All posts tagged the psyche

Freud and The Problem of God by Hans Küng (1979)

Hans Küng (1928 to 2021) was a Swiss Catholic priest, theologian, and author. These are notes on his 1979 book, ‘Freud and the Problem of God.’

1. The genesis of Freud’s atheism

For the German tradition, ‘theology has been dissolved in the nitric acid of the natural sciences’, so said the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. Medicine and physiology were at the centre of German materialism, a movement which aimed to show that the activity of the mind was entirely the result of physiological changes in the brain.

Freud’s father, Jacob Freud, was an orthodox Jew who never converted to Christianity (unlike Marx’s father). Freud was taught Jewish doctrine by his mother and a schoolteacher. In his autobiography, Freud says that early Bible classes had ‘an enduring effect on the direction of my interest.’

Jacob and his first wife had two sons; by his third wife, Amalia, he had eight offspring! Freud was the eldest. A childhood aversion to his distant, forbidding father and the young beauty of his mother led to Freud’s recognition of the Oedipus Complex in himself.

Freud’s early religious experiences:

  1. The Catholic nanny who took Freud to Mass and explained Heaven and Hell to him. Freud used to come home and parody the arm-waving of the priests to his family’s amusement (laying the basis of his later paper Obsessive Actions and Religious Rituals)
  2. Antisemitism: from schooldays onwards Freud suffered persecution by antisemitic Catholics. A founding moment in his life was when, age 12, his father admitted to him how he had acquiesced in his hat being knocked into the mud by racist hoodlums.

When Freud entered university in 1873 there had just been a stock market crash and many in politics and the press explicitly blamed ‘the Jews’.

Freud entered university (aged 17) to study medicine with the aim of seeking answers to the riddles of life rather than merely curing people.

Student Freud fell under the influence of Ernst Brucke, head of the Institute of Physiology, a follower of Hermann von Helmholtz. Helmholtz was a genius who, aged 26, helped secure recognition for the First Law of Thermodynamics (the sum total of energy remains constant in an isolated system). Together with the law of Entropy (energy cannot be turned back into mass without some loss – the Second Law of Thermodynamics) these form the most fundamental of all laws of nature.

Helmholtz later went on to do pioneering work in eye-surgery, optics and physiology. A school grew around him committed to the positivist creed, confident that science would one day be able to explain all the activity in the universe, including all activities of the human mind, on the basis of purely physical and chemical laws.

Brucke was a founder-member of this school in Berlin. When Brucke came to Vienna to head up the Institute of Physiology, he brought this powerful materialistic ideology with him. Freud studied under Brucke for 6 years, years he later recalled as the happiest of his life.

Physicalist physiology got rid of the idealist philosophy of Nature and eliminated the vitalism of the Aristotelian and Scholastic tradition i.e. the belief that God created organisms with forms and purposes, higher goals and objectives of their own. No, said physicalist physiology: all life can be explained in terms of the purely causal, deterministic forces described by biochemistry.

Freud applied these metaphors to clinical psychological observation: he saw the psyche as a machine reacting to the increase and release of tension (the unpleasure-pleasure principle) as a result of the demands of internal instincts on the one hand and external stimuli on the other (the basic argument of An Outline of Psychoanalysis).

For Küng, Freud made the mistake of turning science – a method of investigation – into a worldview – an Idol, in the Baconian sense.

Freud set up his private practice in nervous diseases in 1886, aged 30, on Easter Sunday. His wife, Martha Bernays, came from an eminent orthodox Jewish family in Hamburg. Freud suppressed her religious practices ruthlessly (she later said nothing upset her so much in her life as Freud forbidding her to light the holy candles on the first Friday of their marriage).

They had three sons (Ernst, named after Brucke; Martin, named after Jean-Martin Charcot, the French pioneer of nervous diseases; and Oliver, named after Oliver Cromwell) and two daughters, Sophie and Anna (born in 1895).

In Küng’s opinion, Freud made two great breakthroughs:

a) A theory of the unconscious

Freud’s achievement was to differentiate between the Primary Process of the Unconscious, the vast majority of mental life – and the preconscious and conscious mind, very much the Secondary Process; and to devise a method for examining the workings of the Unconscious.

Freud’s theory that unacceptable wishes are repressed only to return as symptoms. These are expressed in free association so the patient comes to know himself to his depths. All this occurs through transference i.e. replaying the repressed feelings in the privileged arena of ‘the therapeutic alliance’.

Through transference the patient is led to a lasting restructuring of his mental processes, the abolition of morbid symptoms, and restored to the ability to love and work. Interpretation is also carried out on dreams and parapraxes.

b) A theory of libido

Freud’s theory of libido hugely widened the concept of sexuality, extending it far beyond the specifics of genital sexuality in the present, and extending it back in time to cover all of human existence from the earliest part of life i.e. the invention of the concept of childhood sexuality.

Doing this enabled explanations of almost all sexual activity, perversions, love, affection etc to be brought under the rubric of one theory, rather than simply being rejected as extrinsic to human nature, ‘degenerate’ or ‘immoral’, as previously.

The progression of Freud’s medical-scientific investigations can be summarised: cerebral physiology > psychopathology > depth psychology > theory of everything.

2. Freud on the origin and nature of religion

Freud’s critique of religion is twofold:

  1. he tries to explain away the history of religion
  2. he tries to undermine the psychological basis of religion

1. The history

There are two broad theological movements:

  • Degenerationist: pagan religions are distorted versions of the original pristine version of the True Religion clearly understood by Adam and Eve; then came the Fall, the Tower of Babel and it’s been downhill ever since.
  • Meliorist: religion is evolving into higher and purer spiritual forms from its early primitive, half-savage forms.

The 18th century Enlightenment philosophers were degenerationists. For them denominational religion was a distortion of the original clear light of Reason which God had given to Mankind, which had been distorted by popular custom and the inventions of priests.

The nineteenth century saw Enlightenment Nature-theism transmuted into a Science of Religion. Simultaneously, colonial discoveries and the improvement of philology and textual criticism, provided a number of tools for paring away the ‘nonsense’ which had accumulated around the pure creed. The high point of this tradition is the work of Ludwig Feuerbach, who sought to remove the superstitions and legends accumulated over time in order to get back to the original pure creed of Christ.

Darwin turned the theory of degeneration – religion starting from the divine heights – on its head. Evolution implied a struggle upwards of intellect and reason from the savage swamp. This prompted a revolution in the ‘Science of Religion’; instead of hypothesising about what the early and purest creed must have been, scholars now examined earliest religions to ‘get at the heart’ of belief.

It is as a result of this new model that specialists devised a developmental model of religions, speculating that all religions start with primitive animism – then proceed to pagan polytheism – and then evolve to an intellectual and spiritual climax in monotheism (with a possible pre-animistic stage of belief in a world-soul, or mana).

An ethnologist called W. Robertson Smith thought the key parameter was not spirits and gods but the development of ancient rites and rituals: totemism, always accompanied by systems of taboos (‘Thou shalt not kill the totem animal’, ‘Thou shalt not marry thy sister’ (exogamy) and so on). (Taboo is Polynesian for untouchable). Thus civilisations pass through a series of stages: Magic, Religion, Science. These kinds of theories were backed up by the tremendous encyclopedic systematisation of Sir James Frazer (whose masterwork, ‘The Golden Bough’, Freud was such a big fan of – see his own annotated copy included in the exhibition at the Freud Museum).

This was the background Freud drew on when writing Totem and Taboo (1912) – at the suggestion of Carl Jung (still in the Movement at the point).

In Totem and Taboo Freud tries to assimilate the underlying fear of incest expressed in so many taboos (i.e. primitive morality) with the developmental model of religions, and with the ubiquity of totemism based round a holy animal who is eaten in an annual festival. Freud tries to draw a parallel between the religious practice of ‘primitive’ man and the behaviour of modern, urban obsessional neurotics, and between the savage’s reverence for the totem animal, representing the Father, with the explicit rise of the Father to pre-eminence in monotheistic religions.

In explaining the rise of totem animals Freud points to the suggestive way that young children initially like animals but then develop fears of them as they unconsciously project their Oedipal feelings (feelings of rage and of reciprocal anger) onto them.

The classic example in Freud’s writings is the case study of Little Hans, who was petrified of horses. This irrational phobia analyses out into fear they will bite him; and soon enough it is discovered that the horses in fact stand for the father who Han is afraid will chop his penis off.

To revere a totem all the year round and then kill it and eat it in a festive meal is, for Freud, a beautiful demonstration of Oedipal ambivalence, love/hate, revere/kill.

For Freud the Oedipus Complex is at the centre of all religions. The difference with Christianity is that it is a Son-religion. We identify with the Son crucified to appease the guilt we all feel at the communal assassination of the primal Father. To identify with Christ is to be relieved of the guilt of the primal parricide which Freud posits as the basis of human society in Totem and Taboo. It is to become free, rather as the neurotic, after analysis, is freed from his irrational obsessions and becomes free and autonomous to work and love.

2. The essence

Religious belief is an illusion, the fulfilment of the oldest deepest wishes of Mankind, childish wishes for:

  • protection from an uncaring world
  • universal justice (recognition of our own deserts, punishment of those who have wronged us)
  • eternal life

Freud’s diachronic history of religion – comparing early religion with childhood stages of thought – is complemented by his synchronic analysis – comparing contemporary, modern religious belief and practice with the behaviour and motivation of neurotics.

Freud doesn’t really say this fulfilment of deep wishes makes religion wrong – only that all aspects of it can be explained away in other, more scientific terms. Now, he says, as we acquire more knowledge about its origins and nature, religion is gradually dying (just as their as neurosis disappears from a gradually enlightened patient).

By contrast with religion, which fosters and encourages illusions about reality, Freud sees Science as providing an education for reality, in order to abolish childish reliance on religion and rebuild morality and social institutions on a clearer, unillusioned understanding of human nature.

We must grow up, master our own resources for real life, concentrate on this earthly life, prepare to build the New Jerusalem here on earth.

3. Critiques of Freud

In his 1927 pamphlet, The Future of An Illusion, Freud said that attacking religion may do psychoanalysis harm and the book proceeded to do just that by rousing the wrath of churchmen and moralists against him and his movement.

So Freud tried to emphasise that psychoanalysis is a neutral scientific tool, like infinitesimal calculus, a specialised tool for examining the human psyche. It could equally well be used by the defenders of religion.

Eugene Bleuler

Eugene Bleuler was one of the first to take issue with Freud. Bleuler, head of the Bergholzli mental institute in Zurich, Jung’s boss and man who gave us the terms ‘depth psychology’, ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘ambivalence’ was an early convert to psychoanalysis, but he could not go the whole way with Freud.

He granted the discovery of the unconscious but asked, Is it right to consider it only negatively, as a reservoir of repressed wishes, of the dark side? Is it right to regard the psyche as a simple machine, a mechanism within which psychic forces trigger each other and energy is circulated as in a sophisticated steam engine? Is it right to see the human animal motivated only by sexuality (even in the special widened sense Freud gave the word)? Is it right to see the mind as entirely determined by events in the distant past and not as a creative, proactive organism capable of creating new meanings and goals?

Alfred Adler

In 1911 Adler published his Critique of the Freudian Sexual Theory of Mental Life and was expelled from the Psychoanalytic Movement as a result.

A convinced socialist and, later, friend of Trostsky, Adler believed in looking at the individual as a whole in relation to the social world and all his relations with it. The aim of therapy is to build up the individual’s integrity and wholeness. Neuroses start in inferiority (the inferiority complex) and maladjusted attempts to overcome it (“the Masculine Protest”). The patient must abandon these ‘egocentric’ positions and get involved with the group. Happiness is community-based (you can clearly see Adler’s socialist bias).

(Although he powerfully denied Adler’s views once he’d been booted out of the movement, Freud later accepted some of his ideas about aggression. Some critics say Freud’s 1922 revision of instinct-theory dividing instinct into two drives, Eros and the death drive, are indebted to Adler.)

Jung

In 1913 Jung left the Movement and refined his own theories into what became Analytic Psychology. Jung redefined the libido as undifferentiated psychic energy (effectively denying its sexual nature) and claimed that it produces four processes – thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. Each of these is governed by a dialectic, thus:

  • thinking – the rational evaluation of right and wrong
  • feeling – you divide feelings into pleasurable and unpleasurable
  • sensation – you divide into external and internal stimuli
  • intuition – according as it is effective or ineffective

The individual is governed by two modes of approach to these four processes:

  • extravert – influenced by objective factors
  • introvert – influenced by external factors

The two modes apply to each of the four processes thus giving you eight character types. Whenever the one mode of each process dominates, the opposite mode rules the unconscious, and you have to get to grips with this dark side of the soul, ‘the shadow’.

The psyche is also defined by whether it is dominated by anima (female) or animus (male). Whichever dominates, you have to accept the opposite into your life. And you have to reconcile the ‘persona’, the face we make to meet the outside world, with the demands of the ego.

The aim of Jungian therapy is to bring all these facets of the personality into alignment into one integrated personality. (This brief account leaves out all Jung’s theories of the individual and the collective unconscious, archetypes, myths and symbols etc.)

For Adler, religion is the expression of the will-to-overcome humanity’s perceived inferiority in the face of implacable reality: religion works towards an ideal future perfection. For Adler, God is the perfection of a thoroughly human ideal of overcoming. Adler sees a place for religion in the perfect human society since it reflects a thoroughly human wish – but he doesn’t believe in it.

Jung blamed Freud’s thoroughgoing rejection of religion on his being a child of the late-Victorian rationalist materialist worldview (as described above). For Jung, religion is true insofar as it is believed. Jung wanted to remain a Christian but thought denominational Christianity was chaotic and confused and stood in need of further clarifying about the human soul: and this is what his depth psychology could provide.

Neither Jung nor Adler answer the big question set by Freud: Is religion nothing more than a fulfilment of mankind’s oldest deepest wishes?

Küng’s critique

Freud’s developmental history of religion (animism >pantheism > monotheism > science) is nowhere now taken seriously. All these belief systems exist in various places in the world but have nowhere been found to follow this pattern. Sometimes they’ve gone ‘backwards’. In many places aspects of the supposed different levels of development exist happily alongside each other. Nowhere is there proof of development from one stage to the next.

Nowadays Freud’s optimistic scientism has been replaced by a belief that science may have reached its limits in explaining the origins of the human mind. We even consider that primitive peoples know better than us how to live in sympathy with their environment and that – far from leading us to a utopia cleansed of irrationalism – there may be something inherently destructive in scientific enquiry.

In 1912, the same year as Totem and Taboo was published, Emile Durkheim, the founder of modern sociology, refuted Freud’s idea of primitive religions as slavishly superstitious, but said that they contained a hard core of reality, in laying down codes of practice which had their origins in relationships in primitive society, the clan.

Durkheim was followed by most modern anthropologists and sociologists in looking no further for meaning than the internal rules of each individual tribe and culture. (Compare the anthropological structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss.)

Thus neither the degenerative or the evolutionary theory of religion can be proved or disproved. Modern ‘primitive’ peoples aren’t photographs of the early days of humanity, as Freud and his sources thought. They themselves are the result of immense histories and traditions, albeit unwritten.

(One modern theory to explain their lack of development is to assign a crucial role to writing; whoever learns to write can leave histories; histories can be compared with modern practice and so enable the beginnings of a rational critique of social practices.)

Today there is less historical speculation, less moral-drawing, more studying of patterns of culture in situ using the functionalist approach pioneered by Bronislaw Malinowski.

At the other end of the scale modern research shows that religion has always existed. 100,000 years ago Neanderthal Man made grave furnishings; 150,000 years ago Heidelberg Man apparently offered the first fruits to his gods. The question has become not to explain away the existence of religion but to understand that for primitive man everything was religious. The more modern challenge is to explain away the rise of the secular, the scientific worldview.

Even Freud’s facts are largely wrong: totemism is not found among the beginnings of religion; among hundreds of totemic tribes discovered and documented only four knew of a rite which even vaguely resembled killing and eating the father. For anthropologist Mircea Eliade, the triumph of Freud’s views for a while was due to fashion: he established a fashionable doctrine which explains nothing in history or the rest of the world but does help explain the western intellectual’s own sense of dissatisfaction with established religion but obscure sense of guilt at the prospect of overthrowing it.

Freud claimed that psychoanalysis was a neutral tool for the cure of souls, practicable by lay and pious alike.

All Freud’s actual arguments for atheism are old, taken from Feuerbach et al but given new impetus by being underpinned by this new method of exploring the psyche. For example, all ‘projection theories’ of God as fictional answer to suffering humanity’s wishes and fantasies stem back to Feuerbach.

But Feuerbach’s, Marx’s and Freud’s atheisms are hypotheses which have not been proved. Against the reality of experience they set theory; and in the end, for all the subtlety of their critique of the social, economic or psychological determinants of the formation of religious belief in individuals and societies, no conclusion can be drawn from their theories about the existence or non-existence of God.

All human believing, hoping, loving contain elements of projection. But its object need not therefore be merely a projection. (page 77)

From the psychological point of view, faith is always going to look like the projection of early father-figures but this does not mean that God does not exist. That’s to say, the mere existence of a wish for God does not throw doubt on the actual existence of God. Perhaps it’s true:

Perhaps this being of our longings and dreams does actually exist. (page 79)

Thus Freud’s atheism (which he professed long before the discovery of psychoanalysis) turns out to ‘a pure speculation, an unproved postulate, a dogmatic claim’, just as dogmatic as anything laid down by his hated Church.

Freud’s scientism

Nowadays it is Freud’s belief in the ability of science to tell us the truth about the world, and to tell us how to behave in the light of this truth, which seems dogmatic and irrational.

Oskar Pfister, prophetically enough, criticised Freud’s position as itself an illusion before the Second World War; and since the experience of National Socialism, communist totalitarianism and the forces unleashed by the Western development of atomic bombs, the promises of atheistic science have themselves come to look deeply compromised.

The nineteenth century positivistic tradition of science delivering a utopian future now seem ludicrous. (To be fair, Freud towards the end of his life became increasingly pessimistic about this). The ideology of total planning based on rational analyses of human nature and human needs now lies in ruins: we are resigned to living with our imperfections.

For many people it is godless technocratic progress which has become the monster from which we must free ourselves. Cannot religion in fact help here, by providing a morality, a synthesis with science to create a humanistic morality?

Or will society create a new space of total disillusion with both modes of thought, neither militantly atheist nor evangelistically believing – simply drifting from belief to belief in a vast supermarket of the soul?

Is psychoanalysis a Jewish science?

Yes, says Kung. Freud was a stern Jewish moralist in a long tradition of stern Jewish moralists. He taught that all decent human life, all civilisation, rests on the suppression of sexuality, instinct and childhood gratification.

Everywhere in Freud you sense the return of the repressed legalism of the Jewish tradition which he ostentatiously rejected. There is little talk of joy or pleasure in Freud (this is what the French brought to it in the ‘jouissance’ of Barthes et al, bringing actual sex into all Freud’s talk about sex).

No, Freud’s psychology is deeply indebted to the repressed heritage of ancient Mosaic legalism. And this helps explain his lifelong obsession with Moses and his embarrassing attempts to explain away, to master, to over-write the mystery of Moses and Monotheism in his last work.

4. Critique of the critique

From Freud onwards every sphere of human knowledge has had to take account of the vast new terrain of the unconscious which Freud uncovered, and its impact on our lives. What Feuerbach wanted to achieve by a ‘cleansed’ philosophy, what Marx wanted to achieve by a science of social relations, Freud wanted to achieve through depth-psychology: an emancipation, a revaluation of the humanity of Man.

Kung concedes Freud’s criticisms of the failings of denominational religion and agrees that psychoanalysis can help in counselling etc. Psychoanalysis can liberate us from neurotic guilt feelings and help the neurotic subject return to autonomy. But it can’t relieve us of the fact of sin.

It can eliminate illness but it cannot answer ultimate questions about meaning and meaninglessness, life and death. Its aim is to bring things into consciousness, not to forgive; it is healing not salvation.

Küng’s advice to therapists is to be more religious.

Küng’s advice to theologians is to take more account of depth psychology.

Freud thought all neuroses were the result of repressed sexuality. On the contrary, Jung thought all neuroses were the result of what used to be called religion; the lack in people’s lives of a system to give their lives meaning or purpose. Jung criticises psychoanalysis for thinking the ego can stand up to the ‘dark side’ of the soul without the help of some revealed superhuman agency. In Jungian analysis this actually becomes the therapist and the therapeutic alliance.

Erich Fromm in Psychoanalysis and Religion sees two kinds of therapist:

  • the adjustment advisers
  • the doctors of the soul, committed to the optimum development of the self

For Fromm psychoanalysis is adaptable to humanitarian religion. ‘Wonder, rapture, becoming one with the world,’ all these feelings are generated in analysis, in the proper acknowledgement of the power of the id and the assent to life with all its imperfections. Fromm is an assimilationist. There should be no enmity between psychoanalysis and religion.

One of Freud’s problems was that he concentrated on an Old Testament punitive, superego-led religion; he completely failed to understand the quality of rational assent to the New Dispensation. For example, Freud tends to see Jesus only in terms of a revision of Judaism – Jesus as the sacrifice of the Son to the Father which ends the thousand years of Jewish guilt. Despite railing against it all his life, Freud showed surprisingly little understanding Christianity and its new creed of Love, of salvation through Love. (This was Pfister’s complaint also).

In pre-War Vienna Victorian sexual repression led to sex, instincts and the id being at the centre of investigations of psychic life. But, Küng argues, since the middle of the twentieth century there has been a steady growth in indulgence of all these instincts. Nowadays (when he was writing, in the 1970s) Küng thought that our biggest problems were caused by the opposite of repression, but by the overindulgence of the instincts and all the addictions and moral anarchy they lead to.

Since repression is no longer the problem it was in Freud’s day (1880s to 1910s) modern psychology has become more ego-orientated: how to give people a meaning and purpose, existential questions. The problem nowadays is one of spiritual emptiness. Technology may be daily triumphing over every aspect of our existence but it cannot finally give that existence a meaning. Küng (like Pfister before him) argues for a rational religion to cure the ill, prevent regression, channel grief and fear, help control the unbridled pleasure principle and contribute to healthy individuation.

Very late in the day, in 1933, when Hitler took power, Freud and Einstein exchanged letters on how to prevent another war. Freud seems in this late exchange to have suddenly grasped the reason behind, and the need for, a socially approved creed of Love.

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An Outline of Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud (1940)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other concepts have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his assumption of Western superiority over ‘primitive’ peoples, and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions over into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

Background

Freud was allowed to leave Austria by the newly installed Nazi authorities in early June 1938. The unfinished manuscript of ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’ bears the date July 1938, so scholars think that he began to write it either while waiting for permission to leave Austria or soon after his arrival in England. By early September he had written 63 sheets of notepaper but broke off to undergo a serious operation for the spreading cancer of his jaw and he never resumed work on it.

The manuscript was discovered among his papers after his death in September 1939. The editors of the Pelican Freud Library point out that although it might be unfinished, it is not incomplete. The final chapter is shorter than the others but appears to complete the prospectus laid out in the preface.

Almost all Freud’s previous works (for example, the Introductory and New Introductory Lectures) were aimed at the general public. The Outline, the editors explain, is not. It is more like a refresher course for established students of psychoanalysis with the result that the style is clipped and many matters alluded to only briefly, on the assumption that the reader is already familiar with sometimes quite detailed aspects of the theory.

The work is in three parts. Part one describes the structure of the mind, its division into id, ego and superego, and the pressure of the external world. It lays out the nature of the two great categories of primal drive – the sexual urge to procreate (Eros) and the organism’s wish to cease stimuli and excitation (the death drive or Thanatos).

In part two, Freud discusses the technique of psychoanalysis, what its aims are, how it works.

In part three, Freud (briefly) situates psychoanalysis within the broader realms of philosophy and psychology, before recapping the theory.

Preface

The teachings of psychoanalysis are based on an incalculable number of observations and experiences and only someone who has repeated these observations on himself and on others is in a position to arrive at a judgement of his own upon it.

Part 1. The mind and its workings

Chapter 1. The psychical apparatus

The oldest part of the psyche is the id. It contains everything inherited at birth, which means the instincts. The id develops an outer layer to mediate with the external world, the ego. The ego has the task of self-preservation. As regards external events it does this:

  • by storing up stimuli in the memory
  • by avoiding excessively strong stimuli (through flight)
  • dealing with moderate stimuli (through adaptation)
  • learning to bring about change in the external world to its own advantage (activity)

As regards the internal world the ego performs its task of self-preservation by gaining mastery of the instincts, deciding which ones will gain satisfaction and when, or vetoing them altogether.

It is guided in these decisions by tensions caused by (internal and external) stimuli: raised tension is experienced as unpleasure, lowered tension is experienced as pleasure. The ego strives after pleasure and to avoid displeasure. A foreseeable increase in unpleasure leads to anxiety. From time to time the ego retires from its job of mediation into sleep, which appears to be necessary to rest the body and brain.

The long period of human childhood leaves behind a precipitate of parental strictures, the superego. The ego has to satisfy the demands of 1) the superego, 2) the id and 3) external reality. The superego is formed not only from the strictures of the specific parents but from the family, national and racial demands, as well as the demands of the immediate social milieu; and then, along the way, incorporates material from teachers and other authority figures.

The id is the forces of nature, of heredity; the superego, the broad forces of culture and environment; the ego is formed as a result of the accidental experiences of the individual.

Chapter 2. The theory of the instincts

The general theory of instincts is not well understood. Insofar as instincts replace each other and displace energy onto each other there may be thousands of instincts. To be simple, psychoanalysis discriminates two basic instincts, Eros and the destructive instinct, elsewhere referred to as Thanatos. (Contrasting instincts of self-preservation and preservation of the species, between ego-love and object-love, fall within the realm of Eros).

Eros sets out to bind things together and preserve them; Thanatos seeks to tear things apart and destroy them. Thanatos tends ultimately to an inorganic state, hence it is also known as the Death Drive.

The two instincts can combine or oppose. Thus eating is an act of killing something for our satisfaction; sex incorporates aggression with reproduction. A surplus of the destructive instinct turns the lover into Jack the Ripper; a deficit, into a peeping Tom.

The two instincts exist alongside each other in the childish ego-id. The death instinct is easily detected when directed outwards in aggression; when the superego is constructed, the death instinct is attached to it and can operate self-destructively against the organism itself. Holding back aggressiveness can be just as detrimental as restraining sexual desire.

The libido is detectable in the primary infant state of pure narcissism when the ego takes itself as object. As the child develops it projects libido onto external objects. Throughout life the ego remains the reservoir of the libido from which libido is sent out to cathect (or charge) objects and to which it returns. Only when the subject is completely in love is the majority of the libido cathected onto the object which takes the place of the ego.

The nature of the libido has been deduced from its behaviour in the form of the sex instinct. This aspect of the libido develops out of the contributions of a succession of component instincts which are variously attached to different erotogenic zones.

Chapter 3. The development of the sexual function

The traditional view has it that human sexual life consists in bringing your genitals into contact with the genitals of someone of the opposite sex, with accompanying phenomena such as like kissing and touching. This activity is supposed to start at puberty. How does the traditional view then deal with the fact that:

a) some people are attracted to people of their own sex with similar genitals?
b) some people seek sexual satisfaction but ignore the genitals or other people altogether (called ‘perverts’)?
c) some children take an early interest in their own genitals (called ‘degenerate’)?

In contrast to the evident failure of the traditional theory, psychoanalysis has discovered that:

a) sexual life doesn’t begin at puberty but soon after birth
b) it is necessary to distinguish between sexuality and genitality, the former vastly outcompassing the latter
c) sexual pleasure can be obtained from many zones of the body and that these often only imperfectly overlap with the organs of reproduction

Childhood sexuality develops to a peak in the fifth year and thereafter falls into a lull during which much is forgotten: the latency period.

The onset of sexuality in man is therefore diphasic, first occurring in infancy, falling into latency, and re-efflorescing in puberty. The latency period seems to play a vital role in the process of acculturation unique to man, the passing on of traditional wisdom and knowledge to the next generation.

The first stage of childish development is the oral phase of suckling; the continuation of sucking after the baby is fed is evidence of the separation of pleasure-seeking and physiological need. This – the separation of strict physical need from the enjoyment of physical pleasure – is the justification for describing the baby as ‘sexual’.

Elements of sadism are present in the baby biting the nipple. This sadism is expanded in the next stage, the anal-sadistic phase, where biting and defecation become sources of pleasure.

Finally comes the phallic period when the child detaches sexual pleasure from bodily functions altogether and associates it with playing with its penis or clitoris. The little boy playing with his penis obscurely associates this pleasure with his mother; he wants to be the sole object of its mother’s attention and to do away with the father who keeps taking her away. This is the Oedipus Complex. The little girl, as and when she comes to see or hear about a boy’s genitalia, perceives the absence of a penis as a loss and conceives penis envy. The childish turning away from sexuality which this produces in women often lasts a lifetime.

These developmental phases do not develop in a simple pattern but overlap, often becoming fixated at particular levels. With the onset of puberty these earlier patterns return to influence sexual behaviour. Some early pleasures become focussed on traditional genital activity; some remain in residue as types of foreplay; some become the object of perverted sexual practice; some are repressed, or employed by the ego in forming character traits, and the energy of still others are sublimated into higher and socially acceptable cultural activity.

These discoveries mean that:

a) the phenomenology of the subject has to be examined from a dynamic or economic point of view
b) the aetiology of later mental illness is to be found in the patient’s early life

Chapter 4. Psychical qualities

What is the psyche? Behaviourism says there isn’t one, that we observe and quantify each other like machines.

Traditional psychology says there is a psyche and that it is synonymous with consciousness. Consciousness is hard to define but we all know what we mean by it. A psychology which confines itself to consciousness studies the difference between perceptions, feelings, thought-processes and wishes. But it is clear to self-reflection that these processes are not as continual, as transparent or sequential as earlier philosophers, for example John Locke, thought.

What are we to make of the gaps, the blanks, the dysjunctions in attempts to describe our mental life which trouble the ‘continuous consciousness’ model of the old view?

Psychoanalysis shifts the whole playing field by saying that the overwhelming bulk of psychic life is unconscious. It cannot be known (as the workings of chemistry or physics in the brain cannot be experienced) but its activity can be deduced and general laws governing its behaviour worked out by observation.

Some things out of consciousness become conscious easily; they originate in the pre-conscious, a kind of ante-chamber to consciousness and can be readily accessed. But the lion’s share of mental activity is unconscious and therefore can only ever be inferred or deduced from other evidence

Preconscious material makes its way into our conscious mind with little effort, but unconscious material can only be reclaimed for consciousness by a great effort. One is aware of resistance to its extraction. Sometimes unconscious material forces its way into consciousness and dominates it – as in psychotic illness. Sometimes preconscious material can be subject to repression and become inaccessible – as when we lose our memory.

Animals may well function with just an ego-unconscious. In men this happy state is complicated by the existence of speech which links perceptions to mnemic images and residues of perception, or memory. We don’t operate in a permanent present; we accumulate a huge weight of experiences.

In human beings, since the invention of language, internal events, thanks to being verbalised, can acquire a kind of reality which rivals outer perceptions. To test which is coming from where the ego develops methods for reality-testing. Errors which easily arise due to the new situation – where we mistake internal psychic experiences for ‘reality’ – are called hallucinations or dreams.

The inside of the ego is largely preconscious, with a thin layer of consciousness monitoring outside perceptions and an inner stream of consciousness. The id is entirely unconscious. What the nature of the physical processes are which make the biochemical changes which the mind is capable of perceiving remain a mystery.

Chapter 5. Dream interpretation as an illustration

A model mind is one in which the frontiers of the ego are safeguarded from the encroachments of the id by effective repression, and in which the superego and the ego work together as one. To find out how these forces work together we should see them malfunctioning and an easy way to begin is with dreams.

Everyone dreams. In dreams our experiences are hallucinatory, surreal, bizarre, nonsensical – everything we believe the unconscious to be. Dream interpretation distinguishes between the manifest content, what we remember of the dream upon waking, and the latent content, the real message of the dreams.

In a dram unconscious material has forced its way past the slumbering defences of repression into the preconscious; here it is scrambled by the Censor in such a way as not to disturb the sleep which the human organism requires. In other words, dreams enable refreshing sleep to occur because, although we are more vulnerable to raids from the unconscious, the censor steps in to distort the latent content of the impulse.

Dreams can originate from either suppressed wishes deep in the unconscious or from preconscious traces of the day’s activities to which deeper unconscious urges attach themselves.

Evidence that dreams are indeed the irruption of the repressed are:

a) dreams contain a high degree of material forgotten or inaccessible to waking consciousness
b) dreams partake of linguistic symbols derived from earlier stages in the subject’s development
c) dreams often repeat scenes from childhood which are repressed in waking life
d) dreams incorporate memories not accessible to the individual, possibly memories from the origins of the race

But Freud has called dream interpretation ‘the royal road to the unconscious’ because dreams make accessible to us the bizarre laws to which unconscious life is subject. These include processes of distortion called condensation and displacement.

The deduction from dreams is that the unconscious is desirous of expending its energy regardless of object. The dream is the guardian of sleep because it fulfils this rude instinct, this pressing unconscious wish, in the shape of a fantasy.

Anxiety dreams, which seem to disprove the thesis that dreams are fulfilments of wishes, happen when the instinct overpowers the Censor and is threatening to storm the ego in the full ugliness of its naked lust. The only option open to the ego is to wake up, switch defences up to full, and stuff the repressed material back into oblivion – but at the cost of an all too palpable effort (sweats, adrenalin, anxiety etc).

Part 2. The practical task

Chapter 6. The technique of psychoanalysis

A dream, then, is a psychosis which remains under our control. By contrast other mental illnesses are less controllable. They may come about when the urgings of the id unbalance the ego, or when the superego makes impossible demands, or when both gang up on the poor ego.

In analysis the analyst comes to the ego’s aid with a promise to reinforce his mechanism of defence in return for the subject giving us the complete honesty and candour we need to examine the unconscious. [N.B. it is this bolstering of defences which was pursued in the work of ego psychology developed by Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud].

Psychotics who have completely abandoned contact with reality are beyond the terms of this pact and cannot be treated by psychoanalysis. But there is another class of psychiatric patient who still has enough contact with reality to undertake the pact required to carry out therapy – ‘the vast number of people suffering severely from neuroses.’

The therapeutic pact If the neurotic gives us his full story in full candour we will help rebuild his ego. Sounds like the role of the master-confessor from the olden days of religion? Yes, except for the all-important distinction that a psychoanalyst can learn from the patient what he does not know himself, which Christian confession can never do.

In order to do this the psychoanalyst must extract everything whatever that comes to the patient’s mind, no matter how trivial. It is from this material that the analyst deduces the unconscious urges which are dominating the patient.

But the analyst will meet resistance. And after resistance, transference. The patient will begin to project onto the analyst all the feelings evoked by their memories of childhood, for example, the ambivalent love-hate feelings which every child projects onto its first authority figure, the Father.

Transference has the advantage that the analyst can then act with the authority of the father and the patient may make great efforts to please Daddy. Plus, the analyst has the advantage of seeing a key period from the patient’s life acted out in front of them rather than inconclusively reported by a confused patient.

Unfortunately, transference has a negative side as the repressed anger and defiance of the patient, also, can be projected onto the analyst. Worse, the repressed erotic wish for the parent of the opposite sex can emerge in the shape of the patient falling in love with the analyst.

If the patient thinks these are real experiences, it’s tricky; the analyst has to disabuse them and make them see that these are just repetitions of childhood feelings. Once transference is acknowledged, the patient can begin the process of rebuilding, of broadening the area of control of, the ego.

The second part of the cure is the overcoming of resistances. The ego, threatened from within and without, expends a lot of energy clinging to certain anti-cathexes, resistances to repressed material. It is the job of analysis to embolden the ego, to give it the power to regain mastery over its whole domain and not to feel threatened and embattled (anxious, hysterical, neurotic or obsessive).

As resistances to the expression of forbidden material are overcome, welcome mental energy is liberated for the ego to redeploy across its kingdom. When the analysis has progressed this far, two factors now become evident. The first is Guilt, which is the shape taken by resistance in the superego, which expends energy punishing the ego. The superego insists that:

The patient must not become well but must remain ill because they deserve no better.

The analyst has to make the unreasonableness of this self-punishment clear to the patient. The second factor is a complete takeover of the ego by the will to destruction, the death wish, which often leads to suicide.

Chapter 7. An example of psychoanalytic work

One fundamental discovery of psychoanalysis has been that neurotics have the same pathology as normal people, they have the same innate disposition as normal people, the same experiences, the same problems to solve. They are simply people who find this framework of requirements too much, resulting in misery, anxiety, symptoms.

On closer investigation, it appears that almost all these neuroses have their origin in childhood. Hardly surprising when you consider the primal power of the id and the vulnerability of the still-developing ego, feeble, immature and incapable of resistance.

The ego copes with excess stimuli from the external world with flight; with excess stimuli from the internal world with repression, attempts at mental flight, denial and rejection. It later turns out that these have been paid for at the cost of full development, and that the libidinal energy devoted to holding these instincts back, permanently cripples and disables the ego; stunts its proper development.

Why has evolution permitted such an apparently costly mechanism to afflict the young animal? Because it’s a small price to pay compared to the epic task which the ego has to achieve in its first five years:

In the space of a few years the little primitive creature must turn into a civilized human being; he must pass through an immensely long stretch of human cultural development in an almost uncannily abbreviated form. This is made possible by hereditary disposition; but it can never be achieved without the additional help of upbringing, of parental influence which, as a precursor to the superego, restricts the ego’s activities by prohibitions and punishments and encourages the setting-up of repressions.

Thus, the influence of civilisation is among the determinants of neurosis. It is easy for a barbarian to be happy – he gives way to all his basest desires, represses nothing and so has no neuroses. For a civilised man it is a long strenuous journey, with many pitfalls.

The central role of sexuality in this developmental journey has been proved by psychoanalysis time after time:

The symptoms of neuroses are either a substitutive satisfaction of some sexual urge or measures to prevent such a satisfaction; usually some kind of compromise between the two.

Why should this be so surprising? The one essential role of every organism is to reproduce; preparation for reproduction is crucial; and yet in the rise of civilisation no instinct is more thoroughly repressed than sexuality. Given such strong opposing forces why be surprised that so many people fall victim in one way or another to illness caused by the repression of their innermost desires?

Central to the child’s experience is the Oedipus Complex. Freud approaches it via a developmental history of the child.

The child’s first erotic experience is sucking at the breast, the primary model of gratification (‘Love and hunger meet at a woman’s breast’, The Interpretation of Dreams, page 295). Initially breast and baby are one polymorphously perverse substance.

Soon the breast is differentiated and becomes cathected (i.e. charged) with conflicting feelings of love and hate (tiny aggression is shown by biting the nipple) in the oral phase. Soon the breast forms itself into the whole of the mother who pampers and plays with the child, prompting a galaxy of feelings, gratifications and frustrations, pleasures and rages.

Thus the mother is the first seducer, the prototype of all later love-relations.

At three and four, in the phallic stage, the baby boy is aware of the pleasure given by playing with his penis and shows it off proudly to his mother. He associates this pleasure with her and wants to possess her, according to the prompting of obscure feelings. If the child shares the Mother’s bed and then Daddy comes home and he is returned to his cot, the feelings of little Oedipus can be imagined. Rage and hatred and lust and desire seethe in the toddler mind. Eventually the mother or father tell little Johnny to stop playing with himself or being so stubborn or bad tempered and all these injunctions are accompanied by the explicit or implicit threat to deprive the boy of the source of his greatest pride and pleasure, his penis.

This is the castration complex and is the most terrifying experience of a small boy’s life. It echoes down the ages in the Greek myths where successive gods castrate their father, and in the age-old practice of circumcision by which pubescent boys submit to authority, in both Judaism and Islam.

In response to this terrifying fear the child suppresses its masturbatory activities and sublimates them into fantasies. It fosters resentment, defiance and fear of the father and practices a total renunciation of the mother or slavish identification with her, in order to be spared by the Father.

It is precisely because this ‘nuclear complex’ paves the way for so many strategies of defence that psychoanalysis calls it the founding moment in the development of human character. All these seething feelings are repressed in childhood, go underground during the latent phase. But then they return in new guises at puberty that explosive period of sexual and egoistic efflorescence, with the arrival of full-blown sexual awareness. The revival of repressed material with the onset of puberty plays a large role in determining character.

On this model girls are born inferior. Their lack of a penis leads to penis envy. Their attempts at masturbation are failures, hence a general turning away from sexual life in girls and women.

They may try to introject the masculinity they lack and become lesbians. They may turn to hatred of the mother who brought them into the world without a penis and so turn their love toward the father. In this narrative the girl’s attempt to be like their father and to incorporate his penis-authority is finally sublimated into the wish to take the mother’s place, to bear Daddy a baby. Once formulated, this wish may, like the boy’s forbidden fantasies, be repressed into the unconscious but, with the onset of puberty, the wish is revived but directed outwards, so that the young woman goes off to attach herself to the first suitable male who reminds her of Daddy.

Part 3. The theoretical yield

Chapter 8. The psychical apparatus and the external world

Ultimate reality is itself unknowable. All we can know is reality as mediated by our sense perceptions and ‘known’ as it is perceived by our organ of knowledge, the mind.

Thus, in describing the workings of the mind most psychology, and most ordinary people, have to work with concepts which are largely metaphorical, concepts like height, depth, width or more advanced concepts like time, like cause and effect, which have no physical, tangible ‘reality’. We have imposed them on ‘reality’ because they provide us with a working model, a way of getting on with the real world.

Psychoanalysis is no different. It invokes metaphorical concepts like the unconscious, the repressed, the libido and so on. We can never know exactly what these things ‘are’. Possibly, we will one day be able to correlate them to specific physical, biochemical changes in the brain. In the meantime we use them because they provide a workable explanation of the many other phenomena we observe in the mind.

To recapitulate: the id is the realm of unconscious drives; it is ruled by two broad instincts 1) the desire to fulfil every instinctual wish 2) the equal and opposite drive to reduce tension. Ultimately, the second wish is pushing for the cessation of all tension and stimuli (‘Nirvana’). The two broad streams of instincts are assigned to two broad categories: the desire for pleasure, of which sexual pleasure is a subset, fall under the heading of Eros; and the wishes for all stimuli to cease fall under the death instinct.

Mediating between the id and external reality is the ego. The ego attempts to control the instincts of the id such that they can be fulfilled at the most propitious moments in the external world. Sometimes desires which threaten the ego’s function have to be entirely repressed and the ego has to expend energy doing this. The id is driven exclusively by desire for pleasure, the Pleasure Principle, while the ego is driven by a desire for safety, the Reality Principle.

Most of the ego is preconscious. Occasional strands of association, images and verbal residues, drift across the part of the psyche which is capable of self-reflection, often puzzling or even bewildering us.

The ego develops and separates itself off from the primal id at a price. Its autonomy is always contingent and subject to disruptive incursions from ‘below’, from the unconscious, and to a constant stream of punitive demands from ‘above’, from the superego. And the ego is constantly under attack from the terrifying forces of external reality.

No wonder the ego often cracks under the strain and has a ‘breakdown’. It is at this stage that psychoanalysis sets out to trace the fissures, the cracks of the breakdown, back to their earliest origins in childhood. And, once the repressed material has been dragged into the light of consciousness, the patient can acknowledge the long buried childhood experiences which are at the root of the problem and begin rebuilding new, better ego defences with which to face the world.

Chapter 9. The external world

Guilt is the punitive action of the superego upon the ego. The superego is the concentrate of injunctions laid upon us by our first objects, the parents. Thus the psyche has three parts:

  1. the deep inner world – the id
  2. a special part of the outside world introjected or brought inside – the superego
  3. a bit that mediates between outer and inner – the ego

The superego is the heir to the Oedipus Complex. Its intensity has nothing to do with the actual strictness of the real-life parents, but is a function of the intensity of the Oedipal feelings which the child had to repress.

It is a dim perception of this sense of a planting-from-outside which has led theologians to account for conscience as being implanted in us by a higher cause, God.

The superego is initially based on the residue of the Oedipus Complex, but attracts to itself all the teachings of the parents, of teachers and authority figures, general social morality and the accumulated wisdom of the past…

[Here the manuscript breaks off in mid-sentence. The editors of the Pelican edition end the text with ellipses…Quite poignant.]

Comment

This is Freud’s most concentrated theoretical exposition of psychoanalysis, rich in new insights and cross-connections and very persuasive, especially where he gives a bit of wider context, mentioning (albeit briefly) psychoanalysis’s position vis-a-vis philosophy and other psychological theories i.e. it goes deeper than both, far, far deeper.

The passage describing the actual process of psychotherapy is the clearest, most persuasive summary of how the analytic therapy works which I have read.

Possibly it is so effective because he largely eschews the florid metaphors he is so prone to in the rest of his work (analysis as archaeology etc) and also because he doesn’t waste time going off on one of his rants against religion or into a long digression on a literary text (Gradiva, Hamlet etc).

Instead, he bases the theory on the basis of a materialist, biological interpretation of the human organism and human mind,  stopping to consider what the evolutionary reason or advantage for this or that mental strategy might be – and this gives it more scientific weight and authority than almost anything else I’ve read by him.

If you were going to read one work by Freud, maybe this is the one; it’s barely 70 pages long in the Pelican Freud Library paperback.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’ was first translated into English by James Strachey in 1964 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. My quotes are from the version included in volume 15 of the Pelican Freud Library, published in the 1986.

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Metapsychology: The Theory Of Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his occasional slurs against gays, lesbian or bisexuals and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

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Metapsychology is the attempt to link what is observable about human psychological behaviour with the biological basis of the human organism; to link psychology and biology.

Volume 11 of the old Pelican Freud Library is titled ‘On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis’ and contains the following works, most but not all of which I summarise in this blog post:

  1. Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning (1911)
  2. A note on the unconscious in psychoanalysis (1912)
  3. On narcissism: an introduction (1914)
  4. Instincts and their vicissitudes (1915)
  5. Repression (1915)
  6. The unconscious (1915)
  7. A metapsychological supplement to the theory of dreams (1917)
  8. Mourning and melancholia (1917)
  9. Beyond the pleasure principle (1920)
  10. The ego and the id (1923)
  11. The economic problem of masochism (1924)
  12. A note upon the mystic writing pad (1924)
  13. Negation (1925)
  14. A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis (1936)
  15. Splitting of the ego in the process of defence (1940)

Freud’s metapsychology: an overview

Metapsychology was an obscure area in Freud’s day and this volume is a collection of Freud’s very tentative and provisional attempts to link mind and body. Nowadays we know vastly more about the complex nature of the brain, about the nervous system and the action of hormones, about the body’s genetic heritage and so forth. But eighty years after Freud’s death, nobody is much closer to providing a single agreed theory on what links body and mind.

To summarise: Freud began by positing the dominance of instincts, not ‘reason’, over human life, and singling out the sex instinct as the primary instinct. The choice of the sex instinct as primary is logical because, on a Darwinian view, it is evident that we humans share the drive, found across the entire organic world, to reproduce:

The individual actually carries on a twofold existence: one to serve his own purposes and the other as a link in a chain, which he serves against his will, or at least involuntarily. The individual himself regards sexuality as one of his own ends; whereas from another point of view he is a mere appendage to his germ-plasm, at whose disposal he puts his energies, prompted by the incentive of a bonus of pleasure [sex]. He is the mortal vehicle of an immortal substance… The separation of ego instincts from the sexual instincts reflects this dual character of the individual.

This is the libido theory in a nutshell. The choice of the sex instinct as the central plank of Freud’s theory is also fortuitous/handy/useful because Freud claims that sex, unlike, say, hunger or aggression, is uniquely malleable: it is capable of repression and sublimation, of being transformed into the impressive variety of mental constructs which make up our complex mental life.

Moving on, Freud claims that this libido, this sex instinct, at an early stage of the human’s development, divides, such that some of it becomes focused on the infant ego. As this ego grows and develops it uses libido like mental fuel. Hence the division in all humans between the core sex instinct – which continues blindly to follow the dictates of reproduction – and the growing ego instincts – which develop into individual consciousness and judgement and choice.

So libido can be divided into ego-instincts and object-instincts: inward-directed versus outward-directed mental energies.

Now Freud introduces another binary idea: the Pleasure-Unpleasure Principle. All the twelve-week-old baby wants is the gratification of its instinctual needs. It operates according to a calculus: it likes what brings pleasure and reacts against what brings unpleasure. Simple.

  • Unpleasure is defined as an uncomfortable increase in stimuli – from the environment, from inside the body’s nervous system, or from inside the psyche itself.
  • Pleasure is the successful resolution or dissipation of these stimuli.

But as it grows and develops, the child learns to use its hands, its body, above all its voice, to achieve its ends. And slowly it learns that its desired ends may be more effectively met later, if it postpones its immediate gratification now. Thus, from the heart of the Pleasure(-Unpleasure) Principle is born the Reality Principle, the ability to delay gratification in the name of survival or just better gratification.

The growth of the Reality Principle goes hand in hand with the growth of the ego. Thus Freud has developed a complete explanation of how conscious mind grows from unconsciousness; how lucid judging reason develops organically from a hotbed of passions and desires.

Thinking, Freud says, is, at bottom, an experimental form of action forced upon us by the failure of our initial wants to be fulfilled in an indifferent world. Thinking is not God given; anything but. It is evolved upwards from base animal instincts through a long precarious developmental process which can go off the rails at any moment.

This bottom-up theory certainly accounts for the rum assortment of characters, types, beliefs and behaviour which we find in the real world – exactly the kind of gimcrack plethora you would expect from a neo-Darwinian account of the constant creation of genetic diversity within a roughly fixed species.

In Freudian terms the triumph of Thinking over Instinctual Action is directly equated with the triumph of the Reality Principle over the Pleasure Principle. There is nothing special about thinking. It is just the instinctive behaviour of a certain species pushed to interesting and complicated new levels.

Once you’ve grasped this story it’s easy to see why the so-called rational mind is so inclined to never develop beyond, or regularly backslide into, all kinds of ‘irrational beliefs’ – and that its fall will be downwards, backwards, into more primitive mental positions and processes. It is these positions which have to be painfully abandoned during the course of what Freud takes to be every human being’s development towards the acme of human reason, the pinnacle of which is Freud’s own disenchanted and rational stoicism.

Post-war revision

However, during the First World War all Freud’s patients went off to fight and, with time on his hands, he sat down to attempt to integrate all the scattered insights about dreams, jokes, repression, resistance, the unconscious etc which he had developed over the previous 15 years, into a fully worked-out metapsychology. At which point he discovered that recent develops in practical psychotherapy disrupted the old scheme. Slowly he developed a new one. Soon after the war he published a series of books in which he outlined its two key modifications of the pre-war theory:

Two become three

In Freud’s new revised version of psychoanalytical theory, the psyche now has three parts, not just the unconscious-conscious dyad of yore. Now we’ve got:

  1. the ego (formerly the conscious mind)
  2. the id (formerly the unconscious)
  3. the superego (a new agency)

The superego

This new concept, the superego is the introjection (internalisation) of the child’s fantasy ideal of its parents – beings it perceives as having total control, issuing orders with total moral authority, but accompanying this with total unconditional love.

Part of this superego is the more or less conscious conscience which nags at us when we behave badly – but much more of it is underground, unconscious, punishing us for stepping out of line with its impossibly high ideals, raging against us for failing to live up to its ideals. Hence the clinical phenomena of guilt, anxiety, of depression and deep self-loathing. These are the results of part of the mind – the strong inflexible judging superego – directing its energy against the all-too-fallible conscious mind or ego.

But hang on – how can these instincts, supposedly all designed to gratify the organism, to satisfy the appetites of life, end up driving it to commit suicide?

Only if you posit a new theory of instincts, if you place the previously separated-out ego instincts and object instincts into one box and call these the instincts of life or Eros. And over against it you put a newcomer, a bold new idea – this is that every organism, every cell, contains within itself a desire not to exist, a deep desire to return to the blissful stasis of the inorganic: a death wish which Freud grandly called Thanatos.

This new Eros-Thanatos division is inestimably bigger and more grand than the tinkering with the various branches of libido which characterised pre-war psychoanalytical theory.

And so it was armed with this new, expanded, far more ambitious post-war theory of instincts, and the new model of the psyche which allowed for immeasurably greater subtlety and insight, that Freud went on to write his key later philosophical works, Civilisation and Its Discontents, The Future of an Illusion and so on.

After this overview of the development of Freud’s metapsychology, let’s turn to the individual papers gathered in this volume.

1. Formulations of the two principles of mental functioning (1911)

This is a brilliant brief outline of the early psychoanalytical theory, explaining the derivation of ‘thinking’ from pure, instinctual wish-fulfilment. From its simple origins as a bundle of undifferentiated appetites Freud shows how instincts grow and develop and, meeting resistance from the outside world, split into ego instincts (supporting the rational mind) and object instincts (targeting various wanted objects in the outside world: a good steak, a spouse), and how these develop similarly but not simultaneously, are prone to become ensnared and snagged at different points of development.

Just a few pages later Freud is explaining how this theoretical model can account for art, religion, the success of education etc etc. Dazzling.

For Freud ‘thinking’ is essentially an experimental form of acting which has gathered a momentum of its own and developed into the complex interacting of over-thinking humans which we call human culture.

2. A note on the unconscious in psychoanalysis (1912)

This is a collection of practical reasons for believing in the existence of the unconscious, for example Bernheim’s experiments with hypnotism. If you hypnotise someone and tell them to strip naked in half an hour and then instruct them to forget the instruction, wake them up and sure enough they’ve forgotten you even hypnotised and yet, nonetheless, half an hour they strip naked and they can’t explain why – well, where was the instruction stored in the meantime? Certainly not in the conscious mind. Why does the inaccessible command have such power? Unless our minds contain a huge reservoir of material which is inaccessible to the conscious mind. Let’s call it the unconscious and accept that it exerts much more influence over our lives and decisions than any of us imagine.

The other main evidence for the existence of the unconscious which Freud produces is dreams. Freud asserts that dreams have meaning and that psychoanalysis can interpret them to reveal the secrets of the unconscious mind.

The reader can tell we’re still in Freud’s First Theory if there’s a lot of simple stuff about dreams. Freud never abandoned his idea that psychoanalysis had revealed the secret of the interpretation of dreams, but these ‘insights’ pale in comparison with the much more powerful later model which claims to have uncovered the secrets of guilt, unhappiness, despair, suicide and a host of other human feelings. It is a far more comprehensive worldview.

3. On narcissism (1914)

This is one of the key texts in Freud’s theory. In it he draws a distinction between object-libido and ego-libido, makes criticisms of the heretics Jung and Adler who had just left the Movement (compare with his History of Psychoanalysis) and introduces the idea of an ego-ideal. This is an agency which is capable of watching and monitoring the ego, not in order to breach its defences, as the unconscious does, but in order to judge it according to higher, suprapersonal criteria, This is the seed of the post-war notion of the superego.

Freud says the young human animal possesses sexual instincts and ego instincts, the latter growing out of the former:

  • ego instincts work to preserve the rational calculating self and its individual requirements
  • sex instincts work to preserve the race i.e. to achieve sexual satisfaction at any cost

It’s easy to see how the two will frequently, on a daily basis, come into conflict.

The activity whereby the libido (which ought to be an outward-facing sex instinct) becomes focused on our own ego, is named narcissism (first identified as a mental disorder by the British essayist and physician Havelock Ellis in 1898.

Every healthy person undergoes a narcissistic phase when libido is diverted to the growing ego. We can talk about a perfectly natural and healthy amount of narcissism because it provides the energising of the ego which is necessary for it to function:

Narcissism in this sense would not be a perversion, but the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation, a measure of which may justifiably be attributed to every living creature.

But in the course of ‘correct’ development, the libido should be redirected beyond the ego, to real objects in the real world, objects which the growing child learns increasingly to identify and understand. Object-instincts, as their name implies, are developing attachments to objects in the outside world, food, love object etc.

One consequence of this development is that, if both object and ego libido are drawn from the same source, the more one is used up, the less there is of the other:

We see also, broadly speaking, an antithesis between ego-libido and object-libido. The more the one is deployed the more the other becomes depleted. The highest phase of development of which object-libido is capable is seen in the state of ‘being in love’, when the subject seems to give up his own personality in favour of an object-cathexis.

(The opposite situation, incidentally, is that of the paranoiac who, in his self-obsession, concentrates all object-libido back on himself and thus comes to fear for ‘the end of the world’ because all his real ties to the external world, his object-cathexes, have been withdrawn from it. A neat model.)

Freud claims the psychological concept of narcissism is justified by its presence in a number of clinical areas:

  • in compulsive masturbators and narcissists in the simple sexual sense
  • in paranoiacs and schizophrenics (who have withdrawn all object libido from the outside world)
  • in hypochondriacs who project concerns about the contingencies and dangers of the outside world back onto themselves
  • and in the genuinely ill (see below)

But maybe most strikingly of all, the interdependence of object- and ego-libido helps to explain the extreme overvaluation of the object which takes place in ‘romantic love’. In romantic love the ego becomes emptied of libido as libido rushes out in a cathexis of the beloved object.

Overvaluation of the beloved is a form of excessive object-cathexis.

Glorification of the love object and depreciation of the self occur:

  • in love: the beloved becomes the sum of all perfections, see Dante etc
  • in religious worship: God is perfect (despite having made a distinctly imperfect world)
  • in parents’ love for babies, where parents transfer onto their babies/children their own repressed narcissism i.e. baby is perfect, nothing is too good for baby etc

In all of these instances there is a sense that we have revived our repressed infantile narcissism, our exorbitant love of our own ego, which characterised all of our early developments – and projected it onto another.

The object takes the place of the ego’s ego-ideal: anything and everything must be done for it and no questions asked by the internal policeman.

We outsiders can only admire and feel an unconscious tug when we see people pouring their hearts out in worship of God or falling head-over-heels in love, or all-consumed by love of their young baby. How wonderful, we say; how wonderful to feel like that – because it reminds us distantly of our own phase of narcissism, of the great primitive pleasure to be obtained by total abandonment of adult worries in the name of a cause, escape from the exigencies of the Reality Principle, and from the harrying of the punitive conscience.

Recap

The ego instinct is at first just that, energy fuelling the developing ego. But in its development, the libido comes to invest energy outwards, onto objects. And the very first stage it takes is to love itself as an object. The ego takes itself as its first object of love. All later loves contain something of this primary narcissism.

In later life the primitive narcissism – which is overcome in natural development as the ego struggles with the process of maturation in a challenging environment – returns.

For example, think of when you’re ill. You instantly withdraw most of your mature cathexes, your libidinal investments in the outside world, and refocus them on yourself. You pamper yourself. You buy yourself comfort food.

Religion shares similar patterns. In a heartless world you want to be loved. The next best thing to being loved is to love someone else totally, so totally and obsessively that you blot out the sad imperfections of your own life and character. All libido becomes invested in the idealised figure of the Beloved. Whether it’s the beatified Beatrice or Brad Pitt, you’d do anything for this idol set up in your soul.

The overinvestment of the Object and debasement of the Subject in romantic love accounts for why, when the affair ends, the subject is left feeling empty, void of purpose and energy, and has to go through a proper period of mourning which is required to reroute their libido towards a full range of external interests again.

Men and women

Freud then goes on to claim that men and women differ in their development. Men form a first love of the ‘attachment’ type i.e. their first love is their mother. All successive lovers have to conform to the maternal model.

But with women it’s different. The different configuration of women’s bodies, the growth of the reproductive organs, focuses women’s gaze inwards. Women tend to be more self-contained than men, and it is the survival of this far higher amount of primitive narcissism in women which so fascinates men and represents itself as a challenge to penetrate the ‘mystery’ of a really gorgeous woman.

There follows Freud’s explanation of Frauendiest i.e. 1,000 years of Western attitudes towards women.

In their development, then, a human being is presented with two basic sexual choices:

ONESELF – narcissism – women

THE PERSON WHO NURTURES YOU – narcissism object-love – men

Between these two extremes a person’s sex life will fall. For Freud the fully-developed adult is a male with the correct genital orientation, capable of a high degree of object-love i.e. who adores his mother and goes out into the world to find someone just like her.

In extremis this tends towards the total object-cathexis (i.e. over-valuation) of romantic love and the abasement of the subjects ego before it. In contrast, women, ‘perverts’ and homosexuals have a far higher complement of narcissism in their psychic make-up. They rest content with taking themselves as libidinal objects.

Psychoanalysis has discovered, especially clearly in people whose libidinal development has suffered some disturbance, such as perverts and homosexuals, that in their later choice of love-objects they have taken as a model, not their own mother but themselves. They are plainly seeking themselves as a love-object, and are exhibiting a type of object-choice which must be termed narcissistic.

Thus women will tend to like men who make much of them, bring them flowers, chocolates, meals, opera etc. Many women, Freud claims, are remarkably self-centred and self-contained and this provokes the outward-bound object-driven man to fascination, reminding him of his own long-since-overcome narcissism and provoking him to conquer and penetrate the woman’s mystery/aloofness.

This is also an explanation for why lonely women like cats. It is a reversion to an earlier stage of narcissism projected onto a passive object. Notably narcissistic and self-contained themselves, cats reawaken this primal narcissism in women. Cats’ sublime self-centredness calls forth all the loving and pampering which women wish for themselves.

The same happens with babies, which cats are in fact a preparatory substitute for. It’s simple: having a baby reawakens the baby in us. It legitimises a revival of infantile behaviour in us. And a materialist Darwinian worldview would predict that the narcissistic impulse is stronger in women because it is the woman’s biological role to nurture the baby.

If we look at the attitude of affectionate parents towards their children, we have to recognise that it is a revival and reproduction of their own narcissism, which they have long since abandoned. The trustworthy pointer here is overvaluation of the object which we have already recognised as a narcissistic stigma in the case of object choice…

Thus parents are under a compulsion to ascribe every perfection to the child – which sober observation would find no occasion to do – and to conceal or overlook all his shortcomings (incidentally the denial of sexuality in children which it has been psychoanalysis’s achievement to bring into the scientific arena, is another manifestation of this)…

Moreover, they are inclined to suspend in the child’s favour the operation of all the cultural acquisitions which their own narcissism has been forced to respect. The child shall have a better time than its parents; he shall not be subject to the necessities which we regard as paramount in life when it comes to ourselves. Illness, death, renunciation of enjoyment, restrictions of his will, shall not touch him; the laws of Nature and society will be abrogated in his favour; he shall once more be the core and centre of creation – His Majesty The Baby!

The child shall fulfil those wishful dreams of the parents which they have never carried out – the boy shall become a great man and a hero in his father’s place, and the girl shall marry a prince as compensation for her mother. At the most touchy point in the narcissistic system, the immortality of the ego, which is so hard-pressed by reality, security is achieved by taking refuge in the child.

Parental love which is so moving and at bottom so childish, is nothing but the parents’ narcissism born again, which, transformed into object-love, unmistakeably reveals its former nature.

This is exactly what you would expect of an animal produced over hundreds of years of evolution which has developed an advanced ability to think and feel. Evolution never wastes a successful formula. By the same token it prefers to face new challenges with the old equipment at hand. Evolution patches and extemporises. How can it do otherwise? It has no plan, no intention, except blind adaptability. As Stephen Jay Gould puts it:

If God had designed a beautiful machine to reflect his wisdom and power, surely he would not have used a collection of parts generally fashioned for other purposes… Ideal design is a lousy argument for an omniscient Creator. Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution – paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.

How neat, then, that the earliest psychic formations which helped get the infant ego off to a start, and which atrophy as the child adapts to the demands of an uncaring world, should then be recycled, revived or redirected in the name of pampering and protecting their offspring – the new addition to the geneline – which ensures the only form of immortality we have, the immortality of the molecule of life, DNA.

To sum up, a person may love:

1. according to the narcissistic type:

  • what he himself is (himself)
  • what he was, his past (his vanished youth)
  • what he himself would like to be (projected onto idols and heroes)
  • someone who was once part of himself (in the case of women, the baby who was once part of their body)

2. according to the attachment type:

  • the woman who feeds him
  • the man who protects him
  • the succession of substitutes who take their place, whether in the real world or in fantasy (i.e. everyone from a strong protector, in Fascist mentality, to the infinitely strong protector of a supposed Deity)

Freud makes one last crucial point in this essay. Initially, the childish ego is the recipient of unconditional love from its own ego instincts. As the child grows and starts getting hassled about pooing in a pot, not playing with himself etc it becomes clear that the ego is not the little prince we took it for.

As the object-instincts become attached to the mother who nurtures and the father who disciplines, the ego-instincts begin to create an ideal self, a version of the ego which lives up to all these demands, as the real one so lamentably fails to do. This is the origin of the ego-ideal.

The ego-ideal:

  • takes its energy from the ego instincts
  • is formed and shaped in the likeness of parental instruction
  • becomes the object of redirected narcissistic admiration
  • begins to censor and judge the ego in its own right, in a way the wild and simply instinctual unconscious obviously can’t do

And thus the ego-ideal becomes the source of self-judging, of guilt at failure to live up to the ideal.

Now we can restate psychoanalytic explanations of common psychological states using a neat diagram:

  1. Anxiety is formed by the threat of the Return of the Repressed, from below.
  2. Guilt is the superego’s punishment of the ego’s failure to rise to the parental and social standards, from above.

Freud writes:

Repression we have said proceeds from the ego; we might say with greater accuracy that it proceeds from the self-respect of the ego. The same impressions, experiences, impulses and desires that one man indulges or works over consciously will be rejected with the utmost indignation by another, or even stifled before they enter consciousness. We say that the one man has set up an ideal in himself by which he measures his actual ego, while the other has formed no such ideal.

This ideal ego is now the target of the self-love which was enjoyed in childhood by the actual ego. The subject’s narcissism makes its appearance displaced on to this new ideal ego, which, like the infantile ego, finds itself possessed of every perfection of value. As always where the libido is concerned man has here again shown himself incapable of giving up a satisfaction he had once enjoyed. He is not willing to forgo the narcissistic perfection of his childhood; and when, as he grows up, he is disturbed by the admonitions of others and by the awakening of his own critical judgement, so that he can no longer retain that perfection, he seeks to recover it in the new form of an ego ideal. What he projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he has his own ideal.

So what is the relationship between this high ego ideal and the process of sublimation?

Idealisation is to do with the overvaluing of the object. Sublimation is what happens to the instinct.

The formation of an ego ideal and sublimation are quite different. The formation of an ego ideal heightens the demands of the ego and is the most powerful factor favouring repression [i.e. of idea that doesn’t come up to scratch]. Sublimation is a way out, a way by which those instinctual demands can be met without repression.

In other words, embarrassing wishes and impulses which would otherwise be repressed with the help of the powerful ego ideal, can also be rerouted into socially acceptable behaviour, and this is the psychoanalytical process called sublimation.

In this way the unacceptable psychopath reinvents himself as a famous general. Thus the socially (and personally) unacceptable voyeuristic impulse to see naked women is sublimated into the socially (and personally) acceptable career of being a painter.

The ego-ideal is the source of that running commentary on ourselves, that observation of the ego, which we call self-consciousness.

When it’s going OK, it feels like a voice in our heads debating, arguing, judging. When it goes wrong it’s often linked with ‘hearing voices’ telling you what to do, which can be found in schizophrenics and people whose minds have gone wrong.

In primitive societies, in the old days, and in Catholic countries, these voices are heralded as coming from God, angels (such as inspired Mohammed or Joan of Arc):

It would not surprise us if a special psychic agency were to exist which sees that narcissistic satisfaction from the ego-ideal is ensured and which, to this end, constantly watches over the actual ego and measures it by that ideal.

Recognition of this agency enables us to understand the so-called ‘delusions of being noticed’, of ‘being watched’, which are such striking symptoms of paranoid diseases. Patients of this sort complain that their thoughts are known and that their actions are watched and supervised; they are aware of voices which characteristically speak to them in the third person (‘Now she’s thinking that again’, ‘Now he’s off’).

The complaint is justified. A power of this kind, watching, discovering and criticizing all our intentions, does really exist. Indeed it exists in every one of us in normal life. And in these very voices the ego ideal reveals its origins: for what prompted the subject to form his ego ideal, on whose behalf his conscience acts as a watchman, arose from the critical influence of his parents (conveyed to him by the medium of the voice), to whom were added, as time went on, those who trained and taught him, and the innumerable and indefinable host of all the other people in his environment – his cultural milieu–- and public opinion…

The institution of conscience is at bottom an embodiment, first of parental criticism, and subsequently of that of society.

Papers on metapsychology (1915)

During the war Freud sat down to figure out a metapsychology to back up the practice and theory of psychoanalytical psychology. Half-way through it he abandoned the exercise, realising that his own views were in fact changing and realigning. The initial papers from this attempt survive:

4. Instincts and their vicissisitudes (1915)

For Freud an instinct is:

a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, the psychic representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind…. the psychical representative of organic forces…. An instinct can never become the object of consciousness – only the idea that represents the instinct can.

An organism can evade an external stimulus but it cannot evade stimuli from within (instincts) which become attached to particular ideas and images in the psyche. It is with the interplay of these images that psychoanalysis (classically, in the interpretation of dream symbolism) has to deal with, and to deduce from the images present to the waking and sleeping mind, the real state of the instincts, the continual drives, which lie behind them.

Freud posits two fundamental polarities:

  • the Pleasure-Unpleasure Principle: all organisms seek to avoid unpleasant excitation
  • the Nirvana Principle: all organisms seek a state of rest

In respect of the Nirvana Principle Freud says some profound things about the Mind:

The nervous system is the apparatus which has the function of getting rid of the stimuli which reach it, or of reducing them to the lowest possible level; or which, if it were feasible, would maintain itself in an altogether unstimulated condition…

Our mental apparatus is first and foremost a device designed for mastering excitations which would otherwise be felt as distressing or would have pathogenic effects. Working them over in the mind helps remarkably towards an internal draining away of excitations which are incapable of direct discharge outwards, or for which at the moment such a discharge is undesirable.

The human mind is a continuation by other means of the organism’s challenge of coping with the unending stream of inner and outer stimuli.

As to the instincts which operate by these two principles they also fall into two categories:

  1. sex instincts
  2. ego instincts

These instincts roughly correspond to:

  1. the Pleasure Principle (PP)
  2. the Reality Principle, with which the PP is in constant conflict

Instincts which come into conflict are subject to four vicissitudes:

  1. reversal into its opposite
  2. turning back on the subject’s own self
  3. repression
  4. sublimation

Instincts may become inhibited in their aim, such as in the case of ‘affection’, a sort of libido which becomes muffled. ‘Aim-inhibited libido’ is Freud’s explanation of friendship and affection.

Instincts may become fixated on particular objects early in their development and thenceforth lack flexibility and mobility, opening the door to the possibility of obsession.

Instincts may work through identification, a primitive mode of assimilating the (good or bad) features of some object.

Identification is based on the oral stage of development, the first fundamental attitude of the infant to reality when he or she seeks to control things by taking them in the mouth.

The parallel with this infantile oral identification is the cannibalistic phase of the development of primitive peoples. Ingesting a god or god-substitute involves taking on his powers.

In Totem and Taboo Freud attributes a primeval act of cannibalism as being the origin of the Oedipus Complex, of Religion and of Morality and notoriously goes on to claim the persistence of primitive oral identification at the heart of the Christian eucharist.

How many instincts are there? You could have as many as you like but Freud focuses on two:

At the root of all neurotic afflictions was found to be a conflict between the claims of sexuality and those of the ego… Biology teaches that sexuality is not to be put on a par with other functions of the individual; for its purposes go beyond the individual and have as their content the production of new individuals – that is, the preservation of the species. It shows further that two views, seemingly equally well-founded, may be taken of the relation between the ego and sexuality.

On the one view, the individual is the principal thing, sexuality is one of its activities, and sexual satisfaction one of its needs; while on the other view, the individual is a temporary and transient appendage to the quasi-immortal germplasm which is entrusted to him by the process of generation.”

7. A metapsychological supplement to the theory of dreams

What the metapsychological writings demonstrate is the gaps in Freud’s system which you normally miss when reading the rest of him, for example, the absence of a decent theory of instincts, among a host of other questions:

What is an instinct? how many are there? how do they work? how is it different from a reaction? What is the exact meaning of the unconscious? What is consciousness? How does perception work? How are the senses linked to the mind? How do we notice? react? to external stimuli? What is language? How are words linked to images in the mind? What is ‘meaning’? What relation does language bear to reality?

Freud’s vacillations in these areas merely highlight how his brilliant psychological insights break down when you try and elaborate them into a self-consistent system.

His metapsychology is not a theoretical underpinning which other psychologists could use. It is a theoretical justification spun out like medieval theology from radical and useful insights and discoveries made elsewhere.

The most striking thing about his plan for a series of metapsychological papers is the lack of a paper on consciousness and perception. Freud couldn’t enter into this realm of tests and experiments on memory and perception and calculation and decision-making without turning into a cognitive psychologist, and he wanted to remain outside that domain, free to speculate.

8. Mourning and melancholia (1917)

Mourning is the systematic decathecting of object-libido from an object which is no more: not always a person, it could be a nationalistic dream or wanting Oldham to win the Cup.

Melancholia (depression) is rage or hatred against some love-object or ideal which has failed. and then this rage projected back upon the ego.

The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment…

Reality-testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object. This demand arouses understandable opposition – it is a matter of general observation that people never willingly abandon a libidinal position…

The melancholic displays something else in addition to what is lacking in mourning – an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale.

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the patient themselves. The patient represents their ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable; they reproach themselves, vilify themselves and expect to be cast out and punished.

This delusion of (mainly moral) inferiority is completed by sleeplessness and refusal to take nourishment and – what is psychologically very remarkable – by the overcoming of the instinct which compels every living thing to cling to life.

You can see from these quotes why Freud thought every living thing wishes to end the endless flood of incessant stimuli and return to the nirvana of non-being. And why it was only a few more years before he epitomised this drive as Thanatos, the Death Instinct.

And why, at the same time, he comes to see the judging, censoring, punitive ego-ideal as partly fuelled by energy from this latter drive. If ever it gets the upper hand it will push its severe criticism of the miserable ego to the extent where life itself becomes intolerable: the superego.

9. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)

In the early years of psychoanalysis the Pleasure Principle, the drive to seek gratification of the instincts and to avoid unnecessary excitation, seemed enough to account for the mental phenomena exposed by Freud’s investigation of neuroses, hysterias and obsessions.

But during the war, as we’ve seen, in papers like On Narcissism and Mourning and Melancholia, Freud begins to deal with psychological phenomena which seem to contradict this simple Pleasure Principle. He uses the examples of:

  • war neuroses i.e. soldiers who have recurring dreams or nightmares
  • the child who plays the ‘here-there’ game i.e. who repeats the traumatic abandonment of his mother in play
  • dreams which contain recurrent unpleasantness
  • the burning need to act out and repeat traumatic scenes from their early lives on the part of patients in therapy
  • in even normal people, the tendency to repeat behaviour patterns, to fail in business or love

Freud points out the existence of a profound compulsion to repeat in human nature which seems at least as primitive as and, in theoretical terms to go far beyond, the simple requirements of the Pleasure Principle.

For example, anxiety dreams present a pretty good refutation of the idea that all dreams are concealed wish-fulfilments.

Now Freud speculates about the presence of a thin cortical layer protecting the brain from excess stimulation, rather as the lining of the cell protects the cell from too much outside. This wall or barrier, he wonders, may be the origins of the preconscious-conscious system, the interface between outer and inner, in which resides our use of language, our sense of time and duration.

The purely psychological equivalent of this anatomical barrier is anxiety, which is the perceived feeling of lots of mental energy being directed to a weak spot in the mental barrier designed to repel borders.

It may then be that anxiety dreams are attempts to master an intrusion of excess stimuli by repeating the cathexis (i.e. projection) of mental energy to the breach in the ego’s defences and that this repeated sending of reinforcements explains the repetitiveness of anxiety dreams.

This reading confirms what Freud has been saying all along: that the function of the psyche is to master and bind excess stimuli and convert them into life-preserving, life-enhancing behaviour.

This is done by binding free-flowing libido / instinctual energy, to cathexes, charges and mental investments. It is only after this initial mastery has taken place and the libido has been converted into manipulable cathexes that these bound cathexes enter under the dominance of the Pleasure-Unpleasure Principle. Thus, shell-shocked soldiers and playing children are compulsively repeating this attempt to bind and master excess stimuli.

It’s really only a logical extension of the stasis implied by the Nirvana Principle. But at this point Freud goes on to postulate a conservative aspect to all instincts, suggesting that all instincts are attempts to return to an earlier organic form which events have conspired to take the organism beyond. In other words, at some level, the deepest aim of living things is the cessation of stimuli i.e. Death!

The sexual instincts are now seen in a completely new light. From the treatment of Anna O in the 1880s up to the middle of the Great War, the conflict between our riotous sex instincts and the feeble ego instincts which try to control them was enough to underpin the therapeutic practice of psychoanalysis. With these radical ideas Freud moves the goalposts onto a completely new football pitch, to a different city. The scope of psychoanalysis has been vastly expanded.

The sex instincts are now seen merely as one subset of a more general libido which possess the specialised function of regressing to the state of sperm and egg; the sex instincts are even more regressive in a way than the others except that, in their enthusiasm to return to a monocellular state, they are forced to move the organism forwards on to those sex moments!

Evolution is an accident. There may appear to be an onward and upward movement but that is simply because there is no way back. Circumstances change and entire species are wiped out. Only a few mutants survive and prosper. There is no way back. All organisms are impelled forward, along Time’s Arrow, to reproduce. Reproduction is the embodiment of the Life Drive in Time.

So in order to head forwards the creature must repress its backward instincts, the complexes and cathexes it has had to overcome in the long haul to full maturity and adult sexual activity. The No Entrance sign at the doorway to the unconscious propels us forward, and if the repressed threatens to return it is always accompanied by anxiety, the sense of a terrifying vertiginous descent into the primitive past. Thus the only free space, the only place for growth, is forward.

The final part of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is a long meditation on the biological nature of death based on contemporary experiments with protozoa. Left to themselves protozoa multiply and die. But if they can be induced to unite, to join together, they undergo a fresh lease of life, presumably with all the fresh stimuli that have to be coped with on their programmed road to death.

Could this be the basis for a fundamental psychological dichotomy between sex instincts and death instincts found in the higher animals? In Instincts and Their Vicissitudes Freud had postulated two categories of instinct: sex instincts and ego instincts, deduced from:

  • clinical experience of neurotic patients whose conditions nearly all arose from a conflict between a) repressed sexual wishes and b) the conscious ego which was repressing them
  • the fundamental biological fact of the twin purpose of any organism, its individual drive to maintain internal equilibrium fighting against the universal drive to go out there and undergo all manner of trials in order perpetuate the species

But now, in this new version, sex instincts and ego instincts are seen as first cousins, the splitting-off of the same thing. Now the grand dichotomy is between:

  • EROS builder of life
  • and THANATOS, life’s destroyer

What is life? What is death? What is sex? Working within the limited biology of his day, this polarity is the best and deepest answer Freud can come up with.

Key writings

Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) takes these ideas further and contains a long description of being in love.

The Ego and the Id (1923) is a more systematic exposition of the new tripartite structure of the mind which I have sketched out here.

But it’s in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that Freud really turns the corner into a deeper, more complex, more visionary understanding of human nature, which is why it’s regarded to this day as a key work.

Credit

The history of the numerous translations of Freud’s many works into English form a complicated subject in their own right. The works in this review were translated into English between 1958 and 1964 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. All references in this blog post are to Volume 11 of the Pelican Freud Library, ‘On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis’, published in 1984 by Pelican Books.

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