The Story of Psychology

by Morton Hunt

  Parents, however, exert a powerful restraining influence on these elemental gratifications, mostly through toilet training and the disapproval or punishment of masturbation. The originally polymorphous sexual instinct becomes narrowed and channeled so that in adulthood it will be focused on genital sexuality with a partner.

  Faulty child rearing—undue emphasis on eating or toilet training, or the failure to inhibit taboo impulses—can block the child’s development toward genital sexuality. The child remains fixated at an early level of development; the fixation can appear in adult life as a preference for exclusively oral sex or anal sex, but more commonly takes the form of traits of character. The child overindulged at the oral stage may in adulthood be obsessed with eating, drinking, and smoking; the child deprived or insufficiently gratified in the oral stage may grow up passively dependent on others for feelings of self-esteem. Similarly, difficulties of adjustment during the anal stage may result, in adult life, in compulsive neatness, stinginess (retentiveness), and stubbornness.

  The later stages of sexual development: 75 The most crucial psychological event of the child’s life takes place at the “phallic” stage of development (Freud applied that term to both sexes), in the age range of three to six. The child’s sexuality, though chiefly autoerotic, is potentially responsive to persons of either sex, but by the phallic stage the child has divined from many clues the sort of person who might appropriately provide gratification of his or her sexual urges. The ideal model—and the closest at hand—is the parent of the opposite sex.

  This, Freud had said earlier, leads directly to the Oedipus complex, which he had portrayed as a critical stage. Now, going further, he envisioned its resolution as central to character development. Freud theorized that the boy’s rivalry with his father causes him to fear that the powerful father will conquer him by castrating him (rather than killing him), and he reacts to that fear not only by totally repressing his sexual feelings toward his mother and replacing them with feelings of affection but by transforming his hostility and rivalry toward his father into identification with him and his role in life.

  Things take a somewhat different course with the girl, who, in Freud’s later view of female development, imagines she has already been castrated. She suffers “penis envy”; her love of her mother turns into hostility (she fantasizes that her mother allowed her to be born without a penis or to be castrated); she dreams of making up for the loss by having a child by her father. But the dream proves impossible; eventually she gives it up and rids herself of her anxiety-producing hostility toward her mother by identifying with her. Since, however, she has no penis, her fear of harm is less powerful than the boy’s. Throughout life her feeling of having been deprived of a penis negatively influences her personality, her goals in life, her moral sense, and her self-esteem. As Gay puts it, “By the early 1920s, Freud seemed to have adopted the position that the little girl is a failed boy, the grown woman a kind of castrated man.” *76

  Both boys and girls, at about the age of five, having undergone repression of their sexuality, enter the “latency” stage of life, during which they are largely freed of the concerns and anxieties caused by the sexual instinct and turn their attention and energy toward schooling and growing up. But the repressed sexual impulses have been only locked away, not eliminated, and they continually try to break through. They find indirect and disguised outlet in the form of dreams and, in those children who have not adequately resolved the Oedipal complex, pathological symptoms.

  Finally, when the child is around twelve, the hormonal changes of puberty awaken the sleeping sexual impulse, and the repressed feelings begin to be directed outward, in socially approved fashion, toward people of the opposite sex outside the family. In this final “genital” phase of development, the sexual urge is transformed into “object love”—acceptable fulfillment of sexual and emotional desires through the love of another person, often one who is in some way similar to the forbidden object of sexual love, the opposite-sex parent.

  Thus Freud’s theory of psychosexual development, often narrowly misconstrued as concerned only with sexual desire and behavior, actually deals with far larger issues: the basic, inevitable conflicts between childishness and maturity, instinctive desires and societal norms, and wishes and reality, the resolutions of which are crucial to character development and social life.

  The structure of the psyche: 77 Freud had at first pictured the psychic apparatus as made up of the unconscious, the preconscious, and the conscious, but as he worked out his theory of psychosexual development he found this a too-simple formulation. He depicted instead a tripartite psyche comprising id, ego, and superego; these are not entities in any physical or metaphysical sense but merely names of groups or clusters of mental processes that serve different functions.

  In the newborn, all mental processes are id processes, unconscious and primary. There is nothing akin to logical reasoning in the id; it is a cauldron of instinctual demands for the satisfaction of primitive desires having to do with self-preservation (hunger, thirst, and the like), sexuality, and aggression. The demands of the id operate in accordance with the pleasure principle; they seek the relief of tension without any consideration of social rules or the practical consequences of relief-seeking acts.

  Since social life would be impossible if the id directed behavior, child rearing and socialization are aimed at controlling the forces of the id and directing them into acceptable activities. In part this is achieved through training and education of the conscious mind, which understands, reasons, and functions according to secondary-process thinking; this is the ego, or self, which develops and becomes differentiated from the id as the child grows. The ego is not sharply separated from the id but somewhat overlaps and merges with it. However, ideas and emotions in the id that enter the ego and create anxiety, such as the Oedipal impulse, are thrust back by repression and walled off so that they cannot re-enter consciousness.

  Many other impulses, in contrast, are consciously controlled by the ego. The child learns, among other things, that one does not take another’s property, strike another without just cause, or masturbate in public; we teach our children that such actions are not acceptable and will have dire consequences. Although in part we train them, as we do animals, by simple reward and punishment, in larger part we rear them by telling them how they should behave and why. The ego, absorbing these lessons, becomes capable of self-criticism and self-control.

  Much of the ego, however, is not conscious. Many of its processes are preconscious—not repressed but not in the spotlight of attention. We do a good deal of our problem solving, for example, outside of consciousness, continuing to consider information we have gathered and ways of achieving our goal without consciously thinking about the matter. When a solution pops into mind seemingly from nowhere, it is because we were working on it all along. Similarly, the preconscious operates many of our well-learned skills, freeing the conscious mind to use its limited attention elsewhere. The trained musician’s fingers automatically strike the right notes as he reads music; he does not have to think about them.

  In contrast, the superego, which monitors and censors the ego, is unconscious and critically important to the governing of social behavior. It develops within the ego as a result of the Oedipus complex, at which time the child, coming to identify with the same-sex parent, absorbs the parent’s injunctions and beliefs and makes them part of himself or herself. Perceived commands like “you must not” or “you should” are transformed by identification into “I must not” and “I should.” This mechanism turns all sorts of moral values into internalized and self-imposed rules; collectively, they form the “ego ideal” or superego, what we usually call conscience. Moral issues are consciously weighed by the ego; the superego evokes a compelling sense of ought or ought not. The ego of a person adrift in a life raft might reason that to give food and water to a dying companion would be wasteful and result in the death of both of them; the superego might override
the ego and insist on sharing what remained.

  Earlier, Freud had held that the development of the superego takes place in girls in a fashion exactly analogous to that in boys. Later, he came to think that the girl, lacking castration anxiety, has a less intense Oedipal crisis and therefore a less developed superego and moral sense throughout life.78 (Curiously, the paper in which he stated these patriarchal views was, at his request, read on his behalf at the 1925 International Psycho-Analytical Congress by his beloved daughter, the psychoanalyst Anna Freud.)

  The individual’s behavior is thus the outcome of an interplay among the three agencies of the psyche. The id seeks immediate gratification of its desires; the ego, using reality-principle thinking, seeks to restrain the impulse and find acceptable forms of gratification; and the superego exerts control by means of parental values absorbed into the unconscious. When the id is too strong for the ego and superego, the person’s behavior is either pathological or criminal; when the superego is too strong for the ego, the person is guilt-ridden and frustrated or moralistic and persecutory of others.79 In the healthy individual, the ego controls the system, finding ways to permit sufficient gratification of the id but not at the cost of bringing about overwhelming guilt feelings from the outraged superego.

  Instinct theory: 80 By “instinct” Freud did not mean what biologists mean: specific forms of behavior coded into the genes—web spinning by spiders, nest building by birds—forms of behavior he referred to by the German word Instinkt. But the German word translated in the Standard Edition as “instinct” is Trieb, which denotes “impulse,” “moving force,” or “drive.”81

  In his early work Freud had assumed that the sexual instincts associated with the mouth, anus, and sex organs made up the sum total of psychic energy. But his later research on “repetition compulsions” (tendencies to repeat self-defeating or painful acts) plus the horrendous events of World War I broadened his thinking; he became convinced that there is also an instinct to destroy. When directed outward, it takes the form of aggression, but if blocked, it may turn inward, as seen in repetition compulsions.

  He thus propounded a two-instinct theory: The life instinct, or Eros, comprises all life-preserving impulses, among them the sexual drive; and the death instinct, or Thanatos, embraces all impulses toward hostility, sadism, and aggression—and even, he tentatively suggested, a mysterious drive toward one’s own death.

  Anxiety, symptoms, defenses: 82 Originally Freud held that neurotic anxiety and its symptoms—as distinguished from the realistic anxiety one feels when facing a real-world danger—arise from the blocked energy of the repressed sexual instinct: unrelieved sexual tension generates anxiety. But as he accumulated clinical data, he developed the more sophisticated explanation on which he based the theory of the Oedipus complex and its resolution, and extended it to account for other forms of neurotic anxiety. An instinctual desire reaching consciousness either as a fantasy or overt action creates an anticipation of harm. This causes the child to feel intolerable anxiety; the ego, to defend itself, represses the instinctual desire, whereupon the anxiety disappears.

  But what does the psyche do with the bottled-up energy, the tension-producing unpleasure of the unfulfilled instinctual demand? How does the psyche keep it from breaking through into consciousness? One solution—the defective, pathogenic one Freud saw in his neurotic patients—was the formation of symptoms:

  A symptom arises from an instinctual impulse which has been detrimentally affected by repression… The instinctual impulse has found a substitute in spite of repression, but a substitute which is very much reduced, displaced, and inhibited and which is no longer recognizable as a satisfaction. And when the substitutive impulse is carried out there is no sensation of pleasure; its carrying-out has, instead, the quality of a compulsion.83

  He illustrated the process by citing one of his most famous case histories, that of Little Hans.84 At the Oedipal stage of childhood the boy developed a phobia that prevented him from going out to the street; he was afraid of horses (the streets were full of them in that era), which he thought would bite him. His inability to go out was, Freud says, “a restriction which his ego had imposed on itself so as not to arouse the anxiety-symptom.” But where had the fear of being bitten by horses come from? Analysis traced it back to Little Hans’s Oedipal desires, his wish to do away with his father, and the resultant fear that his father would harm him. Instead of resolving it in a healthy fashion, he had displaced it to horses (significantly, his father used to play the part of the horse and let Hans ride on him) and transformed his fear of castration into a fear of being bitten.

  In short, an impermissible wish, repressed but maladaptively dealt with, becomes a neurotic symptom. The symptom is costly to the sufferer, but not as costly as the anxiety it allays:

  An agoraphobic patient may start his illness with an attack of anxiety in the street. This would be repeated every time he went into the street again. He will now develop the symptom of agoraphobia; this may also be described as an inhibition, a restriction of the ego’s functioning, and by means of it he spares himself anxiety attacks. We can witness the converse of this if we interfere in the formation of symptoms, as is possible, for instance, with obsessions. If we prevent a patient from carrying out a washing ceremonial, he falls into a state of anxiety which he finds hard to tolerate and from which he had evidently been protected by his symptom.85

  Repression is thus the fundamental defense against all anxiety-producing wishes, memories, or feelings, and the very bedrock of the psychological structure.86 It works unconsciously; the child who has repressed the wish that a little sibling would die does not know that he harbors such a wish and will react with scorn or rage to any suggestion that he does. (Suppression, a different mental act, is the conscious control of an impermissible desire; one wills oneself to avoid acting on the desire, but this does not get rid of the anxiety.)

  As with the Oedipal conflict, repression can result in neurosis but normally does not; the psyche finds adaptive ways to handle the repressed material. It does so by means of a number of other defenses— again, all unconscious—that transmute the unacceptable into the acceptable. Freud named several and referred readers to a more complete treatment of the defense mechanisms by his daughter, Anna Freud.87 Among the more commonly used defenses named by Freud or discussed by Anna Freud are these:

  Denial is a relatively primitive defense in which the individual simply fails to perceive or acknowledge an anxiety-producing reality. A woman who is forced to care for a dying husband may tell herself (contrary to all the evidence) that he will recover shortly, or she may say, “I want to keep him alive as long as possible,” when unconsciously she wishes the ordeal were over.

  Rationalization is a more sophisticated version of denial. The individual acts out of one motive but justifies the act in terms of another that is more acceptable. A battered woman whose low self-esteem makes her too dependent to be alone tells herself that she stays with her abusive lover or husband because she loves him.

  Reaction formation goes a step further, exaggerating and displaying for all to see a trait exactly opposite to the repressed one. The man repressing homosexual wishes may behave in a macho fashion or physically assault gays. The would-be sybarite may become a born-again Christian or an implacable foe of erotic art and literature.

  Displacement directs repressed feelings toward an acceptable substitute. A woman with an unduly strong attachment to her father may choose a man his age as a husband. A man who has buried his fierce anger at his controlling father may become a chronic rebel, fighting with all sorts of authority figures.

  Intellectualization fends off anxiety by taking an ostensibly intellectual interest in an impermissible desire, a painful loss, or the like. A person with repressed sadistic impulses may become a social scientist specializing in the study of sadists or torturers. Freud’s contemporary Havelock Ellis, though sexually inhibited during most of his life, wrote a mass of scholarly studies of nor
mal and abnormal forms of sexual behavior.

  Projection, a very common defense mechanism, is the attributing of one’s own unacceptable impulses to the object of those impulses. People who deny feeling racial hatred may believe that persons of the other race hate them, or attribute to the others the impulses they deny in themselves, as in the case of Ku Klux Klan members who see blacks as vicious and sexually animalistic.

  Sublimation, finally, is the most prosocial of the defense mechanisms; by means of it, superego and ego transmute the instinctual demand into some socially valuable related activity. Painting is often a sublimation of the childish impulse to smear or handle feces; writing or performing, sublimations of the impulse to exhibit oneself; surgery, a noble transformation of the urge to do harm; and most athletic games (and such nonathletic ones as chess), acceptable and enjoyable sublimations of aggression.

  But Is It Scientific?

  Ever since Freud began publishing his ideas, his psychology has been fiercely attacked on one ground or another. At first and for some decades many physicians and psychologists called it dirty and perverted; by the 1930s communist theorists were castigating it as decadent and bourgeois; and in the same decade the Nazis condemned it as Jewish filth and burned Freud’s books.

  Psychoanalysis outlived these assaults, but for many years it has been under attack of a more thoughtful kind: A number of psychologists and philosophers of science have asserted that it is not scientific. Their chief argument is that psychoanalytic research is not experimental; the psychoanalyst does not construct a situation in which he or she can control variables and manipulate them one at a time to measure their impact and so establish causal connections.