SIGMUND

FREUD
FOUNDER OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
…
INTRODUCTION
Biography
Birth-May 6,1856 (Moravia)
Death- September 23, 1939 (London)
 Theory of Dreaming
 Idea about mental Illness
• Hypnotism
 Power of Unconsciousness
• Unconscious is very important and
consists of 90% of our thinking

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FREUD’S THEORY

Unconsciousness
 Conscious: What we are thinking
about or experiencing at given moment
 Preconscious: What we readily call
to consciousness (memory, knowledge)
 Unconscious: Thoughts, desires and
impulses of which we are not aware;
this is the largest level of consciousness.

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4
 DREAM
Features of Dream
 Manifest content
Dreams have a ‘manifest
content’ which is the story of the dream that
the dreamer tells.
 Latent content
Dreams have a ‘latent content’
which is the underlying meaningof the dream-
the hidden content of the dream.
 The latent content is what is hiding bhind the
manifest content.

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 DREAMWORK
Dreamwork is what the mind is doing whilst dreaming-
keeping unconscious thoughts hidden and repressed.

 Condensation
Many ideas appearing as one idea in dream. When many
thoughts and elements from the unconscious are represented in the dream in
one symbol.
 Displacement
Something unimportant that seems to be important, in order to
shift attention from what is really important.
 Secondary Elaboration
Using muddled ideas from dream work to build a whole story.
The dreamer will add bits to idea when telling someone what it is about to try
to make sense.

Example: Beatrice’s dream 6

SYMBOLS IN DREAMS

The number of things represented by symbols in dreams is not

great; The human body, parents, children, siblings, birth,
death, nakedness, and a few others.
Common Symbols Their Interpretations
 Snakes  Symbolize trouble, death or change
 Guns  Linked to males- power, aggression, sexuality
 Clothes  Restriction In tight clothes, inappropriate dressing
symbolize not prepared for anything
 Cutting remarks, cut off by someone
 Knives
 Something going wrong by pushing wrong button-
 Lifts your progress
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PSYCHOANALYSIS
-Freud’s therapy known as psychoanalysis
-Talking Therapy

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METHODS

• Free Association
• Saying whatever comes to mind while relaxed
• Hypnosis
• Alternative way to enter the unconscious mind
• Interpretation
• Group therapist points out, explains and teaches the meaning of whatever revealed
• Dream analysis
• Dream are the “royal road to the unconscious.”
• Can be productively worked within a group setting 9
• Members can share and explore dreams in a group.
 PSYCHOANALYSIS

• Types
Id
• Predetermined set of psychological needs, drives, instincts
• Seek pleasure, avoid pain
Ego
• Awareness of one’s self and ability to interact with the world
• Balances id and superego
Superego
• Internalization of the moral principles/rues of society
• “conscience”

MAIN FOCUS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

• To bring unconscious material into consciousness and enhance the functioning of the
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ego, helping the individual become less controlled by biological drives or demands of
the superego
PSYCHOANALYSIS

• Structure of personality
• Psychosexual development
• Defense mechanisms
• Applications

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Case Study example
Of Freud’s dream theory

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Freud’s case study of Little
Hans

• Frued carried out a number of case studies,

finding out from clients what was causing them
problems or holding them back.
• Often the people he studied had strange
symptoms, such as not being able to use their
arm, or having bizzare dreams, fears and
phobias.
• Freud tried to help people who had these
symptoms by suggesting that they arose from the
unconscious
• One of Freud’s case studies is the well known
study of a boy called Little Hans (though that
was not his real name). 13
• The study was done in 1909.
 Background

 Hans’ parents were supporters of Freud’s ideas.

 They agreed to log their son’s development and
send Freud regular letters to keep him informed.
 Little Hans, although he was only three years old
when the study started, was aware that Freud was
studying him.
 He even sent messages to Freud (“The Doctor”)
through his parents’ letters.
 However, Freud only met Little Hans once or
twice.

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 Horse Phobia
 Little Hans main problem was his phobia of horses.
 He was afraid to go out of the house and was
particularly frightened of horses.
 Freud analysed what Litlle Hans said, including his
dreams, to find out what was in Hans’ unconscious that
was causing the phobia.
 This was so that these wishes and desires could be
revealed to Little Hans and so cure the phobia.
 This is traditional psychoanalysis – listening to what is
being said and dreamt, considering how these issues
are symbols of hidden unconscious desires, and then
interpreting the symbols to uncover the desires.
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 An early dream
 Little Hans reported that one day, just
before Little Hans was five uearls old,
he woke up in tears and when asked
why he was crying he said to his
mother that he thought that she was
gone and he had no mummy.
 Freud said that this was an anxiety
dream, and showed he was anxious
that his mother would leave him.
 This links to Freud’s theory of the
Oedipus complex.
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 Oedipus complex
 According to Freud, a boy of about five
years old will have feelings for his mother
and be jealous of his father as well as feeling
guilty for wanting to take his father’s place
with his mother.
 These conflicting emotions cause the boy
fear and anxiety.
 Unconscious wishes (wishing to possess his
mother, in this case) are repressed and will
‘leak’ out in dreams.
 When Little Hans dreamt that his mother
would not be there, this was showing his
desires for his mother.
 Freud thought that Hans, like other children
of his age, was in the phallic stage. 17
 Phallic stage
 The phallic stage according to Freud, is the
third stage of development, happening from
about the age of three or four years old until
about five years old.
 In the phallic stage, sexual interest is focused
on the genital area both for boys and girls.
 For boys at this stage, sexual interest is
transferred onto their mother away from his
father, but feraed his father’s anger and also
felt guilty about these desires.
 Note that all of these emotions are
unconcscious – the person is not aware of
them.
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Freud’s interpretation
of Hans’ situation
 To resolve his feelings, of guilt for
wanting to take his mother away and
of fear of his father, a boy would
identify with his father and ‘become’
his father.
 Freud interpreted the phobia of
horses as being symbolic of Little
Hans’ fear of his father.
 There is a similar idea that girls have
feelings for their father amd identify
with their mothers to overcome fear
and guilt in a similar way. This is
known as Electra complex. 19
The ‘giraffe’ dream
 Little Hans also had a dream about
giraffes.
 In the dream there was abig giraffe
in the room and a crumpled one.
 The big giraffe shouted out because
Little Hans ( in his dream) took the
crumpled one away from it.
 The big giraffe stopped calling out
and Little Hans says that in the
dream he sat down on the crumpled
giraffe.
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Interpretting the giraffe
dream
 Freud and Little Hans’ father both thought that the big giraffe
was a symbol of a penis, but Hans himself denied this.
 Frued discussed the dream with Hans’ father and they linked in
the fact that Little Hans liked to get into bed with his parents in
the morinings – something Hans’ father did not like.
 It was thought that the big giraffe who was shouting out was
Little Hans’ father and the crumpled giraffe was his mother.
 When the big giraffe shouted at Little Hans for taking the
crumpled giraffe away, this to take his mother away from his
father.
 This again was taken as evidence for the claim that a young boy
has sexual feelings for his mother and also fears his father &
feels guilt.

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Evaluating Frued’s Dream Theory

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STRENGHTS

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Used unique methods:

Freud used unique methods to uncover unconscious

wishes and desires which are not conscious and are
hard to access.
 An example of the methods is dream analysis;
this is because at that time no one knew that
problems such as phobias could be caused by
problems in the mind.
 Freud realised the existence of an unconscious
mind and tested this realisation creatively.
He instinctively looked for symbols hiding in the
unconscious.

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In-depth, Real-life data:
 Freud listened to his patients very
carefully over a long period of time.
 He only carried out analysis under two
conditions:
1. He had to know his patients well,
2. They had to cooperate with analysis
and contribute by commenting on any
analysis.
 His information was therefore about
real life and hence was valid
 The data was qualitative, containing a
lot of detail and depth which came
directly from the patient 25
WEAKNESSES

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Biased sample:

• Freud was Austrian, working from the late

1800s and he worked mainly with
reasonably well-off Viennese families, so he
did not find out about a lot of different
people in different circumstances.
• Therefore his findings may not be true for
everyone in the world, hence, his results are
not generalizable

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Hard to measure:

 The unconscious does not exist in

the sense that it can be measured, so
it is hard to test
 Scientific “truths” have been tested
over and over again again, for
example that water boils at 100
degrees Celsius
 Freud’s ideas are hard to test in the
first place and even harder to test
over and over again, so, Freud’s
ideas are “not science”.

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 Interpretation:

 Freud’s interpretation of dreams was

likely to be subjective
• This means that another analyst
might have a different interpretation
therefore it would be hard to call any
interpretation “true”-
• Science needs data to be objective
so that the same results are found
every time without subjective bias.
So once again his ideas are not
scientific
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Contested by other
theories
 Such as Activation synthesis
which is the random activation of
neurones
 The main idea behind activation-
synthesis theory is that dreams
are just the brain's efforts to make
sense out of meaningless patterns
of firing in the brain as we sleep.
 Certain circuits in the brain
become activated during REM
sleep.
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THANK
YOU!
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