Exploring the Validity of Sigmund Freud's Psychoanalitical Theories

As an Austrian neurologist, and founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud created a way of understanding the human personality. Today he is known as one of the most influential people of the 20th century. He was born into a Jewish family in Freiberg, Moravia. His family moved to Leipzig and then settled in Vienna where he was schooled. Freud studied medicine at the University of Vienna and when he graduated, he worked with Josef Breuer who was establishing ways of treating hysteria by recalling painful events and experiences using hypnotism. A few years later, Freud became a student of the neurologist Jean Charcot and after returning to Vienna a year later, he practiced privately to specialize in nervous and brain disorders. That year he got married to a woman with whom he fathered six children.

Freud began to develop his theory of the ‘unconscious’ which are the negative impulses leading to sexual and aggressive desires in every individual’s mind. He claimed that humans are in a constant war with their unconsciousness and finding ways of defenses against them. He began a self-analysis which led him to publish the book ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, where he analyzed dreams according to our unconscious desires and experiences. He eventually became a professor of neuropathology at the university where he studied, and eventually gained some followers despite the fact that many scholars criticized his work and theories. He later founded the ‘Psychoanalytic Association’ where Carl Jung, a close associate of Freud’s, was appointed president. However, Jung eventually found his own way and developed his own theories. After the series of unfortunate events that led to World War One, he started spending more time on focusing on his theories, where he published ‘The Ego and the Id’, which explained the different structures of the mind divided into the ‘id, ego and superego’.

The series of events that led Freud to leave Vienna for London with his wife and daughter was the fact that the Nazis burnt some of his books and went on to attack Vienna in 1933. During this time, Freud was battling with cancer that targeted his jaw which was diagnosed in 1929 and experienced a number of 30 operations which led to his death on 23 September 1939.

Bertha Pappenheim (known as Anna O) was the reason behind Sigmund Freud’s change of direction to psychology as a whole. She was twenty one years old and was a gifted human being. She suffered from hysteria which is a condition that shows physical symptoms of paralysis, hallucinations and loss of speech but with no physical cause. She also lost sensation on the right side of her body which occasionally also troubled her left side as well. She eventually had trouble with her vision which restricted her from many things. Other things were affected such as the posture of her head which came with a long lasting cough. For several weeks she was unable to drink water even though she was experiencing dehydration. Her speech worsened to the extent that she was unable to speak or understand her own native language. All of these combined, led to conditions of confusion, and alternation of her whole personality.

She got treated by Josef Breuer who succeeded in helping her regain some of her forgotten memories of traumatic events, although he did not know how to help her at first. Her case was one of a kind and at that time, no physician could properly diagnose a patient as such with the term ‘hysteria’. This diagnosis made its appearance when she was nursing her father, whom she loved. His death was the result of her illness as she was forced to give up on nursing him. Breuer succeeded in giving both sympathy and interest to her case. Anna became more comfortable and eventually made it easier for Breuer to treat her and give her, her first means of help.

Breuer told Freud about Anna’s case which influenced him to initiate ideas that he pursued for the rest of his life. As he studied hysteria, he claimed that the physical symptoms were due to suppressed conflicts. However, he wasn’t just focusing on looking for an explanation of this particular illness, he was proposing a new theory of the human mind itself. His investigations led to his theory that the mind has three different levels, (the Id, ego, and superego).

Freud claims that the interactions between the three fundamental structures of the human mind is what develops our personality. When these structures face a conflict, our mind makes an effort to balance itself among each of their ‘desires’, and this is what shapes our behavior and our approach to the world. Our attempt to balance these conflicts is what determines our ability to overcome any situation at any given time. Freud explains that these conflicts interact between two things:

1. Our biological aggressive and pleasure seeking drives
2. Our socialized internal control over those drives

The id is the structure that controls our instincts, the ego is related to how we face reality and the superego is concerned with morality. He assumed that the id works with our unconsciousness according to our pleasures and satisfying our basic instincts. The ego comes from the id and develops during infancy. The ego’s job is to give the id what it wants but in a safer and more acceptable way. It faces the reality and operates in both the conscious and unconscious mind. The superego is responsible for making sure that we follow our moral standards and motivates us to behave in a socially accepted way.

Another character that was a major influence on Freud’s discoveries was the neurologist Jean Martin Charcot. Charcot was especially known for helping patients who suffered from unexplained physical symptoms that includes seizures, paralysis, and contractures. He then concluded the fact that all these patients were experiencing some form of ‘hysteria’ which is assumed to be caused by accumulated emotional responses to any sort of traumatic event that has occurred in their past. Charcot concluded that they suffered from the idea they had formed of these events, not from the physical effects of the accident. Freud being extremely impressed by his work, took from it the very essence of the initiative forms of neurosis which came about specifically when a traumatic experience leads to a process of unconscious symptoms. He then started to develop his ideas, unknowingly combining the works of Charcot and Breuer. Anna’s case played a role in the development of Freud’s thoughts and eventually was described as a psychoanalytic patient. Psychoanalysis would have never been discovered if it wasn’t translated from Breuer’s ‘talking cure’ theory merging with Charcot’s perspectives on traumatic hysteria and his own method of interpretation of the reconstruction of repressed memories.

Freud began to attract patients with similar cases like Anna O’s and they all came to him not because they were experiencing emotional distress, but because they were suffering from physical symptoms. Freud’s first patient was Frau Emmy von N. She had difficulties with speech which he diagnosed as “spastic interruptions amounting to stammer”. She was also experiencing some abnormal movements with her face and neck muscles and kept on making repetitive verbal and clicking sounds. Another patient was Lucy R, experienced hallucinations and another, Elizabeth von R, suffered pains in her legs. In all these cases, Freud concluded their illness as hysteria and begun to reveal their traumatic events which was supposedly the cause of their symptoms.

This rose the idea of what he called ‘pressure technique’ which was basically applying pressure to their forehead with his bare hands and told them to say whatever they could see or recall in their memory at the moment of pressure. He succeeded in getting pictures, ideas or memories they were unaware of, and if neither one of them appeared at the first pressure, continuous pressure would definitely be effective. The main question to be asked is “did Freud cure his patients”?

Assuming that his patients did not experience any form of psychological suffering and that Freud’s ‘pressure technique’ was never discovered from Charcot’s medical mistakes, then how did he and Breuer succeeded in treating and curing many patients? The first patient whose cure was revealed to the world was Anna O. The story of her cure led to the discovery of psychoanalysis where in fact, no cure ever took place. A year after being untreated by Breuer, and after he entrusted Anna to Freud, he admitted that the patient who was supposedly cured, ‘was quite unhinged and that he wished she would die and so be released from her suffering’. Her suffering did improve but after a few years later, she was still experiencing some form of hallucinations in the evening. After Anna’s hopeless case, while studying the effects of cocaine, he managed to convince his colleague to use it as some kind of distraction from his addiction to morphine. Freud came out to the public and explained that there was no addiction to cocaine and that his colleague was cured when in fact, he became extremely addicted and began experiencing a state of physical and mental distress.

Ten years later, he publically supported Breuer’s historic case of Anna O being cured even though he knew that it was not true. Going back to his own psychoanalytical cases he criticized his ways of therapy which was also misleading. When he talked about the results of Emmy Von N’s treatment he attempted to accept his therapeutic credits even though she was not cured. However, he was forced to accept the fact and admit that Elizabeth von R’s lameness had once again come back after he treated her and this resulted in another failed case. He eventually confided in Wilhelm Fleiss that he failed in treating and curing any one of his patients.

Freud eventually published his book “Studies in Hysteria” in 1895 and focused on ways to come up with ideas related to psychoanalysis. A few years later, he began a self-analysis that led him to analyze and study his dreams concerned with the unconscious which resulted in his next major work “The Interpretation of Dreams” in 1901. He now no longer relied on practicing hypnosis as his therapeutic technique faced a major development. From then on, he studied and discovered the processes of human behavior and the influence that the unconscious had on it. He stated that the conscious played a major role in repressing sexual desires humans develop during childhood. He had many followers despite the fact that many medical establishments disagreed with his theories. He then founded the ‘International Psychoanalytic Association’ with Carl Jung as president. Another one of his work was the ‘The Ego and the Id’ which explained the structure of the mind in 1923.

One of his many famous theories included the psychosexual development. He claimed that as children, we experience a series of stages and that when we complete these stages successfully, we begin to develop a healthy personality. However, when we obsess on one stage and refuse to move to the next, we develop an unhealthy personality. Overtime, this type of therapy has been developed into a more modern idea. In Freud’s perspective of the development of humans’ personalities, there are three stages that determines the kind of behavior we develop during childhood. Along with these stages, he talks about the psychosexual stages that we experience as children. His theory about both psychosexual stages and the three fundamental structures of the human mind intertwine together to develop the kind of personality we grow up with.

The Id, Ego and Superego as mentioned before, play a huge role in the development of our personality, they each make a contribution to the formation of an individual’s behavior. His theory started by describing the levels of the mind by comparing it to the analogy of the iceberg. On the surface is what we call the ‘consciousness’ which defines what thoughts our attention is focused on in the moment. He says that this part is seen at the tip of the iceberg. The ‘preconscious’ part consists of all the memories that can be recalled. Now the most important part which is the third and most significant part of the mind is our ‘unconsciousness’. This is what determines our behavior and why each individual acts a certain way. The unconscious resembles the lower and most important part of the iceberg that you cannot see. It consists of primitive impulses that our preconscious controls. Some of Freud’s patients were experiencing repression which is the process of locking out information in the unconscious area of the brain because patients couldn’t recall some events or desires that they found too painful or frightening. He highlighted and focused on the essence of the unconscious mind, and that the unconscious mind shapes up an individual’s behavior and has a major influence on our personalities, more than people suspect. His main goal, which is the goal of psychoanalysis, is to change this theory and make the unconscious become conscious.

After comprehending the different levels of the conscious and unconscious, he came up with the more structural theory of the mind which, of course is the id, ego and superego. He assumed that the Id functions at the unconscious level and is the primitive and is concerned with pleasing our basic physical needs and desires. He then went further and classified the id into two kinds of biological instincts which are called Eros and Thanatos.

· Eros: Eros is concerned with our life instincts, it helps us survive, it is responsible for the activities that we undergo in order to live such as respiration, eating, and sex. The energy created by this is called ‘libido’.

· Thanatos: In contrast to Eros, the Thanatos is more concerned with our death instinct and is usually noticed as a combination of destructive instincts that is found in every human being. When we reveal this energy onto any other individual, it comes out very aggressively and violently. For example, let’s say there was a stranger eating a donut, the id part of our mind would want to take the donut for itself, it doesn’t care that it might be rude to take something that belongs to someone else. It only cares about satisfying itself and therefore, would only care about wanting the donut. Freud’s theory of this is that our Eros is stronger than our Thanatos and that is why we are able to survive rather than self-destruct.

The ego forms from the id and is developed during infancy. The ego’s job is to satisfy and give the id what it wants. It is processed through the superego and id in order to get some kind of satisfactory outcome. At first, Freud defined this process as ‘ego’ to relate it to ‘a sense of self’ but later interpreted it to relate it to a more psychic function which consists of judgment, tolerance, control, defense, and memory. The ego is less primitive than the id and it is partially made up of the conscious and unconscious. Freud describes it as the ‘self’ and claims that its goal is to give both the id and superego what it wants and balances their satisfaction so the next time you walk past a stranger eating a donut, your ego would balance the conflicts between the id that would want to take the donut for itself and the superego that would determine the fact that it is wrong to take the donut, and decide to buy your own donut.

The superego is more concerned with ‘morals and social rules’. This is what people consider as their ‘conscience’. It usually starts developing during childhood, when we learn what is right and wrong. So if your superego walks past a person eating a donut, it would know that it is rude to take the donut. However, if your superego and id were together experiencing a conflict and your id was stronger than your superego, it would most likely take the donut away but then you would most likely start to feel guilty over your actions. Freud’s structure of the human mind later developed into the theory of what he called the ‘psychosexual stages of development’.

Freud argues that these conflicts between the id, ego, and superego develop over time and change as we grow from a child to an adult. He believes that these conflicts change and progress through five basic stages, each focus on different things. Oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital. These are the ideas he came up with when he talks about the psychosexual theory of development, and with each stage, it’s directly concerned with a different physical kind of pleasure.

During these five stages, a child is faced with different battles between their id which is their biological drives, and their moral conscience which is their superego. Freud states that the child faces their biological pleasure-seeking urges that focuses on different parts of the body known as the ‘erogenous zones’. Their abilities as a child to solve these conflicts between the id and superego determines the kind of personality and their abilities to cope and function as an adult. If the child fails to resolve these conflicts, the child might face what Freud identifies a ‘fixated stage’ which leads to an unhealthy personality. However if the child succeeds in the resolution of these stages, it leads to a healthy personality as they become an adult. The five stages are the oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital:

1. The Oral Stage (0-1 year): In this stage of early personality development, the child’s sexual drive known as the ‘libido’ is focused in the baby’s mouth. By putting everything they see in their mouth, the child satisfies the libido, which also includes satisfying the id demands. This form of satisfaction at this stage are the oral or what we call mouth oriented for example, sucking, biting, and breastfeeding. He said that the satisfaction we get from the oral or mouth oriented, stimulates an oral fixation later on life. For instance, we normally see such personalities all around us such as people who smoke, bite their nails, chew their fingers, and suck their thumbs. This type of personality in such oral behaviors occur when people are nervous or are under stress.
2. The Anal Stage (1-3 years): Our sexual drives now focuses on the anus, where the child experiences pleasure from defecating. The child now knows that they are a person and that what they wish for can be battled by their demands which means that their ego has developed. Freud’s perspective on this stage is that when the child experiences these conflicts occur when an adult interferes and applies some kind of restrictions on the time and place that the child can defecate. The development of this first conflict with the authority of the parents determines the child’s future ability to emphasize its own form of authority. When a child experiences early or harsh potty training, it can lead to what Freud claims an ‘anal retentive’ personality that develops into an obsessively neat, punctual and hates mess type of behavior. They can become stubborn and greedy with their cash and other things they possess. However, when a child undergoes a healthy toilet-training routine, as an adult they become the opposite which is perfectionism and the need to control.
3. The Phallic Stage (3 to 5 or 6 years): The child’s sensitivity is now genital oriented and Freud argued that during this stage, the child experiences what is known as the ‘Oedipus Complex’ in boys, or the ‘Electra Complex’ in girls. In the Oedipus complex stage, boys unconsciously grow closer and develop sexual desires for their mother because they fear that the father will castrate them as some sort of punishment. A fixation at this stage may lead to confusion over their sexual identity.
4. The Latency Stage (6 to puberty): Freud states that a child at this stage represses their sexual desires and therefore, no psychosexual development occurs and the libido experiences some kind of shut down. He also argued that their sexual energy is controlled and they develop a defense mechanism towards school work, hobbies and friendships. Their energy is now centered to learning new things, generalizing their knowledge, and they now confide to other children of the same gender.
5. The Genital Stage (puberty to adult): The last stage of Freud’s psychosexual theory of personality development begins in puberty. This stage leads to a person fixating their interests into members of the opposite sex.

Sigmund Freud took his theories a step further when he wrote the book ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ towards the end of the nineteenth century. Freud suggests that when a person dreams, it is a way of which the mind tries to stay awake after they have gone to sleep. He goes further and explains the types of dreams that he classified. He focuses on self-analysis of his own personal dreams as a way of proving his theory about how dream psychology works. In this theory, he differentiates between the unconscious levels and dreams that are at the surface of the mind. He explains that dreams are a way of the unconscious mind expressing its desires and that dreams have their own language that needs to be interpreted. He states that by interpreting these dreams, an individual is able to gain insights of their desires and how far-fetched they are. Freud classifies the types of dreams into “night terrors”, “night mares”, “lucid dreams” and finally “normal dreams”. Moreover, he also came up with the idea of using these dreams in therapy by deciding if it needs to be interpreted, keeping them in a journal, and finally examining them when the person is ready.

• Night terrors: In this type of dream, the individual experiences a great amount of fear where they begin to scream and experience weird movements known as ‘flails’ while they are asleep. Basically, these dreams are more common in children.
• Nightmares: Commonly in children as well, but teens and adults experience this type of dream as well that consists of pessimistic emotions such as fear and anxiety.
• Lucid dreams: It’s a dream where the individual knows that they are dreaming, and they are able to control what they experience in the dream. Freud believes that a person can learn how to experience this type of dreams by learning certain techniques.
• Normal dreams: A type of dream where the individual does not know that they are dreaming, and they do not experience any kind of emotion that provokes fear or anxiety.

Freud used a method known as ‘free association’ where he would request the person to relive his dream. He would then examine the events concluded in the dreamer’s life. He goes on to explain that when a person loses a loved one, one way to deal with it is by dreaming which helps to lessen any kind of aggressive behavior in society. He then explains that if a person has the potential to commit revenge, he may fulfill his desires in the dream which contributes to a peaceful society. The problem with Freud is that there is no way of proving that his theory acted as a treatment and worked. Further studies later showed that his ideas of dreams were linked to desires which made his work less appealing over time.

I disagree with the critics who believe that Freud’s theories are invalid due to the lack of scientific proof or the restricted examples of individuals that Freud based many of his ideas on. The fact that psychoanalytic theories sometimes do not have any connection to what we call common sense, and that some of his theories are generalized where he failed in leaving out any exceptions for his results. For instance, when he claimed that children grow up to have mental issues related to their sexual identity because of unresolved Oedipal or Electra complexes, my perspective of this is that it is exaggerated and overgeneralized. However, I believe that psychoanalytic theories should not be ignored because Freud succeeded in developing these ideas a century ago and that at least some parts of it are accurate. In addition, people still use psychoanalysis as a treatment for mental illnesses. I also believe that Freud’s psychoanalysis theory leans to a more scientific perspective because it contains some false applications because other types of treatments have been proven more effective. However, I believe that psychoanalysis can be comprehended by any individual and can be applied easily and the fact that it is more responsible for the development of our personality makes it more sustainable.

In conclusion, I believe that psychoanalysis should not be disregarded and therapists and psychologists should not dismiss the theories because without the initiative ideas of Sigmund Freud, a lot of methods and techniques of therapy would have remained undiscovered.