The Story of Psychology

by Morton Hunt

  Ernest Jones, in his monumental biography of Freud, said that the self-analysis produced no magical results and that Freud’s neurotic symptoms and dependence on Fliess actually became more pronounced in the first year or so as disturbing material came to light. But by 1899 Freud’s symptoms were much improved and he felt far more normal than four or five years earlier. By 1900 the task was largely complete, although for the rest of his life he continued to spend the last half hour of every day analyzing his moods and experiences.

  The self-analysis, imperfect though it was, had considerable personal benefit but yielded a far greater one, according to most Freud scholars. Through it Freud arrived at a number of his theories about human nature or confirmed theories he had been deriving from his experience with patients.

  The most important of these was that children, even in their early years, do have powerful sexual feelings, which are particularly apt to involve sexual attraction toward a parent, usually of the opposite sex. But children sense that these desires and fantasies are so wicked in the eyes of their parents and other adults that they thrust them into the unconscious and forget that they have ever had them.

  Now at last Freud understood why so many of his patients had told of being seduced in childhood. The “memories” they had unearthed were of childish fantasies, not of actual seductions.33 He had been on the right track; he simply hadn’t gone far enough to reach the psychic truth. Jeffrey Masson, an apostate psychoanalyst and ferocious Freud critic, has alleged that Freud gave up his seduction theory because it offended his fellow physicians and was bad for business, but in fact Freud’s contemporaries found his new theory of infant sexuality and incestuous desires even more repugnant than the seduction theory. Yet Freud, despite his money worries, sense of isolation, and desire to be publicly recognized, felt compelled to publish the truth, and did so, partly in 1900 and more fully in 1905.

  By 1900, he had done much more than invent a new therapy for neuroses and discover childhood sexuality. He had developed a number of highly consequential theories about human psychology, both normal and abnormal. While he drew on the latest findings and ideas of certain psychologists (the French psychologist Pierre Janet would even accuse Freud of plagiarizing his ideas about the “subconscious,” as he called it), what was original in Freud’s work—and much of it was—was based on what he had gleaned from his own mind and his patients’ by a form of exploration without precedent in the history of psychology.

  Dynamic Psychology: Early Formulations

  The theories that would make Freud famous and would profoundly affect Western culture describe mental processes in purely psychological terms. Freud had begun as an adherent of the mechanistphysiologist school, in which all mental events supposedly were, or someday would be, explicable in physiological terms. Not until he gave up that view did he make his major discoveries.

  Freud had clung to the physiological doctrine for some time after turning to hypnotherapy and psychoanalysis. In 1895, the very year in which Breuer and he published Studies on Hysteria, a predominantly psychological approach to that subject, he wrote an eighty-page rough draft of a “Project for a Scientific Psychology” in which he ambitiously sought to explain mental processes in terms of the physiological events taking place in the brain.34 While the “Project” contained a number of his budding psychological theories, it accounted for them in such physical terms as the laws of motion, the quantity of nervous excitation in neurons, the inertia or discharge of that energy, the pathways of discharge, and the principle of the conservation of energy.

  Freud sent the draft to Fliess, but he himself criticized it harshly and left it unfinished. Neuroscience, he found, was not yet advanced enough for such an approach; like William James, he felt that for the time being psychology would have to deal with thoughts and emotions solely in psychological terms. Freud wrote to Fliess, a month after sending him “Project,” “I no longer understand the state of mind in which I hatched [it] out…It seems pure balderdash.”35 A few years later he added:

  I have no desire at all to leave psychology hanging in the air with no organic basis. But, beyond a feeling of conviction [that there must be such a basis], I have nothing, either theoretical or therapeutic, to work on, and so I must behave as if I were confronted by psychological factors only.36

  Although he abandoned the attempt at a unified theory, Freud in no way reverted to the traditional dualist view that mind is a substance separate and distinct from body. He often used the word Seele, which is translated in the Standard Edition of his writings as “soul,” but the German word has many meanings and the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim has persuasively argued that Freud meant by it psyche, the mental and emotional aspects of the individual, or, simply, the entire apparatus of mind and emotions.37 All his life Freud was firmly convinced that no aspect of mind existed apart from the brain and that physical processes in its neurons are the materials of the phenomena of mind. Also, as a scientist he was a thorough determinist; he believed that every mental event has its causes, and that free will is only an illusion.38

  After Freud gave up the effort to construct a physiologically based theory of mental events, he made a series of great leaps forward. In only five years (1895 to 1900), he invented a new psychotherapy and formulated a number of revolutionary theories of human psychology. In the years to come he would amplify, alter, and add to them, but had he done nothing after 1900, he would have added a whole new dimension to psychology. His theory of the mind, as strewn in bits and pieces throughout his writings of that period, has the following main components:

  The dynamic unconscious: 39 Nearly all the previous research and theorizing of psychologists had dealt with conscious mental processes, such as perception, memory, judgment, and learning. What Freud added to psychology and to Western culture was a set of theories of the unconscious and its crucial role in human behavior. Ernest Jones says this is generally held to be his greatest contribution to science.40

  Freud, to be sure, did not discover the unconscious, as is often said. For two centuries thinkers had speculated about it—everyone from the rationalist Leibniz to the nineteenth-century hypnotherapists and from the poets and philosophers of the Romantic movement to Helmholtz, the members of the Würzburg School, and William James. By and large, though, they had all considered the unconscious merely a repository, a warehouse of experiences and information waiting to be called to use. Freud would label this relatively inert but accessible area of mental life the “preconscious” and conceive of it as quite distinct from the unconscious.

  There had been, however, many clues in the work of Freud’s predecessors and contemporaries, especially the hypnotherapists, that the unconscious played an active role in mental life; some even applied the term “dynamic” to it. Freud adopted and transformed this idea on the basis of his clinical experience and self-analysis.

  He envisioned the mind as having three levels of functioning: the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. The last was the largest and most influential part; far from being a warehouse of inactive material, it was an area of highly active and powerful primitive drives and forbidden wishes that constantly generated pressure on the conscious mind, in disguised or altered form, thereby motivating and determining much of our behavior.

  This had become apparent to Freud from his clinical work. The thinking and behavior of his neurotic patients before analysis were controlled by forces they knew nothing of and could not master. The goal of psychoanalysis was to give the patient’s ego “freedom to decide.”41 This did not imply free will but an awareness of one’s unconscious motives and the attainment of a state in which choices were determined by conscious ones.

  Freud came to believe that what was true of neurotics was equally true of normal people. The latter, however, developed in such a way that their unacceptable desires, hidden from awareness, were converted into acceptable ways of acting. Thus, healthy behavior, like pathological behavior, was motivated and directed largely by the for
ces of the unconscious.

  Primary and secondary processes: 42 The unconscious mind, in Freud’s view, is not merely a place in which we sequester the intolerable ideas and desires of the primitive and infantile part of the mind. He termed the mental processes that take place in it “primary”; they seek the uninhibited fulfillment of wishes either through actions or, when these are blocked by real-world forces, fantasies like those of childhood seduction, or dreams. The content of the unconscious, though not derived from the real world, is the psychic reality that motivates us.

  As we grow up we learn that we cannot behave according to these untamed primary-process urges; we learn what is acceptable and successful in the real world and what is not. Our conscious mind operates according to “secondary processes”—the thinking, knowing, and problem-solving mental activities needed to conceive of and carry out ways of satisfying our desires that are socially acceptable.

  The pleasure principle: 43 Many philosophers and psychologists had theorized that human behavior is largely governed by the quest for pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Freud incorporated this doctrine into his theory of the unconscious but altered its focus. The fundamental motive force for the entire psychic apparatus, he said, is a wish arising from any unfulfilled want or excitation—a wish to relieve the resulting Unlust (unpleasure), thus dissipating the tension and yielding pleasure. In the early period, Freud called it the “unpleasure principle,” but later renamed it the “pleasure principle,” the label by which it became a part of the psychological vocabulary.

  “The pleasure-unpleasure principle is fundamental in Freud’s psychology,” Jones says. “It automatically regulates all the processes of cathexis.”44 “Cathexis,” a critically important term in Freud’s writing, is a word coined by James Strachey, translator of the Standard Edition, to approximate Freud’s use of Besetzung, the German word meaning “occupation” or “filling” that Freud used to signify “charge of psychical energy,”45 or, in lay terms, “emotional investment.”

  Hunger is a typical wish. When primary-process thinking (imagining food, dreaming of food) fails to relieve unpleasure, secondary-process thinking takes over; the cathexis or psychic energy is transferred to real-world activities, such as buying food and cooking, that will, after a while, alleviate the hunger and bring about the pleasure of relief.

  Primary processes therefore operate according to the pleasure principle, secondary processes according to the reality principle. But as Freud would later add:

  The substitution of the reality principle for the pleasure principle implies no deposing of the pleasure principle, but only a safeguarding of it. A momentary pleasure, uncertain in its results [i.e., those of the wish], is given up, but only in order to gain along the new path an assured pleasure at a later time.46

  Sexuality; the Oedipus complex: 47 Although Freud’s ideas about sexuality would not assume their mature form or significance in his system until somewhat later, we have seen that even before 1900 he had come to believe that the sexual drive is one of the most powerful, exists even in childhood, and plays a major role in the development of both the normal and the neurotic personality.

  The most important aspect of this drive, he held, was that in young children it is usually directed by primary processes toward the parent of the opposite sex. As everyone knows, Freud called these wishes Oedipal, because Oedipus, in the Greek myth, unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother. In the young boy, the sexual wish directed toward the mother is accompanied by hatred of the rival, the father, and by the hostile wish to be rid of him. But through realistic secondary-process thinking the child recognizes that his father is far stronger than he and would certainly win any struggle between them, and that the Oedipal wish involves grave danger.

  The resulting conflict between wish and fear causes intolerable anxiety. Not until 1910 would Freud label this the “Oedipus complex,”48 but in letters to Fliess in the late 1890s he had begun drawing the analogy to the Oedipus myth, and he publicly stated the theory in brief form in 1900 in The Interpretation of Dreams. He saw the Oedipus complex as an inevitable part of human experience: “It is the fate of all of us, perhaps”—soon he would drop the “perhaps”—“to direct our first sexual impulse toward our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that this is so.” Later, he would theorize about a different but analogous phenomenon in female children.

  Repression: 49 To survive the anxiety of the Oedipus complex, the child represses the Oedipal wishes, hiding them away in the unconscious. Repression is a central and essential mechanism of the mind, the psyche’s basic way of defending itself against a highly anxiety-producing conflict produced by a primitive wish and fear of harm in the real world. Jones says that it “may certainly be counted as one of Freud’s most important and original contributions.”

  In the years to come, Freud would extend the theory of the Oedipus complex and its resolution through repression to make it the core of a theory of child development.

  Principle of constancy: 50 Although Freud had given up the attempt to explain psychological processes in physiological terms, he continued to believe that Helmholtz’s principle of the conservation of energy—that the sum of forces in any isolated system remains constant—applied to psychic phenomena. As Breuer and he had stated in Studies on Hysteria, “There exists in the organism a tendency to keep intracerebral excitation constant.”51

  When some event induces surplus excitation, as in an occurrence that makes us angry, we tend to discharge the anger one way or another in order to preserve our normal balance of excitation. How we do so is the outcome of primary-process thinking governed by—or sometimes breaking through—the constraints of secondary-process thinking. Breuer and Freud gave an example: “When Bismarck had to suppress his angry feelings in the King’s presence, he relieved himself afterward by smashing a valuable vase on the floor.”52

  The principle of constancy is a basic tenet of Freud’s psychology; it is an essential part of his explanation both of the neuroses as well as certain other phenomena, most notably displacement. Since the total amount of psychic excitation remains constant, if it is diminished in one idea, it is increased in a related idea; it is “displaced.” As we know, Freud relied on this concept to account for neurotic symptoms and dreams, in both of which the energy of impermissible wishes is displaced onto permissible activities. Later, he would apply the concept to account for “sublimation”—constructive acts that use the energy of unfulfilled or repressed desires in positive ways. Hostile impulses, for example, can be redirected into competitive striving for success; the energy of self-love achieves satisfaction through love of another. Freud, always skilled at finding an appropriate quotation or literary example, here quoted a poem in which Heine imagines God explaining Creation:

  Illness was no doubt the final cause

  Of the whole urge to create;

  By creating, I could recover;

  By creating, I became healthy.53

  Success

  In 1900, despite the completion of his self-analysis, Freud, at forty-four, had reason to feel discouraged and depressed. He had had high hopes that The Interpretation of Dreams, which he considered his most important work, would be a major success. Later, he remarked, “Insight such as this falls to one’s lot but once in a lifetime.”54 Yet on publication, in November 1899, it received a few flattering but muddled reviews in Vienna and little notice elsewhere, and commercially was an abysmal failure, selling only 351 copies in six years.

  Freud felt more ignored and isolated than ever. His practice, which he had hoped the book would increase, fluctuated erratically, and he continued to be plagued by the fear of poverty. His friendship with Breuer was long over and his intensely close and dependent reliance on Fliess as confidant, supporter, co-worker, and idol was crumbling. During his self-analysis Freud had scrutinized his near-worship of Fliess, finding in it neurotic tendencies and a disguised homoerotic component
; as the analysis freed Freud from emotional dependence on Fliess, Fliess became testy and critical. At a congress in August 1900, they attacked each other’s ideas fiercely, and Fliess told Freud he doubted the value of Freud’s psychoanalytic researches. They never held another meeting, and the warmth disappeared from their correspondence. The friendship abruptly ended a few years later when Fliess accused Freud of divulging his unpublished theory of universal inherent bisexuality to the philosopher Otto Weininger (who then used it in print) without identifying it as Fliess’s idea.55

  Freud must also have felt isolated in his private life. Although he had a solid relationship with Martha, the intensity and intimacy of the years before marriage were long since gone, and he never discussed his ideas with her. He and she had suspended conjugal relations when he was only thirty-seven in order to give her some relief from childbearing, and although they later resumed their sexual connection, by 1900 he told Fliess that he considered himself “done begetting.”56

  From that year on, however, Freud’s life began to improve. In 1902 he was at last promoted to Professor Extraordinarius at the University of Vienna and for the rest of his life was generally known as Professor Freud. The honor came late, but was both symbolically and practically of great value to him.

  That same year, Wilhelm Stekel, a Viennese physician whom Freud had successfully treated for impotence, suggested that Freud hold weekly evening meetings with a handful of colleagues who were interested in his work. Freud liked the idea and sent invitations to three other physicians. In the fall of 1902 the five, calling themselves the Wednesday Psychological Society, began regular meetings in Freud’s office. One member would present a paper, after which, over coffee and cake, the group would discuss it and relevant aspects of psychoanalytic theory and therapy. In the group’s first years, according to one member, “there was an atmosphere of the foundation of a religion in that room. Freud himself was its new prophet who made the heretofore prevailing methods of psychological investigation appear superficial.”57