FREUDIAN PS YCHOANALYSIS
Freud's manner of constantly revisiting his earlier research in order to reconsider it in the light of m ore recently acquired clinical evidence makes it difficult to proffer a definitive account of his theories. There are great differences between his earlier form ulations of the Oedipus com plex as articulated, for exam ple, in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the versions thereof which he elaborated towards the end of his life in, for example, The E go and the Id (1923) and “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex” (1924). The sum mation I present below is based on the later conclusions to which Freud came. Moreover, for reasons of time and space, my focus is limited here to the physiological and psychologica l develo pment of the masculine subject. As a result, in what follows I will leave till a later date Freud's controversial conclusions about the nature of femininity, a view that has been the subject of much critical debate, not least among fem inists who have, though, also drawn heavily on his views.1
Freud is one of several important philosophers who have contributed to the ‘decentering of the subject,’ that is, our understanding that human identity is not based on some unchanging essential core or imm ortal soul that transcends the physical. He gives us a way of understanding that the brain, like any other body part, is a physical organ and the mind (our consciousness and unconsciousness) partly a function of the physiological processes that occur therein and partly a function of our interaction with the physical and social world around us. For Freud, in short, human consciousness is not a g iven, not something with which we enter this world pre-equipped: rather, it is something that we acquire as we physically grow. From this point of view, Freud’s model of identity is more indebted to Locke’s tabula rasa (the view that our minds are initially blank slates which are then inscribed on by our experiences) than the C artesian cogito (Descartes argued that our consciousness pre-exists and postdates our life on Earth).
Freud’s basic contention is that, in the course of their physiological maturation, all children also pass through several successive stages of psychological development. Physiologically-speaking, as the child grows, it passes through the oral, the anal and the phallic stages, in each of which a particular body-par t com es to dom inate the child’s attention: the m outh, the anus and the penis, respectively. It should be noted that the physical growth of the child’s body cannot be separated from the child’s first social relations w hich are occurring simultaneously, the most important relationship being with the mother. Psychologically-speaking, in so developing, all children also pass through several concomitant stages of cognitive development: the pre-Oedipal, the Oedipal (usually from about age 3 to 6), and the post-Oedipal (the child enters this final stage as a result of going through what Freud terms the Castration complex which ‘resolves’ the former Oedipal stage).
The Pre-Oedipal Period
During this period, the child passes through the oral and, later, the anal stages of growth. At this early stage, the child obviously has a sex (i.e. it is normally anatomically either male or female) but it does not yet have a sense of its gender (the social construction of or interpretations im posed by society on a given sex, that is, the social roles which com e to be ascribed to a particular sex). Initially, given the stage of the brain’s developm ent, the infant has no cognitive functions to speak of as a result of which it relates to the external world prim arily through its senses. At this stage, the child’s libido or pleasure-seeking drive (and the instinctual avoidance of unpleasant sensations) predom inates in lieu of conscious reflection.2 The child, both male and female, has a strong libidinal relation to the mother’s breast in particular which is perceived, at least initially, as part of the child’s m outh and not something external to the child. As a result, it does not at this stage have an Ego per se (Ego in Latin means ‘I’), that is, no thinking or conscio us self and, importantly, no sense of self as distinct from everything external to it.
The earliest and perhaps most important social factor in the development of the child consists in the fact that the infant's sym biotic relationship with the (M)Other (from whose initially rarely-absent body it initially knows no distinction) is inevitably and increasingly interrupted by the latter's necessary absences. The first inklings of infantile consciousness (i.e. cognitive thought) as well as self-consciousness (i.e. a sense of a distinct selfhood) emerge in response to what Freud calls this ‘primordial loss,’ that is, to the realisation that the (M)Other is an entity distinct from itself. In other words, the child’s (self-)consciousness develops as it
begins to becom e aware of the difference between the presence and absence of the (M)Other, to consciously register the frustration of its instinctual desires, and thus to conceive that there is a distinction between self and other.
It is in this way, too, that the infant undergo es its first and monumental confrontation with the conflict between what Freud later terms the Pleasure and the Reality principles, to wit, the conflict between his desire to gratify his instinctual drives, on the one hand, and, on the other, the realisation that he cannot a lways get what he wants when he wants it. This dialectic between the Pleasure and Reality Principles, self and other, will henceforth not only entirely structure his existence as a human being (as the child matures, this conflict will take other forms) but may also subsequently inform, some argue, the predisposition o f hum an consciousness to view the world in terms of binary opposites: presence/absence, black/white, good/evil, etc.
The Oedipal Period
Freud argues that af ter passing through the oral and the anal stages, the male child reaches the phallic phase. This is the period during which his genital organ, the penis, comes to take centre stage within his own consc iousness. As a result of this, his libidinal relationship to the (M)O ther begins to take on an overtly sexual cast and he begins to want more than the mere gratification which the child derives from the sustenance, warmth, love and comfort provid ed by the (M)Other. To be precise, he finds himself attached often in explicitly erotic ways to his mother. Freud argues in “The Dissolution’ of the Oedipus Complex” that the child's earliest attempts at self-stimulation, so frequent at this stage, is a "genital discharge of the sexual excitation belonging to the complex" (318). At the same time, however, he predicates his developing identity on that of his father (i.e. he identifies with the father in a way that produces the nucleus of his developing Ego). This relationship quicky takes o n an a m biva lent cast, however. Freud puts it this way in The Ego and the Id: “At a very early stage, the little boy develops an object-cathexis for his m other” (640) and “deals with the father by identifying himself with him” (640). For a time
these two relationships proceed side by side, until the boy’s sexual wishes in regard to his mother become m ore intense and his father is perceived as an obstacle; from this the Oedipus complex originates. His identification with his father then takes on a hostile colouring and changes into a w ish to get rid of his father in order to take his place with his mother. Henceforward his relation to his father is ambivalent. (640)
Freud first termed these desires Oedipal in The Interpretation of Dreams where he describes how he realised that the very same situation w as depicted in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex where, although the chief protagonist Oedipus does not realise it at first, he has slept with his mother and killed his father.
The Castration Complex:
It is as a result of the Castration Complex, Freud argues, that the child learns to forego the erotic attachm ent to the (M)Other and com es to identify with the parent it formerly viewed as a rival. In “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex,” he argues that it is the child’s masturbation in particular which elicits parental disapproval: "More or less plainly, more or less brutally, a threat is pronounced that this part which he values so highly will be taken away from him" (316) by, significantly, the father. As Freud puts it, if the "satisfaction of love in the field of the Oedipal com plex is to cost the child his penis, a conflict is bound to arise between his narcissistic interest in that part of his body and the libidinal cathexis of his parental objects" (318).3 The first triumphs and the child's ego turns away from (i.e represses) its Oedipal longings. In other words, rather than risk losing his penis, he surrenders his attraction to the mother. W hat ultim ately confirms the threat of castration (the extreme fear of w hich is understandable given that the child is in the phallic phase of his development) is the "sight of the fem ale genitals" (318) (which also rudely destroys his presumption of sexual hom ogeneity, to wit, his narcissistic illusion that everyone possesses the penis).
In his earlier account of this process found in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud assum ed that the male infant almost automatically represses an inherent attraction to his mother and identifies with his father. In later years, however, Freud came to accept that the infant was in fact inherently bisexual (or ‘polym orphously perverse,’ as he put it). In "The Dissolution of the Oedipus Com plex,” he argues that at this stage, the child
stands in an Oedipal relation to his parents and is faced with two "possibilities of satisfaction" (318) with regard to his libido: either by assuming the active masculine role of the father and seeking intercourse with the mother (the real fat her thus becomes a hindrance to be removed) or by assuming the passive feminine role of the mother in a desire to be copulated with by the father (whence the superfluous role of the mother).4 The male child's acceptance of the personal possibility of castration makes an "end of both possible ways of obtaining satisfaction from the O ed ipus com plex" (318) since both the masculine and the fem inine roles entail the loss of the penis. The former involves castration as punishm ent, the latter as a precondition. The child’s inherent bisexuality com plicates the object-cathexes and the process of identification outlined above: he argues in The Ego and the Id that the
boy has not merely an ambivalent attitude to his father and an affectionate object-choice towards his mother, but at the same time he also be haves like a girl and displays an affectionate feminine attitude to his father and a corresponding jealousy and hostility towards his mother. . . . The broad general outcome of the sexual phase dominated by the Oedipus
complex may, therefore, be taken to be the forming of a precipitate in the ego, consisting of these two identifications in some way united with each other. (641)
In other words, Freud came to believe that there occurs no simplistic, black and white rejection of the mother and identification with the father, as he had earlier assumed. Rather, the proc ess is much greyer and less clear cut: the boy, who is initially attracted to both parents, will come to reject these feelings for one and to identify with the other to a greater or lesser degree. This might explain, for example, why some males appear ‘effeminate’ (they have identified with and, at least to some degree, modelled themselves more on the mother) while others (who have identified more with the father) do not.
The Post-Oedipal Period
As a result of the foregoing, the m ale child represses his Oedipal desires. The psyche is henceforth radically
split, that is, divided between conscious and unconscious portions. The forbidden sexual desire (which cannot
henceforth be consciously acknowledged precisely because it is repressed) forms the Unconscious or what Freud came to term the Id (which in Latin means ‘that thing’ and is designed to connote something extraneous or foreign to the Ego or one’s sense of self found, ironically, at the very heart of one’s identity). W hat Freud called the super-ego or the ego-ideal (what we otherwise tend to call a conscience) is also formed at the sam e time, the prohibition of certain pleasures (which in its primordial form here is the injunction against incest) forming the nucleus of a society’s m oral values.5 The super-ego henceforth becomes the repository of the wider com munity's moral values, an ideal of conduct to be lived up to, and, as such, the censor of both the ego's conscious thoughts and actions as well as its recall of unconscious activity.6 From this point of view, morality would seem to be something culturally acquired. Freud ’s vie ws in this regard w ould seem to be very different from those o f Im manuel Kant, for example, who fam ously argued that a sense of right and wrong is transcendental and, accordingly, innate in humans. By its very name, it should be evident that there is a link between the super-ego and the third component of the psyche: the ego.
The ego, generally-speaking, is that part of the psyche responsible for conscious thought and self-awareness. It possesses several qualities. It is, firstly, the “representative in the mind of the real external world” (639-640), as Freud puts it in The Ego and the Id, in other words, the conscious part of the psyche which is formed, as Locke might put it, by the brain’s intercourse with the world around it. It is that part of the psyche “which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world ac ting throug h” (634) the perceiving senses (what Freud termed the ‘perception-consciousness system’). “For the ego, perception plays the part which in the id falls to instinct” (636). Secondly, it functions to accurately record and report on the precise nature of the external world em pirically apprehended or perceived by the senses. Thirdly, its task is to “bring the influence of the external world to bear upon the id and its tendencies” (635-636) and "to substitute the reality-principle for the pleasure-principle which reigns unrestrictedly in the id. . . . The ego represents what we call reason and com mon sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions" (15). In "its relation to the id it is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse" (215) by means of “borrowed forces” (636).
To complicate matters further, Freud contends that eve n the ego itself, however, is arguably split. Freud argues in another very late essay entitled “Fetishism” (1927) that one way which the male infant devises to deal with the horror afforded by the prospect of castration is by the substitution of a so-called fetish-object for the sight of the fem ale genitalia. The child attem pts to deny the lack or loss which the vagina signifies (he views it as a m utilated penis) by only remembe ring the last object glimpsed (e.g. a skirt or stocking) before the sight of the offending organ. This is the source of a man’s sexual attraction to such objects in adult life. However, more importantly, Freud’s point in another related late essay called “The Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence” (1938) is that where there is a conflict within the child between instinctual demands (the pleasure principle) and the reality principle, the child faces a choice between satisfying the instinctual dem and and acknowledging the danger that such satisfaction represents. "On the one hand, with the help of certain mechanisms he rejects reality and refuses to accept any prohibition; on the other hand, in the same breath he recognises the danger of reality, takes over the fear of that danger as a symptom and tries subsequently to divest himself of the fear" (373). The result is a "rift in the ego which never heals but which increases as time goes on. The two contrary reactions to the conflict persist as the centre-point of a split in the ego" (373) in a way that contradicts any notion of the "synthetic nature of the workings of the ego . . . The synthetic function of the ego is . . . subject to particular conditions and is liable to a whole series of disturbances" (373).
Many philosophers contend in this regard that Freud’s concept of the split psyche has been one of the most important arguments by which the entirely rational and fully self-aware so-called Cartesian subject has been decentered.7 Descartes had concluded that cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am; in other words, man is fundamentally a thinking being. Freud recognised that man’s defining feature was not his ability to think (his consciousness) but the instinctual desires which innately moved his being but w hich he was forced to repress (this was the price of civilisation). Some have argued that Freud substituted ‘desidero’ (‘I want’) for the Cartesian ‘cogito’ (‘I think’), ‘homo desiderans’ (‘desiring man’) for ‘homo cogitans’ (‘thinking man’). Because not all desires can be perm itted, there is thus a part of man of which he cannot be aware, a dimension to his being of which he is perf orce unconscious.
The Dream-Work
For Freud, our dreams constitute the ‘royal road to the unconscious,’ as he put it. There is, he argued, a illogical ‘logic’ to the seem ingly bizarre nature of the dream which indirectly betrays much about the repressed contents of our psyche. In addition to dreams, the contents of our unconscious can also be glimpsed through some jokes we tell and slips of the tongue. Because they are repressed, however, they are otherwise inaccessible.
W hen we sleep, the forbidden desires which lurk in our unconscious are given greater freedom as the ego and super-ego are no longer in com plete control of our psyches at this time. Dreams are primarily visual, for Freud, and m ay be thought of as possessing two levels: the manifest (the surface level of the dream with all its frequently apparently nonsensical happenings) and the latent (what these seemingly nonsensical events dreamed in fact signify). The ego performs what Freud calls the dream-work in order to disguise the dreamer’s unconscious desires from the censorious ego and the super-ego. The principle mechanisms in this respect are those of condensation (two or more latent desires are fused or conflated into one object at the manifest level of the dream) and displacement (whereby a latent desire manifests itself in the dream as a seemingly unrelated object). A simplistic exam ple of the form er for a m ale dream er m ight be dreaming of going to a party and kissing all the women in sight (there are at least two desires latent here, the desire to go out and have a good time coupled with, obviously, a sexual desire). A sim plistic example of the latter might be where the dreamer dreams about a fa ncy, sleek, sexy, red sports car which may have (not so obvious, at first glance) erotic connections with sexy wom en in red stockings.
SUMMARY
Nancy Chodorow offers an overview in “The Psychodynamics of the Family” of the usefulness of Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory which is worth quoting in its entirety: it provides us, she points out,
1.See Freud’s controversial essay “Femininity” in which, dissatisfied with the pronouncements of fellow psychoanalysts on the subject, he formulated his controversial theory of penis envy in order to explain the ‘feminine character.’ Women’s
consciousness, he argues, is dominated by a desire for the organ which they lack: the penis. (All essays by Freud to which I refer may be found in The Collected Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey.) See Luce Irigaray’s monumental critique of the phallocentrism (i.e. the way in which he privileges the penis over the vagina) which informs Freud’s concept of femininity in her Speculum of the Other W oman. See the brief but very useful extract therefrom “Another ‘Cause’--Castration” in Warhol and Herndl, eds. Feminisms.
2.Libido is, for Freud, a energy which is the most important life-force motivating the human being. It is that which drives us to seek pleasure and to gratify the needs of the body.
3.W hen Freud speaks of the ‘libidinal cathexis of an object’ he merely means that libidinal energy is directed towards a particular object.
4.By this stage of his career, Freud had overcome the heterosexism that had, in his own opinion, marred his earlier accounts of the Oedipus complex. He came to argue that the child's 'polymorphously perverse' (or bisexual) desires could be directed towards a parent of either sex. This view is clearest in the case of the patient to whom he gave the pseudonym the Wolfman: the primal scene (the sight of copulation between mother and father) led the Wolfman to interpret the sight of the mother's vagina as a wound, castration thus becoming a precondition for intercourse with the father. Freud theorised that the W olfman, in the wake of the sight of his mother’s vagina, repressed a homosexual desire to be copulated with by his father, a desire that later manifested themselves in the form of various physical symptoms that were the result of neurosis. (See Freud’s Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis for a brief overview of the origins of his Psychoanalytic theories. He was a medical doctor who sought to account in psychic terms for illnesses for which there was no discernable physiological cause. He termed such illnesses neuroses which are linked, he argued, to the faulty repression of socially unpermissible desires which come back to plague the patient in physical forms that are symptomatic of the desire[s] in question. For example, the Wolfman’s physical symptoms were largely related to the intestinal tract.)
Freud came to the view that any given adult sexual practice is only normal in so far that it meets certain social criteria of behaviour. Heterosexuality itself is, he would argue, ultimately the function of repression. That is, according to Freud, we repress our inherent bisexuality in order to limit our sexual attraction to only the opposite sex. See Jonathan Dollimore's Sexual Dissidence for a fuller exposition of the 'repression thesis' of psychoanalysis.
5.For Freud's most important later account of this model of the psyche see his The Ego and the Id. In earlier stages of his work, he speaks of conscious, pre-conscious and unconscious which are not the equivalent of ego, super-ego and id.
6.It was in “Femininity” that Freud controversially suggested that because the horror of castration does not apply in the case of the female (as a result of which she does not ‘benefit’ from the process of repression), the super-ego was less developed in the female, making for a less moral human being.
7.The ‘Cartesian subject’ is the term which philosophers have ascribed to the dominant conception of human identity in Western society in modern times (since the Renaissance). It is named after the celebrated Rationalist René Descartes for whom human identity or nature (what is called to day by philosophers ‘subjectivity’) is synonymous with rational thought or consciousness: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ In Descartes’s scheme of things, there is no unconscious dimension to the human psyche and therefore nothing about himself which an individual cannot know. For this reason, the self is unified, rather than split or divided, autonomous (independent of both the body and external circumstances) precisely because it is something ‘pre-given.’
with a theory of social reproduction that explains the major features of personality development and the development of psychic structure, and the differential development of gender personality in particular. Psychoanalysts argue that personality both results from and consists in the ways a child appropriates, internalizes, and organizes early experiences in the family–from the fantasies they have, the defenses they use, the ways they channel and redirect drives. . . . A person subsequently imposes this intrapsychic structure, and the fantasies, defences, and relational modes and preoccupations which go with it, onto external social situations. This reexternalization . . . is a major constituting feature of social and interpersonal situations. . . . (193)
