Psychoanalysis

November 2013
Chad Cyrenne
 Does anyone read Freud?
•  Haven’t his theories and empirical work
been discredited?
•  In psychology, does he have any
influence? (DSM-III, 1980)
•  Cognitive therapy ≠ Freudian analysis
•  Hasn’t his work done serious harm?
(“recovered” memories, phallocentrism)
The greatest social theorist of
the 20th century?
•  We all speak in his terms.
(sibling rivalry, unconscious motivations,
repressed instincts, neurotic behaviors, sexual
frustration, libidinal urges, irrational fixations,
defense mechanisms, projection, displacement,
transference, oedipal attachments, phallic
obsessions, wish fulfillment, a death wish, the
unleashed id, etc.)
•  We all understand our subjectivities in
the way Freud argued.
(a) We are, in important respects,
unknown to ourselves. We can take
ourselves by surprise. We can discover
the “true reason” for our actions.

(b) We do not always know why we act the

way we do, and understand our
motivations and choices as only partly
cognized, partly rational, partly within our
control.
(c) We feel “compelled” or “repressed” in
our social conduct by internal forces we do
not fully apprehend, forces that we believe
lie inside the mind.

(d) We believe those internal constraints to

be idiosyncratic and uniquely ours. They
exist separately from whatever cultural,
biological, or social conditioning we share.

(e) With improved self-knowledge, we can

take steps to become less constrained.
 Where Freud Concludes
We are each highly individuated persons
with distinct personalities that continue to be
elaborated and will never be fully known.
Every human being has bottomless depths,
and will spend a lifetime working and
reworking the self-understanding she has.
The greatest argument for human equality
and dignity ever made?
Let’s Get Something Out of the Way:
What is the Unconscious?
“In the course of centuries the naïve self-love of
men has had to submit to two major blows at
the hands of science. The first was when they
learnt that our earth was not the centre of the
universe but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic
system of scarcely imaginable vastness… The
second blow fell when biological research
destroyed man’s supposedly privileged place in
creation and proved his descent from the animal
kingdom and his ineradicable animal nature…”
“But human megalomania will have suffered its
third and most wounding blow from the
psychological research of the present time
which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not
even master in its own house, but must content
itself with scanty information of what is going on
unconsciously in its mind. We psycho-analysts
were not the first and not the only ones to utter
this call to introspection; but it seems to be our
fate to give it its most forcible expression and to
support it with empirical material” (p. 353).
 The Unconscious
“The oldest and best meaning of the
word ‘unconscious’ is the descriptive one;
we call a psychical process unconscious
whose existence we are obliged to
assume – for some such reason as that
we infer it from its effects –, but of which
we know nothing” (p. 88).
“We challenge anyone in the world to give a more
correct scientific account of this state of affairs,
and if he does we will gladly renounce our
hypothesis of unconscious mental processes. Till
that happens, however, we will hold fast to the
hypothesis; and if someone objects that here the
unconscious is nothing real in a scientific sense, is
a makeshift, une façon de parler, we can only
shrug our shoulders resignedly and dismiss what
he says as unintelligible. Something not real,
which produces effects of such tangible reality as
an obsessional action!” (p. 344)
•  Freud began by conceiving the unconscious
in positivist terms, as something that was
there in the mind, that could be identified,
located for the analysand to see.

•  Over time, Freud – and especially his later

followers – reconceived the unconscious in
interpretive terms, as a means for the
analysand to name, interpret, and
practically engage an element in her self-
understanding that she had avoided
confronting beforehand.
•  When it comes to dream analysis, everything
hinges on the dream-work of the analysand.

•  The same for repressed “memories,” which

Freud came to see as constructed fictions
that helped the analysand to understand and
engage a practical problem in her present.

•  This is why a psychoanalytic intervention

rests on the analysand identifying her
problem and its solution – and not passively
awaiting an expert diagnosis.
 Theory of Society
Apparently irrational social behavior can
have a rational basis rooted in intra-
psychic conflict.
We can describe that social behavior as
the symptomatic manifestation of an
unconscious instinct or drive that has
been:
frustrated from achieving its full expression
and fixated along a different channel.
That fixation can occur through:
displacement (identifying a different object for
the satisfaction of the instinct or drive)

projection (expelling something one refuses

to recognize or resolve in the self onto an
external object)

transference (when the analyst becomes the

object of displacement or projection)

condensation (the concentration of

interrelated instinct and drive-energies into a
single, affectively-charged object)
•  The fixated instinct or drive has been
redirected, in ways that allow for
temporary relief but not a lasting
resolution.
•  Instead, each participant experiences
an acutely-felt intra-psychic conflict or
neurosis (shame, anxiety, fear, disgust,
hysteria, rage, frustration, phobia, etc.)
•  The repeated social behavior then
treats the symptoms but not the root
causes of the neurosis.
•  Should all instincts or drives be freely
expressed? Civilization (or common life)
would be impossible under such
circumstances.
•  Is it then our fate to live neurotically?
Perhaps. We can, however, gain more
clarity over those instincts and drives, and
perform cognitive and interpretive “self-
work” to mitigate or live with them.
•  Ultimately, our aim is to love and work with
a minimum of psychological inhibition.
 Models / Anti-Models
•  Psychoanalysis should be modeled on the
medical sciences, with evidence-based
therapeutic interventions to treat both the
symptoms and the underlying aetiology of
neurotic behavior.
•  Psychoanalysis, as a science of self-
interpretation, is further enriched by
humanistic study and the ability of art and
literature to disclose the self to itself.
•  Psychoanalysis should supplement the
existing psychological approaches that
are too physicalist in their attention to
brain legions, neural activity, spatial
manipulations, cognitive deficits.
•  Psychoanalysis should resist popular
views of emotional illness that
emphasize “chemical imbalances” or
medicinal solutions. The latter is more
likely to treat the symptom than the
underlying basis for the neurosis.
 Methodological Preferences
Any time we encounter repeated behaviors
•  that the participants find burdensome
•  but necessary to achieve a sense of
resolution
•  despite the seeming lack of connection
between the behavior and the intended
result
•  and with no permanent resolution of the
neurotic symptoms that motivated the
behavior (shame, anxiety, fear, disgust,
hysteria, rage, frustration, phobia, etc.)

•  we should assume that we are

witnessing an intra-psychic conflict.

•  we then need a working hypothesis, a

model of the mind, that will help us see
how, and where, and why this intra-
psychic conflict is occurring.
 Two Models of the Mind
•  The Topographic / Spatial Model
Between the unconscious and the
conscious lies a drawing room of the
“preconscious,” to which an internal
watchman gives access.
Intra-psychic conflict occurs when the
watchman allows the wrong thoughts to
pass and must then repress to rectify
his mistakes.
•  Some unconscious thoughts never make it
through, but are “censored” at the door.
Others momentarily pass, but are quickly
pushed back through repression. Only the
repressed thoughts generate symptomatic
neuroses (pp. 365-369).

•  Unconscious thoughts are more likely to

become preconscious when we are asleep
and the watchman less vigilant. Whatever is
allowed to pass will still be censored or
interfered with. Hence the importance of
dreams and dream-work.
•  The Structural Model
We are each the controlled expression of:
the irrational, amoral, unconscious id, “the dark,
inaccessible part of our personality,” a “chaos, a
cauldron full of seething excitations” (pp. 91-93)
the “sense organ of the entire apparatus,” the self-
integrating ego that “stands for reason and good
sense” (pp. 93-97) that is forced to obey “three
tyrannical masters” – the id, the external world,
and the superego, our societally-reinforced
conscience (p. 83).
•  Intra-psychic conflict occurs when the ego fails to
find the right integration of id, superego, and
external reality.
•  The characteristic symptom is anxiety.
•  The therapeutic response?
The analyst strives “to strengthen the ego, to
make it more independent of the superego, to
widen its field of perception and enlarge its
organization, so that it can appropriate fresh
portions of the id. Where id was, there ego shall
be. It is a work of culture – not unlike the draining
of the Zuider Zee” (pp. 99-100).
Freud developed other models / working
hypotheses, including:

•  the dynamic/economic model (the mind

as a machine, with reservoirs and safety
valves).

•  the genetic model (the psychic

personality passing through
developmental stages, negotiating new
erogenous satisfactions: oral, anal,
phallic, latency, genital.
 Still on Methods
To extrapolate from the modeled intra-
psychic conflict, we want to locate
neurotic symptoms and their attempted
mitigation within the social practice we
study.
We want to look for attempts to repress
unconscious motivations (from simple
aversion and resistance to elaborate
defense mechanisms).
 Such aversions or resistance are likely to
found in the presence of:
•  anything ordinarily kept from public inspection
(bodily functions, sexual practices).

•  anything that speaks to central matters of fertility,

conception, birth, aging, and death.

•  anything for which there appears a marked

cultural reluctance to acknowledge or discuss.

•  anything that is explicitly marked as sacred or

taboo.
 We then locate intra-psychic
conflicts in our social world
•  through close ethnographic study
•  respondent interviews that encourage
free association
•  a careful, interpretive back and forth
between analytical diagnosis and
cultural / analysand self-disclosure
•  “Our therapy works by transforming
what is unconscious into what is
conscious, and it works only in so far as
it is in a position to achieve that
transformation” (p. 347).

•  Put otherwise, we strive to show that

seemingly irrational behaviors can be
shown to have rational explanations
rooted in the unacknowledged intra-
psychic conflicts of the community.
 Preferred Data
•  Clinical data: neurotic symptoms
•  Parapraxes: “Freudian slips”
•  Dreams: “the royal road to a knowledge
of the unconscious activities of the mind”
•  Jokes, Free Associations, Spontaneous
Utterances
•  Cultural Representations (Art, Literature,
Myth, Religion, Politics, etc.)
 Freud Insists that His Theory is
Empirical, not Speculative
•  “My interpretation carries with it the hypothesis
that intentions can find expression in a speaker of
which he himself knows nothing but which I am
able to infer from circumstantial evidence” (p. 79).

•  “You should not for a moment suppose that what

I put before you as the psycho-analytic view is a
speculative system. It is on the contrary empirical
– either a direct expression of observations or the
outcome of a process of working them over” (p.
302).
 Founders

Sigmund Freud
(1856-1939)
 Institutionalizations
•  Psychoanalytic Institutes
•  Some National Ministries of Health
(Argentina, France, Brazil, Chile, Israel)
•  In Social Sciences: Anthropology,
some Political Science, Sociology.
•  In Humanities: English, Culture
Studies, Art, Religion.
•  Some Social Work, Clinical Psychology.
 Criticisms
•  If every resistance is further evidence
for the hypothesis, how do we reject it?

“Psycho-analysis brings forward so much that

is new, and among it so much that contradicts
traditional opinions and wounds deeply-
rooted feelings, that it is bound at first to
provoke denial” (p. 13).
•  Intra-psychic conflicts over-privilege
animal instincts and biological drives,
the lower affective registers (shame,
anxiety), the body and its physical
functions.
Why not an Aristotelian reading of human
nature, rooted in the exercise of our higher-
order capacities, our capacity to reason and
exercise self-restraint, to cultivate characters
of ennobling virtue, as the baseline for a
flourishing psychic personality?
•  Traditional analysis takes personality as
variable, re-workable, re-interpretable,
but childhood as fixed, lasting, enduring
in its effects.

•  Traditional analysis is wrong in its

treatment of girls and women:
egregiously condescending and
phallocentric, normalizing the male body
as the universal ideal, with a wholly
implausible understanding of girls,
women, and women’s sexuality.
•  The power imbalance between the
analyst and the analysand invites
serious abuse.
The analysand is already vulnerable and
looking for affirmation. The insistence that
the analysand further abandon her defenses,
and present her unconscious wishes,
fantasies, and desires without constraint or
inhibition, gives the analyst every opportunity
to manipulate and take advantage.
•  There are likely to be similar imbalances
of power and authority at the cultural
level, when the social scientist
presumes to investigate and know a
cultural practice better than its
indigenous participants.