Freud's theories have influenced the world of Psychology and outside of it to the present. Some of the best known are the pleasure principle, the drive and repression.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of Psychoanalysis, a praxis formulated for the treatment of psychopathological disorders, from the dialogue between the patient and the psychoanalyst.
His work has left an indelible mark on the culture and history of humanity because they have generated substantial changes in the conceptualization of subjectivity.
Concepts such as the unconscious are part of the vocabulary of most people and its definition is due, to a large extent, to the discoveries of this eminent psychoanalyst.
In turn, Freud's theories left their mark in the treatment of psychopathologies, by relating mental illness with the environment in which the patient lives and with their personal, family and social history.
This view is opposed to the idea that psychological illnesses are due only to biological or cognitive phenomena exclusively of the subject.
Differences between psychoanalysis, sexuality and genitality
Before starting to read, it is necessary to clarify that in psychoanalysis, sexuality and genitality are not the same.
Sexuality is a much broader concept, encompassing almost the entire life of human beings, as it refers to ways of relating to others, of loving, hating and feeling.
Genitality is more limited and refers only to genital sexuality.
The 5 most important theories of Freud
Throughout his prolific career as a writer, Freud reviewed his writings on numerous occasions, adding depth to his arguments or making amendments.
We leave here the 5 most important theories outlined by Freud so that the reader can know a little of the vast work of this great thinker:
1- The pleasure principle (and the afterlife)
"Children are completely selfish; they feel their needs intensely and struggle roughly to satisfy them. ".- Sigmund Freud.
The pleasure principle postulates that the psychic apparatus seeks, as the ultimate goal, to achieve pleasure and avoid displeasure, and thus to satisfy the biological and psychological needs. Pleasure is the force that guides the process of identification of the person.
It works only in the systemic unconscious, and is the principle that governs all its functioning. That is why unpleasant representations are repressed, because they transgress order.
The pleasure principle leads unconsciously to the reach of basic survival needs.
Why do we have symptoms?
Knowing that this principle exists, asking yourself this question becomes an obligation. Why would a person suffer from a symptom, suffering in his daily life if he is supposed to live under the pleasure principle?
The answer is in the previous paragraph: the pleasure principle is unconscious, while in consciousness the principle of reality operates.
The reality principle is the polar opposite of the pleasure principle, the person is aware of the real environment and knows that he has to adapt to it in order to live in society.
We learn as we mature to repress our instincts based on social rules in order to obtain more long-term pleasure and in a more diminished way but according to reality.
The subject has an irreconcilable representation and represses it, so he forgets it. But, since the "I" is governed by the reality principle, the representation returns as a return of the repressed, in the form of a symptom.
The subject no longer remembers what was repressed, only suffers a symptom that maintains a relationship (sometimes close, sometimes distant) with the repressed. The principle of pleasure has not been contradicted: the subject prefers to suffer a symptom rather than to remember the irreconcilable representation, which remains unconscious.
Is there anything beyond the pleasure principle?
Freud was devoted to reviewing his theory, so he came to conclude that there is a "source" in the human psyche that is beyond the Principle of pleasure, ie it does not obey its laws because it exists prior to that principle.
It is an attempt to link or recognize the existence (although later it can be repressed) of a representation. It is a step before the pleasure principle and without which it would not exist. Then: the representation is linked to the psychic apparatus-its existence is recognized-and then it is judged pleasant or unpleasant to take the corresponding action -Principle of pleasure-.
This amendment allowed Freud to account for the compulsion to repeat people, in which (either in the space of therapy or in daily life) humans tend to stumble always with the same stone, that is to say that we repeat again and again the same mistakes or very similar variations.
2- The drive
"The unexpressed emotions never die. They are buried alive and come out later in worse ways ".- Sigmund Freud.
This concept articulates the psychic with the somatic and is called by Freud a hinge concept, to explain sexuality.
There are internal stimuli in the human being that are constant and that, unlike hunger, can not be placated through an interaction with something external, as it would be to eat.
In turn, because they are internal, they can not escape from them either. Referring to the principle of constancy, Freud postulates that the cancellation of this organ stimulus gives a drive satisfaction.
The drive consists of four properties:
Effort / push: It is the motorizing factor. The sum of force or measure of constant work that brings the drive.
Goal / end: It is the satisfaction attainable by canceling the stimulus from the source.
Object: It is the instrument through which the drive reaches its goal. It can be part of one's body and is not determined in advance.
Source: It is the body itself, its holes, its surface, especially the edge areas between the inside and the outside. It is experienced as excitement.
The drive is not satisfied in the object, this is the instrument through which he manages to cancel the stimulus, which is his only goal and what gives him satisfaction.
Freud affirms at first that there are two drives that are in conflict: the sexual impulses and those of self-preservation. In the course of his childhood, the child finds different "typical" objects that satisfy his sexual drive and according to which he goes through different stages:
- Oral stage: The object of satisfaction is the mouth.
- Anal stage: The object of satisfaction is the anus.
- Phallic stage: The object of satisfaction is the penis, in children, and the clitoris, in girls.
- Latent stage: The child abandons his sexual explorations and engages in more intellectual activities.
- Genital stage: Coincides with the entry into puberty, where the pubes reexplore their sexuality based on intercourse and reproduction.
Once the compulsion of repetition and the Beyond the Pleasure Principle have been conceptualized, Freud changes the drive duality and groups the sexual and self-preservation drives as Life Pulses.
It opposes them to the Pulsion of Death, which is the human tendency to cancel all stimuli and find a state of "nirvana" where there are no more stimuli, that is, in death. These two impulses usually work together (mixed) but when they separate is when the symptoms manifest.
3- Repression
"Dreams can thus be declared: They are hidden realizations of repressed desires" .- Sigmund Feud.
This concept is central to psychoanalytic theory. People have subconscious thoughts that are key to the development and life of people.
Repression is a mechanism of psychic defense: when a representation (an event, a person, or an object) becomes intolerable for the subject, irreconcilable with the accumulation of representations that it lodges in its mind, the psychic apparatus represses it and returns unconscious that representation, reason why the subject "forgets" it (although in truth, he does not know that he remembers it).
In this way you can move on with your life "as if" you never would have taken knowledge of that event, person or object.
Later, in his text "The repression", Freud locates two types of repression that are part of every subject: Primary repression and secondary repression:
The primary repression
It is an unconscious operation that founds the psychic apparatus. Through this repression, the representation of the sexual drive is inscribed in the psyche, thanks to which the subject is able to desire and seek fulfillment of his desire.
This repression gives strength to the psychic apparatus to attract the repressed and prevent it from becoming conscious.
Secondary repression
Also called repression proper.
The psychic representative of the drive is repressed, that is, that which is intolerable for the psyche of the subject and of which he does not want to know anything. Secondary repression is what we described at the beginning of this section.
The return of the repressed
Freud always affirmed that there is no such thing as a 100% successful repression, for which the repressed always returns and usually does so through a neurotic symptom (an obsession, a hypochondria, for example) or a substitute formation as a joke, a dream or a slip.
4 - The unconscious
"The unconscious is the largest circle that includes within itself the smallest circle of the conscious; all conscious has its preliminary step in the unconscious, while the unconscious can stop with this step and still claim full value as a psychic activity. "- Sigmund Feud.
Intimately linked to repression, the unconscious is another central concept in psychoanalysis and where much of the psychoanalytic "action" takes place. It is necessary to clarify beforehand that everything repressed is unconscious, but not all the unconscious is repressed.
Freud, in his text "The unconscious" expands in depth to explain this concept more clearly, giving three definitions of the unconscious:
Descriptive
It is simply everything that is not conscious.
This property is not necessarily due to the fact that this representation has been repressed, it may happen that it is not a content that must be used at that moment (it is latent), for which reason it is "stored" in the unconscious. It is also called Preconscious.
Dynamic
It is that inaccessible to the conscience because of secondary repression, that is, they are those repressed contents.
These contents can only return to consciousness as returns of the repressed, that is, as symptoms or substitute formations, or through therapy, through the word.
Systemic (structural)
It is a structural place within the psyche.
Unlike the other two definitions, it does not refer to unconscious contents, but to the way in which the unconscious works as a system of thought.
Here there is no denial, doubt or certainty, as well as contradiction or temporality. This is because there is no word, but endowments.
As an example, let's think of a tree. In doing so, we did two things: think of the word "tree" and imagine a tree. Well, the descriptive and dynamic definitions refer to the word "tree" while the systemic to the representation of a tree.
This separation is what allows two contradictory representations or two different times to coexist in the systemic unconscious.
This is the case in dreams, where one person (for example, a friend) can represent others (the friend can also be another friend and a relative simultaneously) and be placed at different times (the childhood friend is still in the dream as a child at the same time that the dreamer is an adult).
5 - The Oedipus complex
"The sexual desires with respect to the mother that become more intense than the father, is perceived as an obstacle to him; this gives rise to the Oedipus complex. "- Sigmund Freud.
Undoubtedly one of the most important theoretical contributions of psychoanalysis and one of its most important theoretical pillars. The Oedipus complex (in the male) argues that the child wants to seduce his mother but this leads to a conflict with his father, who has forbidden him to take her as his own.
The complex begins in the Phallic Stage and is a response to maternal seduction, since the child has known his body (and its pleasure areas), has made it partially erogenous thanks to the maternal care he has received as being caressed, bathed or even cleaned after going to the bathroom.
Since the child can not carry out his task of seducing his mother, he is forced to accept his own phallic castration, carried forward by the paternal prohibition (the installation of the law), so the complex is buried and gives way to the Latency Stage until the arrival of puberty.
Upon reaching the Genital Stage, the child no longer seeks again his mother, but another woman, but his passage through the Oedipus Complex has left indelible marks in the way he will now relate to others and influence his choice in the women you will want to take as a couple.
Freud developed this theory based on the male sex, not explaining the development of this theory in women. It would later be Carl Jung who developed the theory of the Electra Complex, understood as the female version that explains the Oedipus Complex in women.
References
- Freud, S .: The interpretation of dreams, Amorrortu Editores (A.E.), Volume IV, Buenos Aires, 1976.
- Freud, S .: Three essays on sexual theory, A.E., VII, idem.
- Freud, S .: Note on the concept of the unconscious in psychoanalysis, A.E., XII, idem.
- Freud, S .: Remember, repeat, rework, idem.
- Freud, S .: Pulsions and pulsed destinies, A.E., XIV, idem.
- Freud, S .: Repression, idem.
- Freud, S .: The unconscious, idem.
- Freud, S .: Beyond the pleasure principle, A.E., XVIII, idem.
- Freud, S .: The burial of the Oedipus complex, A.E., XIX, idem.
- Freud, S .: The self and the id, idem.
- Freud, S .: The child's genital organization, idem.
- Freud. S .: Diagram of psychoanalysis, A.E., XXIII, idem.
- Haggbloom, Steven J .; Warnick, Jason E .; Jones, Vinessa K .; Yarbrough, Gary L .; Russell, Tenea M .; Borecky, Chris M .; McGahhey, Reagan; et al. (2002). "The 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century".