Psychoanalysis

Freud's Theories

In his 1922 essay “Psychoanalysis,” Freud explains the different areas of interest to psychoanalysis (reprinted in Philip Rieff: Character and Culture 1963, 230):

Freud stresses that psychoanalysis is an “art of interpretation” and that it focuses on material in people's minds of which they are unaware. He notes that the ideas that there are unconscious mental acts in people—material that is both mental and unconscious—seems absurd to many people. Many of Freud's theories are quite controversial, and a number of psychologists have developed theories and concepts that move beyond Freud's original notions, though his basic ideas about the primacy of the unconscious and the importance of sexuality are at the core of modern psychoanalytic theory.

Freud believed that dreams were the royal road to the unconscious. He suggests that dreams are generated by unconscious impulses we experience and are based on wish fulfillments that are repressed during the day but which arise when we dream. This wish-fulfillment theory, like many other theories of Freud, is controversial and has been criticized by some psychologists. Freud maintains that dreams are full of symbols that dreamers don't recognize but that disguise our desires and thus avoid our being wakened by what he called our dream censors. Freud's theories about symbolism strike some people unfamiliar with psychoanalytic theory as far-fetched.

Freud believes that neurotic symptoms are connected to traumatic experiences people have in their early sexual lives. He enlarged our understanding of sexuality to include other phenomena not connected with the sexual act: the oral, anal, and genital stages in our sexual development. He also suggested that the Oedipus complex is at the core of human neuroses. This illness is named after the mythic hero Oedipus who, unaware of what he was doing, killed his father and married his mother. Those who are not able to master the Oedipus complex in a suitable manner are troubled with various neurotic symptoms in later years.

We prevent ourselves from recognizing the significance of our thoughts and actions by various means such as repression and regression. As proof of the existence of neurotic symptoms, Freud mentions the phenomenon of transference, in which patients develop powerful emotional relationships with their therapists, which therapists can use to help heal their patients.

Freud's psychoanalytic theory maintains that the human psyche has three levels, one of which—the unconscious—is not accessible to us on our own. This is what is known as Freud's topographic hypothesis. As he wrote in his essay “Psychoanalysis,” its key achievement was to recognize that all “mental acts of normal people” had a meaning. The notion that we are aware of everything found in our minds is an illusion, for there are “unconscious mental acts” that we do not and cannot recognize.

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