Transcript of Audio Lecture
In this lesson and in the next several lessons, we will
be examining the psychoanalytic perspective pioneered by Sigmund Freud.
Slide two. The psychoanalytic model arose from some
puzzles. One Freud began puzzling about in the late 1800s was: Where do
your thoughts and feelings and impulses come from? Are they sometimes
mysterious and confusing or disturbing? If you’re honest with yourself,
you’ll recognize that you rarely if ever choose your thoughts, feelings
and impulses before they happen. And indeed sometimes you will do things
that will be mysterious to you, such as deciding that you’re going to
simply eat one or two chips when you open a bag of chips, and then
finding that you have eaten all of them. Who decided to eat the whole
bag? Since it was not a conscious decision to do so, where did it come
from? Sometimes you will be confusing--you’ll make up your mind that a
relationship is no good for you and a few weeks later you are seeing
that person again. We seem to have different feelings at different
levels of awareness. Sometimes our thoughts will even be disturbing. You
might find yourself having a very aggressive fantasy about your boss and
be surprised and concerned that you could have such thoughts go through
your mind.
Slide three. Freud’s deduction was that if you do
something or think something (that is, there is a meaningful and
motivated mental process, not just some random firing glitch or abnormal
chemistry, and of course the vast majority of time our thoughts and
feelings are meaningful) but you don’t know why you did it and you may
not have had conscious control over it and you may not have even wanted
to do it (as in the case of eating another chip or calling someone up
you promised you wouldn’t call up) then where is that motivation coming
from. If it’s not coming from the conscious mind then the motivation
must be unconscious. This is Freud's fundamental deduction and, when put
in this way, is quite compelling; so whereas oftentimes Freud is
considered to have made strange claims, in fact many of his claims are
very straightforward and reasonable.
Slide four. On the basis of this deduction, Freud
argued that the mind had a topography to it. There were different
regions to the mind; in particular a conscious mind, a pre-conscious
mind and an unconscious mind. The conscious mind is the region that
contains what is in your awareness currently. The image on the screen,
the sound of my voice, these are the contents of awareness, the contents
of your conscious mind. Now: what is your phone number? Well prior to my
asking the question about where your phone number was, you’re unlikely
to have had that in awareness. But ordinary memories—such as your phone
number, address, age, and so on, are easily moved into consciousness
when needed. These types of everyday knowledge are the contents of the
pre-conscious. Ideally, the pre-conscious also contains much of what
you’ve learned in this course; therefore, when taking an exam, you can
simply draw it up into consciousness. But according to Freud, there’s a
third region—the unconscious. And therein resides most of your thoughts
and motives and memories and indeed all of your threatening thoughts and
motives and memories get pressed down there, or more technically
repressed, that is actively forbidden from awareness. But despite being
forced out of awareness, they remain a powerful force exerting pressure
on all aspects of psychic function. You continue to put material into
your unconscious throughout life, but Freud suggested that some of the
most important material was placed there early in life; specifically,
some of the fundamental unconscious dynamics that shape your character
throughout your life were forged during the first 5 years of life.
Slide five. Let us now consider what psychoanalysts
call the stages of psychosexual development during childhood.
Psychoanalytic theory states that the source of all psychic energy is
the libido and the focus of your libido changes over time.
Psychoanalytic theorizing stressed in particular the shifts that occur
during childhood. Frustration or overindulgence of your libido at the
different stages could result in fixation or regression. Fixation meant
that you would get stuck at that stage. Regression would mean that under
stress your personality functioning manifest qualities reminiscent of
that stage. But either way your personality continues to show features
of that immature stage of development. So let us now look at each of the
stages of psychosexual development. Slide six. The first stage is the
oral stage. This is the stage that tends to occur in infancy (the first
year or so of life). For each stage we’ll also consider what is the
erogenous zone, what are the fundamental underlying issues, and what
fixations might occur. For the oral stage, the erogenous zone is oral,
the mouth. The reason why the psychoanalysts suggested this was they
observed the degree to which infants were focused on and had a lot of
feelings about the process of nursing and the process of weaning. If you
watch infants, they really do seem mouth focused, much to the concern of
parents who are constantly having to grab things off the floor because
babies, once they can move around, tend to stick everything in their
mouths. So, the mouth is an important way that babies experience and
interact with the world. But the larger psychological issue being played
out is one of dependency and trust. As an infant, you cannot do much for
yourself, so you are dependent on others, and must trust them to respond
to or take care of your needs. If during this oral stage the parents,
the infant’s caregivers are either too withholding of care and affection
OR too indulgent of the child’s need for dependency, a fixation might
develop. Sometimes the fixation leads a person to become overly needy or
dependent. As an infant they felt they were never getting enough, that
their caregivers were not meeting their needs; perhaps the breast kept
being taken away from them when they were hungry; and consequently they
feel like there is always an empty place inside themselves, they feel
like they are never filled, they feel—in other words—needy and
dependent. Even as adults, in each new relationship they enter into,
they seek to get that nourishment, that care, that nurturing they never
felt they adequately received early on during this crucial first oral
stage of development. They show these needy, dependent traits throughout
life because they’re stuck or fixated at this oral stage. This is called
the oral dependent personality—a dependent personality whose origin was
the oral stage. But sometimes this same type of oral dependency can
arise from being overindulged. In this case an infant, the moment it
showed the slightest distress, was immediately coddled and nursed;
consequently, it feels itself to be a fragile being incapable of
tolerating frustration and being independent.
But this highlights one of the complaints people have
about the psychoanalytic approach: there are not clear predictions about
how a particular childhood experiences lead to particular adult
outcomes; since, for example, a very withholding parent or a very
nurturing parent might result in the same oral dependent personality
style in adulthood. This makes it very hard to test the psychoanalytic
model. A further complications is that problems at the oral stage can
also lead to a different type of oral personality—one characterized by
mistrust, rejection, and sarcasm. That is because while some infants
respond to feeling neglected and abandoned by becoming needy and clingy,
others respond by getting mad. For example, some infants, when a breast
is being pulled away from them, will grab on and bite--they’re
responding with anger because their needs are being frustrated. If this
becomes a recurring pattern, it can form part of their character
structure. Believing that they their needs will not be met, they
withdraw their trust; believing they will be rejected, they reject
others first. Psychoanalysts suggest that sarcasm tends to go along with
this oral aggressive style because it literally is form of oral
aggression, and suggested by phrases like “that person has a biting
wit”. Thus, a neglecting, frustrating parent can lead to either an
oral-dependent personality or an oral-aggressive personality, and this
makes it very hard to predict how a particular childhood experience is
going to manifest itself in an adult character structure.
Slide seven. The second stage is the anal stage. It
tends to appear during the toddler years, ages two to four, during which
the erogenous zone shifts from the mouth to the anus, and the most
stressful issue shifts from weaning to toilet training. The larger issue
that surrounds the toilet training is autonomy: Can you do things on
your own, can you control yourself, and can you accept some social
control, meaning doing things when, where, and how society expects you
to. Toilet training is just one of the early domains in which a child is
asked to conform to a set of social norms.
At this stage again fixations
can occur. Perhaps the child is punished and made to feel ashamed if
they have potty accidents. As a result, they may respond by getting mad
and feeling, in essence: “Hey authority figures! You’re telling me when
and where to use the potty? Ha! Well I’m gonna do what I want. I’m gonna
have potty accidents just to show you. Yeah, because it’s not me who’s
bad, it’s your stupid rules that are bad.” If this attitude becomes
their way of coping with and defending against the potential humiliation
of not being able to meet a social norm, then it can form part of their
character. That is, they get fixated at this angry toddler stage and
throughout their life tend to be a disorderly, rebellious, angry
individual. Now in adulthood, the person may sound more reasonable,
saying: “Here are the reasons why these rules are stupid or beneath me”.
But the psychoanalyst would suggest that basic feeling or attitude of
rejecting rules arises from an fear of feeling inadequate, ashamed,
humiliated, bad if one were held up to those standards, and that
unconscious inarticulate fear comes from those early humiliations
concerning toilet training during the anal stage.
However, another way
to cope with the potential humiliation that comes from being in the
wrong is to go the other direction, to become extremely concerned with
being perfect—being clean, neat, orderly—and this is known as the anal
compulsive personality style. Indeed, the phrase “that person’s really
anal” has become part of everyday speech, and refers to a person who, in
psychoanalytic terms, is fixated at the anal stage, who is overly
concerned about being the "good boy" or "good girl" (as their parents
might have said to them when they used the potty correctly) and not
being the “bad boy” or “bad girl” (as their parents might have said to
them when they when they had an accident). The psychoanalysts have
identified a number of traits that seem to be part of this
anal-compulsive personality style, such a stinginess. According to the
psychoanalyst, the anal-compulsive individual learned to hang onto their
feces until just the right moment, and now, in adulthood, have
generalized that attitude to hanging onto to their money and
possessions, and so appear stingy or miserly.
Slide eight. As we move into the preschool years, ages
three to six, we move into the phallic stage. In this stage, the
erogenous zone shifts from the anus to the genitals and the child begins
to feel the first stirrings of sexual interest in others, which may lead
to a complex family drama—at least within the head of the child—called
the oedipus complex. While there is some research support for the oral
and anal stages and the fixations associated with those stages, there is
no research support for the psychoanalytic theory of what’s going on
during the phallic stage. So, while I will describe the theory because
it is so famous and so often mentioned in the wider culture, you should
take it with a grain of salt. In any case, the theory states that as the
child feels those stirrings of desire, the focus of that desire becomes
the opposite sex parent, so boys will begin to feel some attraction
towards their mother, and girls will feel some attraction towards their
father. But there’s a problem: The same sex parents already has an
exclusive and intimate relationship with the object of their desire.
This makes them mad, even hateful towards the same sex parent. The boys
become resentful of their fathers; the girls become resentful of their
mothers. But now that they are rivals of their same sex parent, they
worry that the same sex parents will do something to get them out of the
picture so they also become fearful of the same sex parent. So they
trapped in this family crucible of desire, hate, and fear. This
stressful state cannot continue. The resolution for the child to
identify with the same sex parent. A boy concludes: I can’t have mom
right now, but if I grow up to be like dad, I’ll be able to have
somebody like mom. A girl concludes: I can’t have dad right now, but if
I grow up to be someone like my mom, I can have someone like my dad. So
basically they decide if you can’t fight ‘em, join ‘em; that is, I’ll
become like the same sex parent and eventually be able to have the type
of intimate relationship that they currently enjoy.
Psychoanalysts suggest that if you don’t resolve
adequately these oedipal issues, these competitive feelings with your
same sex parent, you might become fixated on these issues, and spend
your life feeling competitive and playing power games, especially with
same sex others and especially when it comes to competing for attention
from opposite sex others. You may also feel unresolved feelings of
guilt, especially guilt in the context of sexuality, because your first
sexual feelings are associated with your parents—that is, they were
incestuous feelings.
Slide nine. As we move into the elementary school and
pre-puberty years, which psychoanalysts call the latency stage, the
libido, and especially the bodily expressions of libido associated with
the preceding stages, become repressed. Instead, the libido is
re-directed towards mastering social and cognitive skills. The demands
society places on children, especially those entering formal schooling
as in the United States, focuses their energy on learning these basic
skills: reading, writing, arithmetic, social skills, athletic skills,
and so on; and the issues that were focal during those first five years,
during the oral, anal and phallic stage become repressed and
increasingly hidden from memory until, in adulthood, it takes years of
psychoanalysis to rediscover the thoughts and feelings and urges that
you had during those emotional, conflictual first five years.
Slide 10. The final, genital stage of psychosexual
development is triggered by the onset of puberty. As people enter their
teenage years the libido once again stirs in a way that cannot be
completely repressed and again the focus of the libido, as in the
phallic stage, is the genitals, but now the energy is focused outside
the family towards relationships with peers. Some of the issues that
arise at this stage and that continue throughout life include: how to
control libido and express that energy in a mature way through our love
and our work. The people that we love and the tasks that we engage in
ideally will be opportunities for experiencing intrinsic enjoyment and
for making a meaningful contribution, but this depends on our not having
unfulfilled oral, anal or phallic needs. To the extent that we are
fixated at those earlier stages, that we have unresolved issues, then we
will experience the people we encounter as adults as objects for
fulfilling those needs. If we have unresolved oral issues, then others
will be viewed only with respect to how they might take care of us or
how they might reject us; if we have unresolved anal issues, then we
will be too tightly controlled or rule-governed to form flexible and
mutual relationships; if we have unresolved phallic issues, we will be
overly competitive or guilty. On the other hand, if our earlier
experiences allowed us to resolve the issues associated with each stage
of psychosexual development in an appropriate way, then as we meet new
situations in life, rather than projecting unfilled needs onto them, we
can see them more as they really are.
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