection

– These sources were commonly unpleasant events

Studies in Hysteria – Key ideas

• Hysterics suffer from traumatic, painful or unpalatable memories

– Such memories can be pathogenic

• The mental can cause the physical…

– These memories are an unconscious force for behaviour

– They are unconscious due the action of repressive, unconscious mechanisms

– It is the negative emotional content of these memories that causes the problems

• Abreaction

– The process by which repressed memories emotional force is released.

– The goal of the therapeutic process is to release this negative energy through the reliving of the traumatic event.

Seduction Theory

• In 1896 Freud proposed the seduction theory of hysteria

– Repressed memories are usually associated with some kind of presexual sexual trauma (e.g. incest, rape, molestation, etc)

– The reactive nature of the repressed memory is delayed until after puberty.

• However, within approximately one year this theory had been retracted

– Therapeutic failure

– The implausible frequency of child sexual abuse (usually by the father)

– The unconscious does not know the difference between reality and phantasy

– The reports do not emerge in delirium when all the repressive defenses break down.

• Some historians believe that the patients were ‘persuaded’ by Freud himself of the early sexual abuse.

The Interpretation of Dreams

• All dreams represent the fulfilment of wishes

– Dreams are only a partial expression of the wish

– The latent content of the dream (usually some kind of sexual wish) is only allowed to appear if it is disguised as manifest content.

– The manifest content of the dream expresses the latent content of the dream through (Freudian Symbols)

• Dreams are evidence of the unconscious through the way that they operate

The Oedipus/Electra Complex

• The male child egoistically (and erotically) desires exclusive loving access to the mother.

– However, the father obstructs this access

– So, the child desires the death (absence) of the father

– (Oedipus, separated from his parent in early childhood, later he returns, kills his father and marries his mother)

• For boys this narrative is relatively straightforward, but the initial object of desire for girls is also the mother, so why does it shift to the father

– ‘Penis envy’

• The girl learns that the mother has been ‘castrated’ and rejects her mother’s powerlessness

• The girls transfers her sexual desire to the father.

– (Electra, killed her mother, to avenge her father’s death)

The Freudian Mind

• Id– Present at birth and follows the ‘pleasure principle’– Primitive reservoir of undifferentiated energy and derived from the

instincts (e.g. sex, hunger, thirst)– It is ‘polymorphously perverse’

• Ego– Functions according to the ‘reality principle’– Develops as a function of the id’s inability to function efficaciously in the

external world– Operates at three levels: unconscious, preconscious, and conscious

• Superego– The moral component of mind– Incorporates both parental and societal strictures about correct

behaviour– Controls the ego through reward and punishment.

Accessing the Unconscious

• For Freud, only a small part of the mind is conscious, the real issue is the unconscious mind.

– “Mental processes are in themselves unconscious and that of all mental life it is only certain individual acts and portions that are conscious” (Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis)

• Parapraxes – slips of action, slips of the tongue, slips of writing…

– “As one professor remarked ‘In the case of the female genitals, is spite of many Versuchungen (temptations) – I beg your pardon, Versuche (experiments)….’ “

– It is “the suppression of the speaker’s intention to say something that is the indispensable condition for the occurrence of a slip of the tongue”

• The method of free association

• The analysis of dream symbols