Freudian Slipping (Warning: Long and Disturbing)

Courtesy of OxfordSEOBlog


After viewing the blockbuster exhibition Liquid Desires featuring Salvador Dali at the NGV, I learnt that much of his art was influenced by ideas which stemmed from Sigmund Freud. Being curious to learn more about Freud's theories and influences - without going too deep into the intricacies of psychology - I picked up a slim volume titled Introducing Freud by Richard Appignanesi and Oscar Zarate. Heavily illustrated in a highly whimsical fashion, the book described the life of Freud as well as his major contributions as the father of the psycho-analytical movement.


One of his earliest interests was in the condition of hysteria, which was thought to be either an irritation of the female sexual organs, or mere imaginary play-acting by women (19th Century Europe was still very sexist)! Some of his early therapies include the method of catharsis (invented by his friend Josef Breuer), the use of the pressure technique (where one presses one's hand on a patient's forehead and asked questions), and the seduction theory.


To understand dreams, Freud made two discoveries, namely that "all dreams represent the fulfillment of wishes" and that the "functioning of dreams provides systematic evidence of the unconscious". Dreams often express one's repressed unconscious wish, often in a partial or censored version, and the latent content of the dream can only appear when disguised as manifest content. Manifest objects either suggest penetration (like swords, guns, umbrellas etc) or receptables (like boxes, purses, caves etc) which are proxies for the male and female sexual organs. The "shifting over" of the wish to such manifest objects was called displacement by Freud. Concepts like castration anxiety and penis envy were also suggested then.



Considered as a 3rd Revolution (after Copernicus' discovery that the Earth is not at the centre of the Universe and Darwn's Theory of Evolution), Freud's Psychology of the Unconscious states that only a small part of what is mental in conscious, with a large part made unconscious. Freud was also responsible for the idea of transference whereby hostile unconscious feelings were made conscious and "transferred" to the therapist. When this fails, the psychotic cases were referred to as narcissistic, where the ego is directed back to the self and regressed to conditions like megalomania, schizophrenia, and hypochondria.

In Mourning and Melancholia (1915), Freud carried this idea further and wrote about the idea of extreme identification called introjection, where one's lost love object is literally "devoured" by the ego, and the patient regresses to infantile narcissism. The death instinct was also covered, where ideas on how all behaviours are used to reduce tension was proposed and the condition of repetition-compulsion, whereby the painful memory is relived again and again in attempts to get back to a condition totally devoid of all energy - death.

Freud's final contribution was in the dynamic model of the mind called the Id, the Ego, and the Super-Ego. His ideas here was that the ID (Latin for 'it') is the primitive, unconscious basis of the psyche dominated by primary urges, the ego is the guide to reality which encompasses the conscious mind, and helps to repress the id, and the super-ego is introjected parental authority - a defensive effort which prohibits the expression of Oedipal wishes. Thus, our behaviours are not due to strict moral ideas but due to our renouncing of aggression.


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