FREUDIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS

Freudian psychoanalysis

Freudian Psychoanalysis

Introduction

Freud followed in her father's footsteps and became a reputable and influential expert in her own right. Her major innovations were in the field of the ego and the mechanisms of defense. She also indicates resistance to treatment as a form of defense against instinct. She theorized that the affects associated with the instinctual impulses also are defended against in the ego, for example by the means of mastering them by putting them through a metamorphosis, which may manifest itself as emotional suppression or denial, among other things (Freud, 1966).

Freud also refers in her work to a notion that W. Reich (1945) called "Charakterpanzerung," or the "armor-plating of the character." This is the residual manifestation of rigorous past defenses that have been dissociated from their original conflicts. These manifestations, such as stiffness, or peculiarities of personality, such as a fixed smile or arrogant behavior, develop into permanent character traits. The ego has too many defenses to ever be properly discussed here, among them repression (S. Freud's brainchild), displacement, reversal, etc.

Discussion

Psychoanalysis is an extremely involved process that takes place over the course of a number of years. The analyst and the patient develop an intimate relationship, which includes "transference," which is a process in which the patient develops a sort of parent-child relationship with the analyst, and therefore transfers the patient's old emotions with his or her actual parents onto the analyst. This makes for an extremely touchy situation in which the analyst has a huge amount of influence, which is necessary but requires care and restraint.

Freud (1964) thought that all neuroses were a result of repressions, and so he sought to use his influence as an analyst to access and help the patient to access the relevant issues in the unconscious. Freud (1964) saw the unresolved Oedipal complex as the most universal, as well as most important, repression (in males). (Freud's theory was admittedly less developed for women, as noted by his statement "That [the eros and sexual development] of males is the more straightforward and the more understandable." (Freud,1953,207) Freud's theory holds that males, around the age of three or four, enter into sexual fantasies about their mothers, including fantasies about taking their fathers' places. The father is pictured as threatening the boy with castration as punishment for his early masturbation fantasies and showing off of his penis, which initially seems impossible to the boy, until the realization of the lack of a penis in females. This brings on the "castration complex," which entails long term sexual repression. The question of how to get a (male) patient to accept this about himself, however, was and is an entirely different problem.(Wolman,1971)

Lloyd Demause describes psychohistory as "the science of patterns of historical motivations" and asserts that it is "a science, not narrative art like history". Freud is known as the founder of the psychoanalytical school of thought, the ideas of which can be used with historical enquiry to form ...