Great Ideas of Philosophy

II. In his practice, Freud would see a variety of “hysterical” symptoms—blindness, insensitivities, paralysis—thathad no physical basis.A. Hysteria takes its name from the Greek word for “uterus.” Pre-19 th century, it was widely thought thatconditions of this kind occurred only in women and generally as part of the complexities of theirreproductive biology.B. Freud was not the one who turned things around on that. Between 1885 and 1886, Freud studied underCharcot, who was reporting some success in treating hysterical patients with hypnosis.1. Freud would imaginatively develop the idea that traumas generate physical symptoms by way ofunconscious processes.2. With six months of experience behind him, Freud returned to his practice in Vienna and, for a time,used hypnosis, giving it up chiefly because of what he took to be its “mysteriousness.”C. Meanwhile, Freud’s friend and colleague Josef Breuer, also a practicing neurologist, reported success inone patient—the famous Anna O, who suffered from a persistent cough, a paralysis on the right side of herbody, sensory disturbances, and even hallucinations—by a “talking cure.” The two determined that thehysterical symptoms must be based on a blockage of some sort that is partially released by cathartic means.As a psychic disturbance, the hysteria must be the physical manifestation of events involving “psychic”energy.1. With Breuer, Freud reached the conclusion that hysterical symptoms were the result of a psychicmechanism: repression.2. Repression resembled a hydraulic principle: Things not able to be expressed at one level must beexpressed at another.III. Armed with these findings and inspired by evolutionary theory, Freud focused on survival mechanisms.A. Our ancestry guarantees that the individual will do everything possible to promote survival, to enhancepleasure and minimize pain. That is the pleasure principle—that we come into the world designed in sucha way as to enhance pleasurable experiences and minimize those that are in any way painful.B. What Freud calls the reality principle lies in dialectical tension to the pleasure principle. Most of the time,we conduct ourselves in a way that denies us certain pleasures so as to exist in an integral society.C. The primal unconscious instincts (the id) must be controlled through the cultivation of a moral conscience(the superego) derived from parental and, ultimately, from social strictures and constraints.D. The self as known to the self, the person we know as “I,” the person in the mirror (the ego), is constructedout of a process of socialization being brought to bear in opposition to impulses and drives at a levelinaccessible to the actor.1. The ego is the synthesis, as it were, of the dialectical tension between id and superego.2. It is to the defense of the ego that the mechanisms of sublimation, repression, displacement, and so onare committed.E. The tensions generated in the conflict between the pleasure and reality principles may, to some extent berelaxed but not eliminated. The demands of society being what they are, it is necessarily the case that thelife we live will not be an authentic life.F. Beneath surface rationality and simplicity is the busy workshop of the unconscious, directing and formingcomplex intuitions, causing weird dreams and disturbing symptoms, rendering one at once fit for, anddiscontented with, civilization. Examples include people waking up blind or with paralyses because theyharbor horrid wishes they cannot face.1. What kind of wishes might these be? Sexual, of course!2. Here is the theory of the Oedipal complex. As a boy moves toward heterosexual sexuality, the obvioustarget of his affections will be the source of his preexisting gratification—his mother.3. Socialization of sexuality requires redirecting the sexual energies to a socially acceptable target, adevelopment that can be a profoundly traumatic experience.IV. Freud faced criticism by his contemporaries perhaps less for the sexual content of the theory than for the factthat it was so theoretical itself.A. In Freud’s time, science is an essentially observational enterprise designed to generate general testable andrefutable laws. What evidence is there for the unconscious at all?24©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership