Freud, Sigmund
Freud, Sigmund
The development of Freud’s ideas
Major contributions and weaknesses
Sigmund Freud was born May 6, 1856, in Freiberg, Moravia (now Czechoslovakia), and died September 23, 1939, in exile in London. When the boy was three, his father, a small wool merchant, was forced by economic reverses to move for a year to Leipzig and thence to Vienna, where Freud spent the rest of his life—1860 to 1938— except for his last year. His biographers agree that the unusual structure of the family into which he was born was partly responsible for his interest in intimate human relationships: Freud’s father had two sons by his first wife; when he remarried after her death, it was to a woman of their age. Sig mund, her first child, often played with his year-older nephew. A brother who was born when Sigmund was not yet a year old died after eight months; then came four sisters and another brother.
A dedicated student, Freud graduated summa cum laude from the Gymnasium at age 17 and entered the University of Vienna medical school. After three years Freud became deeply involved in research, which delayed his m.d. until 1881; re search was to remain his main interest. In 1882 he met and became engaged to Martha Bernays, and he began clinical training in order to be able to earn a living from the practice of medicine. He continued research and publishing, was made Dozent, and received a grant in 1885 to study for several months with Charcot in Paris. The next year he married and began practicing neurology; three sons and three daughters were born between 1887 and 1895.
Since existing therapies were not effective for his patients, most of whom were neurotic, he turned to hypnotic suggestion and in 1889 briefly visited Bernheim and Liébeault to perfect his technique. He learned a more helpful method, however, from a close friend, Josef Breuer, whose patient “Anna O.” (Bertha Pappenheim) had managed to overcome some hysterical symptoms by talking freely about the circumstances of their first occurrence. Freud’s successful experiences with and modifications of this “cathartic” treatment were reported in the book he wrote jointly with Breuer, Studies on Hysteria (1893–1895). For the next five years, he continued to develop this psychotherapeutic method into psychoanalysis, gradually withdrawing from neurology, although by then he had an international reputation in that field. [SeeHysteria; Psychosomatic illness.]
The way his own self-analysis contributed to the growth of his ideas during this period may be seen in the letters and drafts of papers sent to a Berlin colleague, Wilhelm Fliess, who became a close friend and confidant (see 1887-1902; 1895). The first major statement of his theories was The Inter pretation of Dreams (1900). In 1902 he was made professor extraordinarius at the University of Vienna, and about that time his publications and lectures began to attract a group of followers, which became in 1908 the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society.
The principal focus of Freud’s life thereafter was the growth of psychoanalysis—as a theory, a form of treatment, and a movement. The movement did not remain monolithic: dissident followers who withdrew and formed their own schools included Adler (in 1911), Stekel (in 1912), Jung (in 1913), and Rank (in 1926). As Freud’s ideas began to become more widely known, they attracted respect and scientific interest, but also met with a great deal of hostility as well as extreme rejection. A truly objective weighing of these two kinds of reactions at various periods of Freud’s career has yet to be done, but in any event Freud seems to have been more keenly aware of the negative than of the positive reception. An especially welcome early sign of recognition was the award of an honorary degree by Clark University in 1909, on which occasion he visited America with Jung, Ferenczi, and Jones and delivered a series of lectures.
In 1923 he had the first of many operations for cancer of the upper jaw, which finally proved fatal. During his last 16 years, Freud suffered almost constant pain and difficulty in speaking because of an awkward prosthesis, but he continued psycho analyzing and writing into his final year. Only after the Nazi Anschluss could he be persuaded to leave Vienna, though he often had declared his detestation for the city. Long before the end, he had achieved world-wide acclaim and recognition as one of the decisive shapers of the twentieth century.
The development of Freud’s ideas
Freud’s first scientific contribution was published in 1877; his last was written only a few months before his death. Only the most superficial sketch of the development of his thought in the six hundred-odd papers and books he produced over these 63 years can be given here. There were four major and overlapping phases of that development.
(1) His prepsychoanalytic work, which lasted about twenty years, may be subdivided into an initial ten years of primarily histological-anatomical research and a partly overlapping 14 years of clinical neurology, with increasing attention to psychopathology, beginning in 1886 when he returned from Paris.
(2) The first theory of neurosis dates from the decade of the 1890s, when Freud used hypnosis and Breuer’s cathartic method of psychotherapy, gradually developing the psychoanalytic methods of free association, dream interpretation, and the analysis of transference. The first dozen truly psy choanalytic papers appeared during this time, expounding the view that neurosis is a defense against intolerable memories of a traumatic experience— infantile seduction at the hands of a close relative. With the discovery of his own Oedipus complex, however, Freud came to see that such reports by his patients were fantasies, which led him to turn his interest away from traumatic events in external reality and toward subjective psychic reality. A notable but only recently discovered event in the development of Freud’s thought occurred in 1895 after the publication of the book he wrote with Breuer: he wrote but did not publish a “Psychology for Neurologists” (or “Project for a Scientific Psychology” see Freud 1895), presenting a comprehensive anatomical-physiological model of the nervous system and its functioning in normal behavior, thought, and dreams, as well as in hysteria. He sent it to Fliess in high excitement, then quickly became discouraged by the difficulties of creating a thoroughgoing mechanistic and reductionistic psychology, tinkered with the model for a couple of years in letters to Fliess, and finally gave it up.
The turn of the century marked many basic changes in Freud’s life and work: he severed his close and dependent friendships with colleagues (first Breuer, then Fliess) and his contacts with the Viennese medical society; his father died; his last child was born; he psychoanalyzed himself; he gave up neurological practice, research, and conceptual models; and he created his own new profession, research method, and theory, in terms of which he worked thereafter.
(3) Freud’s topographic model was the foundation of two decades of work, during which he published his major clinical discoveries, notably, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905); his papers on the technique used in psychoanalytic treatment; his five major case histories, the central works of metapsychology; and a series of important surveys and popularizations of his ideas, in addition to his principal applications of his theories to jokes, literature and art, biography, and anthropology. A complete or metapsychological explanation, Freud wrote in 1915, requires “describing a psychical process in its dynamic, topographical and economic aspects”—that is, in terms of a theoretical model in which the central concepts are psychological forces, structures, and quantities of energy (Rapaport & Gill 1959). Hence, we speak of three meta psychological points of view. The topographic model, which was first set forth in Chapter 7 of The Interpretation of Dreams and was further elab orated in the metapsychological papers (1915), conceptualizes thought and behavior in terms of processes in three psychological systems: the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious (none of which has an explicit locus in the brain).
(4) In the final period, extending between the two world wars, Freud made four main types of contributions: the final form of his theory of in stinctual drives (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920); a group of major modifications of both general and clinical theory—most notably, the structural model of the psychic apparatus (The Ego and the Id, 1923) and the theory of anxiety and defense (Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, 1926); appli cations of psychoanalysis to larger social problems; and a group of books reviewing and reformulating his theories.
To grasp the structure of Freud’s work, it is useful not only to adopt such a developmental approach but also to view his theories from the perspective of the following threefold classification:
First and best known is the clinical theory of psychoanalysis, with its psychopathology, its accounts of psychosexual development and character formation, and the like. The subject matter of this type of theorizing consists of major events (both real and fantasied) in the life histories of persons, events occurring over spans of time ranging from days to decades. This theory is the stock in trade of the clinician—not just the psychoanalyst, but the vast majority of psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and psychiatric social workers. Loosely referred to as “psychodynamics,” it has even penetrated into general academic psychology via textbooks on personality.
Second, there is what Rapaport (1959) has called the general theory of psychoanalysis, also called metapsychology. Its subject matter—proc esses in a hypothetical psychic apparatus or, at times, in the brain—is more abstract and impersonal; and the periods of time involved are much shorter—from fractions of a second up to a few hours. The processes dealt with are mostly those occurring in dreams, thinking, affect, and defense; Freud’s reasoning in working out this theory is much closer, and he made more use of theoretical models of the psychic apparatus. The main works are the “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” Chap ter 7 of The Interpretation of Dreams, and the meta-psychological papers.
Third is what might be called Freud’s phylogenetic theory. The subject matter is man as a species or in groups, and the periods of time involved range from generations to eons. Here are Freud’s grand speculations, largely evolutionary and teleological in character; they contain no explicit models of a psychic apparatus, employing instead many literary, metaphorical concepts. The principal works of this type are Totem and Taboo (1913), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), The Future of an Illusion (1927), Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), and Moses and Monotheism (1934–1938).
His clinical contributions are among the earliest of Freud’s papers that are still being read, and he continued to write in this vein all of his life. As far as the other two types of theory are concerned, however, they overlap fewer developmental periods: the major metapsychological works came early, the main phylogenetic ones late. As Freud’s concepts became more metaphorical and dealt with such remote issues as man’s ultimate origins and the meaning of life and death, he became less concerned with describing or systematically accounting for the course and fate of an impulse or thought.
The rest of this article will concentrate on hypotheses and observations about two groups of Freud’s ideas: what now appear to have been his major, lasting contributions, those that have been most influential on and most assimilated into the behavioral sciences (not to mention literature, art, and other aspects of contemporary Western culture); and his major errors, those concepts that have been most cogently criticized by psychoan alysts and other scientists. Finally, it will discuss historical antecedents of his ideas and influences upon them. The literature on these topics is al ready large and growing rapidly, so this survey must be highly selective.
Major contributions and weaknesses
Contributions
Freud may be said to have made five major contributions.
(1) He based his work on the assumption of psychic determinism. the lawfulness of all psychological phenomena, even the most trivial, including dreams, fantasies, and slips of the tongue.
(2) The lastingly valued aspects of Freud’s complex doctrine of the unconscious include the general proposition that cognitive and other psychological events can go on outside of awareness; the influence of unconscious motivation on behavior; and the special qualitative characteristics of unconscious processes—the primary process and symbolism. The primary process is the kind of primitive functioning of the “psychic apparatus” that characterizes the unconscious id; indeed, it is the principal property by means of which the latter is denned. Processes characterized by magical rather than rational logic and by wishfulness—a seeking for immediate gratification of crude sexual or aggressive impulses—are called primary. Freud emphasized the concepts of displacement and condensation of psychic energy in his conceptualization of the primary process and noted that it often makes use of symbols, which differ from other types of displacement substitutes in having been shared by many persons for generations. These were the main theoretical resources Freud called upon to explain dreams, neurotic symptoms, psychotic thought and language, normal character traits, myths, creative thought, art, and humor.
(3) Of the many contributions Freud made to our understanding of sexuality, the following seem to enjoy the most acceptance: his stress on its great importance in human life generally; his broad defi nition, which includes oral, anal, and other bodily pleasures and links them to the phallic-genital; his conception of its plasticity—it can be delayed, transformed, or fixated, and interest can be shifted from one “component drive” or “partial instinct” to another; his discovery that it appears early in human life (infants and young children masturbate, have sexual curiosity, etc.) and follows a typical developmental sequence; his insistence that bisexuality and “polymorphous perversity” are uni versal endowments or potentialities; his explanation of sexual perversions as pathological developments, not (or not wholly) as constitutional givens and not as sins; and his elaborations of many aspects of the Oedipus complex—the fact of inevi table but tabooed incestuous attraction in families, the associated phenomena of anxiety about castration (or, more generally, mutilation), and of intra-familial jealousy, hatred, and envy, much of it unconscious.
(4) Three of Freud’s concepts—conflict, anxi ety, and defense—are so interrelated that we may look on them as constituting one major contribution. He saw the pervasive importance of conflict (not merely the traditional opposition of reason and passion, or ego versus id, but also ego versus superego and superego versus id) in both normal and abnormal behavior. One of his earliest insights was that defenses—structuralized means of controlling impulse and preventing the outbreak of anxiety, thus being in effect resolutions of conflict —are major factors in the formation of symptoms and character traits and are shaping influences on the organization of thought. He also described the specific mechanisms of defense, such as repression, projection, reaction formation, isolation, and mastery via the turning of passivity into activity. [SeeAnxiety; Conflict, article onPsychological Aspects; Defense Mechanisms.]
(5) A number of Freud’s lasting discoveries and insights make up the genetic point of view. He showed the necessity of knowing facts of development in order to understand personality; the importance of the events of early life for the main features of character, including the specific syndromes of the oral and anal character types as outgrowths of events at the corresponding psychosexual stages; the role of identification as a principle of learning and development; the importance of drive delay and control in development; and the nature of psychopathology as regression along a developmental path.
As Shakow and Rapaport (1964) have pointed out, in each instance it is the general conception and the observations that have been accepted, not the specific concepts and the explanatory theory in which they are embedded. But this is to be expected: theories necessarily age, and any theory in the behavioral sciences formed as long ago as Freud’s is bound to contain many anachronisms, obsolete assumptions, and unfortunate turns of thought.
Flaws
Three weaknesses in Freud’s work seem to have had the most extensive negative effects upon theory, research, and practice (see Holt 1965a; 1966). However necessary they may have been to his positive contributions, they are logically separable from them.
(1) His basic operating model (at first, of the central nervous system; later, of the psychic apparatus) was a passive reflex apparatus with no energies of its own, operating only to rid itself of inputs from the body (instinctual drive) and from the environment (reality), these inputs being conceptualized as quantities of energy (subjectively experienced as tension), and the regulative rule formulated as the principle of constancy. Consequently, the fundamental principle of motivation and affect is tension reduction.
Even in Freud’s fourth period, when he said little directly about it, the passive reflex model seems to have operated as a silent pressure in the following directions:
(a) Freud tended to overemphasize quantitative as against qualitative aspects of behavior and thought, though only the latter were observable. The quantitative emphasis would have been more defensible if it had actually led to measurement, which is needed, but it did not. The result was a relative neglect of the phenomenology of affects in favor of a primary emphasis on pleasure and unpleasure, including anxiety (Kardiner et al. 1959), and a relative neglect of the phenomenology of the primary process, such as the various specific forms taken by condensation and displacement, in favor of an elaborate theory about unmeasurable energies of various qualitatively and directionally specific types.
(b) Similarly, Freud tended to reduce motivation to the somatically based; for example, he assumed that love and affection are derivative forms of a seeking after sensuous pleasure.
(c) There was a relative neglect of motives that do not easily fit the tension-reduction conception, such as curiosity and positive interest in stimuli and the seeking of challenges to master (White 1963).
(d) The passive reflex model suggests a simple theory of pleasure and unpleasure as perceived concomitants of rises and falls in energic tension. Yet from the beginning, Freud was aware of conflicting data, and he was never able either to abandon the original theory entirely or to account for the anomalous observations in a way that was consonant with the model.
(e)There were other shortcomings in the metapsychological economic point of view—the notion of a fixed and limited amount of energy which has to be withdrawn from one locus if used at another: for example, a scarcity economics of love, according to which the more one loves others the less self-esteem is possible—and in the quasi-vitalistic, unmeasurable, and overelaborated concept of psychic energy (Holt 1966).
(f) The model was hospitable to the death in stinct and nirvana principle as ultimate extensions of tension reduction. But outwardly directed ag gression was difficult to fit into the model and was relatively neglected for years.
(2) The second fundamental flaw was Freud’s originally physicalistic conception of reality: basically, as “masses in motion and nothing else” ([1895] 1954, p. 369); more generally, as a welter of dangerous energies in which may be found some tension-reducing objects. In this conception, reality lacks significant organization on a large scale, as in the social structures or value systems (especially the latent ones) postulated by modern sociology and anthropology. To be sure, Freud did not con sistently hold to such reductionism; he always dealt with meanings as such. Nevertheless, a physicalistic notion of reality lingered in his mind as an implicit conceptual ideal, with several consequences:
(a) Without a way to conceptualize an enduring structure of society and culture, Freud needed to assume individual genetic transmission of stable but latent cultural themes by way of a Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics and to assume also that much of what he observed was inherited and universal, not culturally specific (for example, the Oedipus complex, or the inferior status of women as determined by anatomical differences).
(b) Freud tended to neglect the problems of adaptation and the relations to reality studied more recently in ego psychology.
(c)There were problems in the theory of object relations: for example, the “primary hate of ob jects,” which the model requires, conflicts with the facts of infant observation; the theory also had difficulty in accounting for sustained interest and affection in a sexually consummated relationship, and psychoanalysts were led to a relative neglect of the natural history of subtleties in human relations.
(3) Freud’s third basic error was his unclear and ambivalent handling of the mind-body problem, alternating between psychophysical parallelism and interactionism. The consequences began to show up as soon as he gave up the neurological model of 1895: he carried over its basic assumptions (the passive reflex model and the implicitly physicalistic concept of reality) in his later, osten sibly psychological, theories. There were several consequences of Freud’s failure to take a consistent position on the mind-body problem.
(a) The status of the basic model remained undeveloped, unclear with regard to the existential status both of psychic energies and forces and of psychic structure.
(b)Since the basic model was not made fully explicit, there followed a relative neglect of structural considerations in favor of a “motivational reductionism” (Gill 1959), the explanation of the control and restraint of impulses (especially ag gressive ones) in terms of instinctual fusion and defusion instead of in structural terms, and the neglect of adaptive and health-maintaining capacities in favor of an emphasis on pathology.
(c) A further consequence was Freud’s tend ency to reify functions as structures and to per sonify theoretical entities of uncertain existential status.
(d) Psychoanalysis became isolated from progress in medical and physiological sciences because of the difficulty in assimilating their findings.
It should be emphasized that none of these shortcomings was as crippling as it might have been if the underlying assumptions had been applied rigidly and consistently. As a group, they did steer Freud’s thinking to a demonstrable extent, but thanks to the creative looseness of his cognitive style (Holt 1965b) he was able to observe much and to develop many specific theories that were logically incompatible with them.
Historical background
Before examining the antecedents of those ideas of Freud’s that have been outlined above, it will be helpful to sketch in some of the grand trends of intellectual history in the nineteenth century.
“Naturphilosophie” and its rejection
The way for the romantic revolt that broadly characterized all aspects of intellectual life in the early 1800s had been prepared by Naturphilosophie, a mystical and often rhapsodic view of Nature as perfused with spirit and with conflicting unconscious forces and as evolving according to an inner, purposive design. Not a tightly knit school, its constituent thinkers included (in chronological order) Kant, Lamarck, Goethe, Hegel, Schelling (perhaps the central figure), Oken, and Fechner. With the exception of Fechner, who lived from 1801 to 1887, they all lived athwart the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Naturphilosophie encouraged the recrudescence of vitalism in biology, championed by the great physiologist Johannes Miiller, and stimulated a humanistic school of romantic medicine (Galdston 1956). In psychiatry, the early part of the century was dominated by the reforms of Pinel, Esquirol, and their followers, who introduced an era of “moral treatment”: firm kindness in place of restraints, therapeutic optimism based on etiological theories of a more psychological than or ganic cast, and an attempt to involve inmates of asylums in constructive activities.
The tough-minded reaction to this tender-minded era was greatly aided by the strides being made in physics and chemistry. Three of Müller’s students, Brücke, du Bois-Reymond, and Helmholtz, met Carl Ludwig in 1847 and formed a club (which became the Berlin Physical Society) to “constitute physiology on a chemico-physical foundation, and give it equal scientific rank with Physics” (Ludwig, quoted by Cranefield 1957, p. 407). They did not succeed in their frankly reductionist aim but did attain their other objectives: to promote the use of scientific observation and experiment in physiology and to combat vitalism. Among themselves, they held to the following program:
No other forces than the common physical-chemical ones are active within the organism. In those cases which cannot at the time be explained by these forces one has either to find the specific way or form of their action by means of the physical-mathematical method, or to assume new forces equal in dignity to the chemical-physical forces inherent in matter, reducible to the force of attraction and repulsion, (du Bois-Reymond, quoted by Bernfeld 1944, p. 348)
In Germany especially, this materialistic ferment of physicalistic physiology, mechanism, and reductionism became the mode, gradually putting romantic medicine and other aspects of Naturphilosophie to rout. Where earlier there had been Psychic, Psycho-somatic, and Somatic schools in German psychiatry (Earle 1854, see in Hunter & Macalpine 1963, pp. 1015-1018), the Somatic gradually won out; Meynert, for example, conceived mental disorders to be diseases of the forebrain. Despite its therapeutic successes, moral treatment was banished along with its psychogenic (often sexual) theories as “old wives’ psychiatry,” in favor of strictly organic-hereditarian views and very little by way of therapy (Bry & Rifkin 1962).
The University of Vienna medical school was an outpost of the new hyperscientific biology, with one of its promulgators, Briicke, holding a major chair and directing the physiological institute (Bernfeld 1944). Ironically, Freud tells us that his decision to enter medical school was determined by hearing the “Fragment on Nature” attributed to Goethe read aloud at a public lecture. This short prose poem is an epitome of Naturphilosophie, and it must have swayed Freud because of his long standing admiration for Goethe and perhaps because of a “longing for philosophical knowledge,” which had dominated his early years, as he said later in a letter to Fliess. Evolution had been a major tenet of Naturphilosophie; so it is not surprising that this 1780 dithyramb could be part of a lecture on comparative anatomy, the discipline that furnished much of the crucial evidence for Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859).
Energy and evolution
Perhaps the two most exciting concepts of the nineteenth century were energy and evolution; both of these strongly influenced Freud’s teachers at the medical school. Helmholtz had read to the 1847 group his fundamental paper on the conservation of energy—presented as a contribution to physiology. Thirty years later, Briicke’s lectures were full of the closely related (and still poorly differentiated) concepts of energy and force. To use these dynamic concepts was the very hallmark of the scientific approach; Brücke taught that the “real causes are symbolized in science by the word ‘force’” (Bernfeld 1944, p. 349). It seems obvious that the first of Freud’s three metapsychological points of view, the dynamic (explanation in terms of psychological forces), had its origins in this exciting attempt to raise the scientific level of physiology by the diligent application of mechanics and especially of dynamics, that branch of mechanics dealing with forces and the laws of motion. The heavily quantitative emphasis of the school of Helmholtz and its stress on energy are clearly the main determinants of metapsychology seen from the economic point of view (explanations in terms of quantities of energy). The fact that, among authors Freud respected most, such disparate figures as Fechner and Hughlings Jackson held to dynamic and economic viewpoints no doubt strengthened Freud’s unquestioning conviction that these viewpoints are absolutely neces sary elements of an explanatory theory.
Despite its physicalistic program, the actual work of Briicke’s institute was largely classical physiology and histology. Freud had had his Darwinian scientific baptism under Claus in a micro scopic search for the missing testes of the eel, and his several attempts at physiological and chemical experiments under other auspices were fruitless. He was happy, therefore, to stay at the microscope where Brücke assigned him neurohistological studies, inspired by and contributing to evolutionary theory. When he worked with Meynert, it was again in a structural discipline with a genetic method— the study of brain anatomy using a series of fetal brains to trace the medullar pathways by following their development. His subsequent clinical practice was in neurology, a discipline which, as Bernfeld (1951) has noted, was “merely a diagnostic application of anatomy.” Moreover, Freud’s first fullscale theoretical model, the “Project” of 1895, is foremost a theory about the structural organization of the brain, both gross and fine. His early training thus demonstrably convinced him that a scientific theory has to have a structural (or topographic) base.
Of Freud’s enduring contributions listed above, the two that are most plausibly traced to the intellectual climate of physicalistic physiology and to specific teachings of Brücke and Meynert are psy chic determinism and the genetic point of view. The evolutionary surge of Naturphilosophie, given a modern, scientific, and nonteleological form in Darwinism, inspired all the biological sciences of the late nineteenth century with a conviction that phenomena of life cannot be understood without the elucidation of how the organism develops—out of its own parental germ plasm and out of a phylogenetic series. This point of view pervaded all of Freud’s work in this first period; it would have been surprising if he had not carried it over and extended it when he turned to psychopathology, as Spencer was doing in academic sociology and psychology.
The assumption of exceptionless determinism was so fundamental a principle of mechanistic science as hardly to need discussion. Freud was exposed to it on all sides in the university and in much of his reading, then and later. Doubtless, this conviction that all phenomena are lawful and are thus legitimate subjects of scientific interest helped Freud to pay attention to the trivia of mental life and underlay his conviction that even if a patient relaxed the controls of conscious purpose in favor of free association, the material he produced would not be random but would betray an inner organi zation, a deeper and more meaningful set of psychological laws.
The unconscious
But the existence of psychological forces determining a meaningful inner organization required the assumption of a dynamic unconscious realm of the mind, besides conscious ness. Many writers have shown how much a part of the thought of the time one part of this assumption was: “the general conception of unconscious mental processes was conceivable … around 1700, topical around 1800, and fashionable around 1870-1880” (Whyte 1960, pp. 168-169). Among the scientists known to have been familiar to Freud during his formative years (before 1900)—Charcot, Bernheim, Breuer, Lipps, H. Jackson, Galton, Fechner, and Helmholtz—all had one or another con cept of the unconscious; other such concepts are to be found in writings known to have influenced Freud: those of the philosophers Plato, Kant, and Spinoza (Aron 1963-1964), the Bible, and the works of his favorite writers of fiction, Goethe, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Dostoevski. Moreover, the Herbartian psychology taught in all Austrian secondary schools when Freud was in the Gymnasium was presented “not as one of several schools of psychology but as a well-established semi-official psychology” (Andersson 1962); together with asso-ciationism, it was adopted by Meynert and trans lated into neurological terms. It was a theory of the dynamic interaction of ideas, some of which may repress others below the threshold of consciousness, whence they may be hindered from rising by the resistance of the more or less inte grated masses of ideas. This is, not surprisingly, precisely the terminology used by Breuer and Freud in 1893 ([1893-1895] 1955, chapter 1) in their first attempt at a psychological explanation of hysteria.
It is possible to find some predecessor who expressed one or another of most components of Freud’s conception of the unconscious (though it is not established that any of them were known to Freud before he formed his own hypotheses)—for example, symbolism in dreams (von Schubert, Schemer), the role of dream symbols in myths (Carus, von Schubert), dreams as wish fulfillments (Plato, Maass), and the unconscious as the source of powerful motives (Herder, Richter) and of artis tic creativity (Goethe, Schiller). Nevertheless, these were mostly isolated apercus; even von Hartmann, whose Philosophy of the Unconscious touches on all of them, was not able to integrate these fragmentary insights into a coherent theory, like the psycho analytic theory of the primary process. Further more, Freud differed from all his “anticipators” in that they remained outside the cave and made remarks—often profound ones—on what they glimpsed inside, but Freud went boldly in and devoted himself for decades to its painstaking (and painful) empirical exploration. Although the idea of unconscious processes had been around for centuries, Freud forced us to see the true power and pervasiveness of these processes in man’s thought, feeling, and behavior.
Sexuality
The enormous importance of sexuality as a basic human motive had long been explored by poets and dramatists, and there had been many times when it was freely discussed in science and medicine as well as in everyday conversation. The prevailing belief today is that the second half of the nineteenth century, when Freud grew to maturity, was an era of unusually strong shame about sexuality and of moralistic attempts to suppress even its scientific study in the name of Christian morality; this climate of opinion influenced Freud’s own personality and behavior, so characterized by propriety, self-control, and conventional monogamy. Yet our stereotype of Victorian prudery is probably oversimple; in any case, by the end of the nineteenth century the tide had begun to turn; Bry and Rifkin (1962) and Rieff (1959, chapter 10) have documented many social, literary, artistic, and scientific countermovements. In addition, it might be mentioned that sexology was already an established (if minor) science when Freud’s con tributions first appeared. Though Freud and Fliess felt like lonely pioneers, Magnus Hirschfeld and Krafft-Ebing had preceded both of them, and Havelock Ellis and G. Stanley Hall were their contemporaries. We know little about how a Zeitgeist of slowly liberalizing attitudes about sex may have been transmitted to Freud. We do know that there were contemporary moves to broaden the concept of sexuality and extend it backward in the life span, such as the observations of diffuse sexuality in children by Bell (1902), the relation of sucking and masturbation in the first year by Roehmer (1891), and the plasticity of the sexual drive in children (Barnes 1892).
Again, diligent historical scholarship can uncover predecessors for many, perhaps most, of Freud’s lastingly valid formulations about sex. For example, Shakow and Rapaport (1964) have pointed to James’s (1890) recognition of the potentiality for perversion in all of us; and many authors have discussed the similarities between Freud’s and Plato’s broad concept of eros. Freud himself ac knowledged that the idea of universal bisexuality had first been suggested to him by Fliess. In the era of moral treatment, various sexual etiologies had been suggested for a number of neurotic conditions, which made Freud’s first psychoanalytic papers seem more reactionary than radical to many of his organically minded psychiatric colleagues.
As with the difference between Freud and earlier writers on the unconscious, so here again it was he alone who really devoted himself to prolonged, focused empirical as well as theoretical work on sexuality. In addition, however, Freud differs from most of the others who have helped to liberalize sexual mores in his mode of presenting his conclusions: he always refused to pull his punches, to make any concessions to prudishness in hopes of gaining a more sympathetic hearing; but at the same time, he had not the slightest tendency to glorify or romanticize sexuality. He presented his facts and theories dryly and as directly as his own distaste allowed him. In the short run, he antagonized the bluestockings and undermined the fem inists, while disappointing the libertines and disillusioning the sexual Utopians. By overstating the centrality of sexuality and stretching the concept of libido, he laid himself open to misunderstanding as a pansexualist and attained the unwelcome no toriety of a succes de scandale. In the long run, however, the net effect was to force the world’s attention to the problems of sex, greatly advancing the contemporaneous anti-Victorian movements and, despite vicious opposition and vilification, probably getting his ideas a hearing and ultimate acceptance faster than he could have done in any other way.
Role of conflict
Views of man’s behavior as the outcome of interior conflicts have been propounded since ancient times. The pervasive human tendency to think in terms of dichotomies is speculatively traceable to anatomical bilateral symmetry and to the diurnal cycle of light and dark. In any case, a probable shaping influence on Freud’s conceptual orientations is the centrality of conflict between unconscious purposive forces in the world view of Naturphilosophie. More immediately, the Herbartian psychology of Lindner that Freud studied in the Gymnasium treats the life of the mind in terms of conflicting ideas, which could be smoothly absorbed into the paradigm of parallelo grams of forces in physicalistic physiology. Hughlings Jackson, whom Freud greatly admired, held to even more proto-Freudian views on the role of conflicting forces (Stengel 1954a; 1954b).
The substance of the conflicting forces in Freud’s final model is clearly related to traditions in Western thought going at least as far back as Empedocles, for whom love alternated with its antithesis, strife, and to religious sources: God versus Satan and the doctrine of conscience as the opponent of the base passions. In the era of moral treatment, there had been no dearth of psychiatrists who saw these inner battles as a cause of neurosis. Carter, writing in 1853, observed the conflict between sexual desire and moral scruple in chaste hysterics of both sexes and even blamed “the mod ern necessity of [a single woman’s] entire conceal ment” of her sexuality as the social cause of most hysteria (see Hunter & Macalpine 1963, pp. 1002-1003).
Defense and repression
Freud’s conception of defense, more particularly his ideas about defense against anxiety, seems to be a more original clinical innovation than most other parts of psychoanalytic theory. Perhaps its model was the medical conception of the body’s defenses against pathogenic invasion; and the proposition that ideas can be repressed was familiar in Herbartian psychology. Nietzsche described the general outlines of several specific defenses—according to Brandt (1955), repression, isolation, reaction formation, sublimation, and projection—but there is no evidence that Freud knew about it. These conceptions and the closely related signal theory of anxiety are as directly derived from clinical observation as any in psycho analysis and are among Freud’s most original contributions.
Regression
The Darwinian origins of the genetic viewpoint in psychoanalysis have been briefly mentioned. An important specific mediator of Darwinism was Hughlings Jackson, from whose view of the evolutionary organization of the brain Freud took the conception of a hierarchic organization of psychic structures (Rapaport 1959), and from whose correlated theory of neurological diseases as “reversals of evolution,” Freud derived the concept of regression as an explanation of psychopathogenesis (Stengel 1954a; 1954fa). The genetic discipline of embryology had been given an enormous impetus by Darwin; Freud’s use of fetal materials in his medullar researches must have caused him to study this discipline with particular care and to become familiar with the epigenetic principle that is implicit in his doctrine of psychosexual development. The phenomenon of identification and its role in interpersonal and social relations of all kinds, as well as its outstanding importance in development, appears to be largely the outgrowth of clinical observation; Rieff’s (1959) hint that it may owe something to the “sympathy” of earlier social theorists (for example, Adam Smith) re mains unexplored. By contrast, it is easy to find plenty of antecedent recognition of the importance of impulse control in the growth of character.
Passive reflex model
Freud put his personal stamp upon all the conceptions he drew—directly or indirectly—from his broad intellectual heritage. His reworking of the ideas of others often brought to the forefront their latent potentialities for advancing the understanding of the central problems—the innermost longings and agonies— of real persons. At times, however, the usefulness of Freud’s ideas was marred by his need to fit them into his set of basic working assumptions, the passive reflex model of the nervous system.
This model was synthesized by Freud from the physicalistic physiology of his teachers and was more clearly enunciated in the “Project” than in any of the works of Brücke, Meynert, Breuer, or Exner, in which its elements may be clearly discerned (Amacher 1965). Anticipations of the dynamic, economic, and topographic points of view are plainly to be seen in books that Freud cited, for example, those by Fechner (Ellenberger 1956) and Jackson (Stengel 1954a; Spehlmann 1953); the economic point of view is also traceable to Darwin (Andersson 1962). It seems safe to conclude, therefore, that this set of principles was concurrently developed by many leading scientists in Germany and Austria in their attempts to apply the physics of Helmholtz and his school to biology and to generalize the reflex arc as a model of all mental processes in order to close the doors to such romantic notions as spontaneity, free will, and vitalism. Although virtually all of the assumptions underlying the passive reflex model are demonstrably untrue, much of the same doctrine underlies the behavioristic schools of psychology and is only now being painfully modified.
When Freud put aside explicit neurological theorizing, he was unable to give up the passive reflex model and the closely related physicalistic concept of reality (Spehlmann 1953; Holt 1965a). Although he explicitly postponed any attempt to relate the terms of metapsychology to processes and loci in the body, he substituted psychological theories that carry the same burden of anachronistic assumptions.
Nevertheless, Freud did not make a clean break from neurology, which fact contributed to his unclear and inconsistent stand on the mind-body problem (Rubinstein 1965; Holt 1965a). Jones (1953-1957, vol. 1) and a number of other authors portray him as a consistent follower of Jackson in a psychophysical parallelism that makes mind an “independent concomitant” of brain. But neither Jackson himself, who at times postulated that physical energy is directly transformed into psychic energy (Spehlmann 1953), nor Freud’s teachers held to a consistent position (Amacher 1965); it was common to slip into interactionism, and Freud followed suit (Andersson 1962, p. 107). The concept of hysterical conversion is the most obvious instance of interactionism.
Speculative elements
The concept of Freud’s most frequently rejected, at least among psychoanalysts, is the death instinct; not surprisingly, many of them have attributed this concept to Freud’s own needs and conflicts. While the evidence is impressive that for many years Freud had an unusual and probably pathological preoccupation with death, there are plenty of less tendentious hypotheses about sources for this notion. Freud himself traced it to the ancient Greeks; it has been likened to the Christian concept of original sin; pessimistic, late romantic philosophers like Nietzsche contributed a strain of thought of which Freud could not have been unaware, however little he read them directly. More generally, the works in which he developed the theory of the repetition compulsion (clearly related as it is to the ancient conception of “the eternal return”) and the virtually mythic concepts of life- and death-instincts are part of his phylogenetic theory. It is tempting to interpret this last development in Freud’s thought as a kind of return of the repressed: that youthful speculative bent and yearning for broad philosophical knowledge which he repeatedly admitted fearing in himself and suppressed for many years (Holt 1963). His exposure to and enthusiasm for Natur-philosophie antedated his conversion to physicalistic physiology, which helped him put such unscientific ways of thought out of mind. Even the philosopher with whom he studied, Brentano, strongly opposed Naturphilosophie and advocated the scientific method as the only valid source of knowledge.
Yet the old mode of thought remained an undercurrent in his thinking, as it did in that of his friend Fliess (Galdston 1956). Finally, after Freud’s change of identity at the turn of the century, after his great discoveries, the establishment of the psychoanalytic movement, and his first international recognition, the old mode of thought may have seemed less threatening. In Totem and Taboo (1913), one of his favorites among his own books, he created what he himself called a “scientific myth” (the slaying of the Darwinian primal horde’s father). Shortly thereafter, he first read Lamarck, who was strongly identified with Naturphilosophie. It is Fechner the Naturphilosoph, not the psychophysicist, whom he cited in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), and the loose, analogical, teleological, and personifying mode of thought he employed there is in marked contrast to the cognitive style of his metapsychological works (Holt 1965b). Many properties of his concept of psychic energy can be traced to the vitalism that was a prominent feature of Naturphilosophie (Holt 1966). Some of the specific fallacies in his phylogenetic works can be traced to sources on the more mechanisticmaterialistic side: Haeckel’s “biogenetic law” that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny seemed to provide respectable scientific auspices for the extension of genetic speculations based on individuals to the development of all mankind; Spencer and various post-Darwinians were the source of his linearevolutionary conception of anthropology; and the inheritance of acquired characters had been a general assumption of the organic-hereditarian psychiatrists of Freud’s formative period (Andersson 1962), as well as having been given some currency by Darwin himself (Ritvo 1965). Nevertheless, the major flaws of both manner and matter in Freud’s speculative works show the unmistakable earmarks of Naturphilosophie.
Freud’s stature is too great for his errors to require any whitewashing; it is not an apology for him but a fact that the least tenable aspects of his theories are traceable to influences that shaped his basic outlook when he was still a student, while his enduring achievements seem to owe less to antecedent influences. It appears to be one of the marks of a genius that he finds more sources of ideas in his reading and observation and subjects them to a truer integration and transmutation than does the less gifted man. The great contributor to knowledge (who may or may not be a genius) does not only toss off brilliant sparks of ideas; he lights and tends an enduring fire. Freud had both of these innovative capacities and more; his ideas have the remarkable property of being self-transcending. He taught us how to know more than he could, how to find and use the best in what he left by testing it against reality.
Robert R. Holt
[For a listing of articles describing Freud’s influence upon psychology, psychiatry, and the other social sciences, see the detailed guide under the entryPsychoanalysis. Directly related to Freud’s work and influence are the biographies ofAbraham; Adler; Alexander; Charcot; Ellis; Fechner; Ferenczi; Helmholtz; Horney; Jones; Jung; Klein; Müller, Johannes; Rank; Rapaport; Reich; Roheim; Sullivan.]
WORKS BY FREUD
(1887–1902) 1954 The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts and Notes: 1887–1902. New York: Basic Books.
(1893–1895) 1955 Breuer, Josef; and Freud, Sigmund Studies on Hysteria. Volume 2 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth; New York: Macmillan.
(1895) 1954 Project for a Scientific Psychology. Pages 347-445 in Sigmund Freud, The Origins of Psycho analysis. New York: Basic Books.
(1900) 1953 The Interpretation of Dreams. Volumes 4-5 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychologi cal Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth; New York: Macmillan.
(1905) 1953 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Volume 7, pages 123-245 in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth; New York: Macmillan.
(1913) 1959 Totem and Taboo. Volume 13, pages ix-162 in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychologi cal Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth; New York: Macmillan.
(1915) 1957 Papers on Metapsychology. Volume 14, pages 109-243 in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth; New York: Macmillan.
(1920) 1955 Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Volume 18, pages 7-66 in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth; New York: Macmillan.
(1921) 1955 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Volume 18, pages 69-134 in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth; New York: Macmillan.
(1923) 1961 The Ego and the Id. Volume 19, pages 12-63 in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psycho logical Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth; New York: Macmillan.
(1926) 1959 Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. Volume 20, pages 77-178 in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth; New York: Macmillan.
(1927) 1961 The Future of an Illusion. Volume 21, pages 5-58 in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth; New York: Macmillan.
(1930) 1961 Civilization and Its Discontents. Volume 22, pages 64-148 in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth; New York: Macmillan.
(1934–1938) 1964 Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays. Volume 23 in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth; New York: Macmillan.
Gesammelte Schriften. 12 vols. Leipzig, Vienna and Zurich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1924–1934.
Gesammelte Werke. 18 vols. London: Imago, 1940–1952.
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 vols. London: Hogarth; New York: Macmillan, 1953–1964.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Amacher, Peter 1965 Freud’s Neurological Education and Its Influence on Psychoanalytic Theory. Psycho logical Issues, Vol. 4, No. 4; Monograph No. 16. New York: International Universities Press.
Andersson, Ola 1962 Studies in the Prehistory of Psychoanalysis: The Etiology of Psychoneuroses and Some Related Themes in Sigmund Freud’s Scientific Writings and Letters, 1886–1896. Stockholm: Svenska Bokforlaget Norstedts.
Aron, William 1963-1964 Freud and Spinoza. Harofe haivri [1963] no. 2:260-242; [1964] no. 1:284-265; [1964] no. 2:260–242.
Barnes, E. 1892 Feelings and Ideas of Sex in Children. Pedagogical Seminary 2:199–203. ? Now called the Journal of Genetic Psychology.
Bell, Sanford 1902 A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love Between the Sexes. American Journal of Psychology 13:325–354.
Bernfeld, Siegfried 1944 Freud’s Earliest Theories and the School of Helmholtz. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 13:341–362.
Bernfeld, Siegfried 1951 Sigmund Freud, M.D.: 1882–1885. International Journal of Psycho-analysis 32:204–217.
Brandt, Rudolf 1955 Freud and Nietzsche: A Com parison. Ottawa, University of, Revue 25:225–234.
Bry, Ilse; and Rifkin, Alfred H. 1962 Freud and the History of Ideas: Primary Sources, 1886–1910. Pages 6-36 in Academy of Psychoanalysis, Science and Psychoanalysis. Volume 5: Psychoanalytic Education. New York: Grune.
Cranefield, Paul F. 1957 The Organic Physics of 1847 and the Biophysics of Today. Journal of the His tory of Medicine 12:407–423.
Darwin, Charles (1859) 1964 On the Origin of Species. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.
Ellenberger, Henri F. 1956 Fechner and Freud. Menninger Clinic, Bulletin 20:201–214.
Galdston, Iago 1956 Freud and Romantic Medicine. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 30:489–507.
Gill, Merton M. 1959 The Present State of Psychoanalytic Theory. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 58:1–8.
Holt, Robert R. 1963 Two Influences on Freud’s Scientific Thought: A Fragment of Intellectual Biography. Pages 364-387 in Robert N. White (editor), The Study of Lives. New York: Atherton.
Holt, Robert R. 1965a A Review of Some of Freud’s Biological Assumptions and Their Influence on His Theories. Pages 93-124 in Norman S. Greenfield and William C. Lewis (editors), Psychoanalysis and Current Biological Thought. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press.
Holt, Robert R. 1965b Freud’s Cognitive Style. American Imago 22:163–179.
Holt, Robert R. 1966 Beyond Vitalism and Mechanism: Freud’s Concept of Psychic Energy. Unpublished manuscript.
Hunter, Richard A.; and macalpine, Ida (editors) 1963 Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1860: A History Presented in Selected English Texts. Oxford Univ. Press. ? See especially pages 1002-1003 and 1015–1018.
James, William (1890) 1962 The Principles of Psychology. 2 vols. New York: Smith.
Jones, Ernest 1953-1957 The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. 3 vols. New York: Basic Books. ? Vol ume 1: Formative Years and the Great Discoveries, 1953. Volume 2: Years of Maturity, 1955. Volume 3: Last Phase, 1957.
Kardiner, Abram; Karush, Aaron; and Ovesey, Lionel 1959 A Methodological Study of Freudian Theory. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 129:11-19, 133-143, 207-221, 341–356.
Parsons, Talcott (1952) 1953 The Superego and the Theory of Social Systems. Pages 13-29 in Talcott Parsons, Robert F. Bales, and Edward A. Shils. WorkingPapers in the Theory of Action. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press.
Parsons, Talcott (1958) 1964 Social Structure and the Development of Personality: Freud’s Contribution to the Integration of Psychology and Sociology. Pages 78-111 in Talcott Parsons, Social Structure and Per sonality. New York: Free Press.
Rapaport, David 1959 The Structure of Psychoanalytic Theory: A Systematizing Attempt. Pages 55-183 in S. Koch (editor), Psychology: A Study of a Science. Volume 3: Formulations of the Person and the Social Context. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Rapaport, David; and Gill, Merton 1959 The Points of View and Assumptions of Metapsychology. International Journal of Psycho-analysis 40:153–162.
Rieff, Philip 1959 Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. New York: Viking.
Ritvo, Lucille B. 1965 Darwin as the Source of Freud’s Neo-Lamarckianism. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 13:499–517.
Roehmer, A. 1891 Ueber psychopatische Minderwertigkeiten des Sauglingsalter. Medizinisches Korrespondenzblatt filr Wurtemberg 61:265-269, 273-279, 281-285, 289–292.
Rubinstein, B. B. 1965 Psychoanalytic Theory and the Mind-Body Problem. Pages 35-56 in Norman S. Greenfield and William C. Lewis (editors), Psycho analysis and Current Biological Thought. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press.
Shakow, David; and rapaport, david 1964 The Influ ence of Freud on American Psychology. Psychological Issues, Vol. 4, No. 1. New York: International Universities Press.
Spehlmann, Rainer 1953 Sigmund Freuds neurologische Schriften: Fine Untersuchung zur Vorgeschichte der Psychoanalyse. Berlin: Springer.
Stengel, E. 1954a A Re-evaluation of Freud’s Book On Aphasia: Its Significance for Psychoanalysis. International Journal of Psycho-analysis 35:85–89.
Stengel, E. 1954b The Origins and Status of Dynamic Psychiatry. British Journal of Medical Psychology 27: 193–200.
White, Robert W. 1963 Ego and Reality in Psychoanalytic Theory: A Proposal Regarding Independent Ego Energies. Psychological Issues, Vol. 3, No. 3. New York: International Universities Press.
Whyte, Lancelot L. 1960 The Unconscious Before Freud. New York: Basic Books.