D3

III. FREUD'S LEGACY

By Stephen Palmquist (stevepq@hkbu.edu.hk)

7. Psychoanalysis and Sex

This week we shall be examining the main ideas of the person widely regarded as both the founder of psychotherapy and the discoverer of the unconscious, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). That Freud deserves to be honored as a pioneer in developing a new approach to psychology is undoubtedly true; but we must be careful to avoid the assumption that he did this all on his own. The fact is that the last half of the 19th Century saw a growing interest in personality theories and in how they might be applied to psychological illnesses. And the idea that the human mind has an unconscious side, hidden from the view of our conscious minds, was being treated seriously by numerous theorists before Freud. (Indeed, six lengthy chapters precede the chapter on Freud in Ellenberger's classic book, The Discovery of the Unconscious.) When Freud began training as a medical doctor at Vienna University in 1873, he entered into a climate where colleagues were already actively searching for effective forms of therapy and meaningful ways of understanding the unconscious.

If Freud was not the first psychotherapist and did not invent the notion of the unconscious, then what did he do that makes him such an important figure in the history of psychology? The two most significant answers to this question, I believe, are as follows. First, he constructed a systematic, scientifically-based theory of the whole structure of human personality (conscious and unconscious). Here he drew together insights from the many other scholars who had been working in this area (most now ignored), and went well beyond them with new insights into some areas that had hardly been touched before. Second, he popularized the practice of psychotherapy and belief in the unconscious by showing in his many writings how his theory has meaningful practical (therapeutic) applications. The success of his efforts to popularize his views is evidenced by the fact that before Freud only intellectuals talked about the unconscious; ordinary people typically assumed a naive form of Cartesian dualism, with the material body being "inhabited" by a conscious mind. After Freud, by contrast, belief in the dual nature of the mind (i.e., as both conscious and unconscious) has been taken for granted by most people.

Freud developed his understanding of the unconscious and his method of psychotherapy gradually over a number of years. The main focus of Lecture 8 will be on his theory of the structure of the personality, so let us concentrate today on his approach to therapy. After medical school, Freud's first experience with mentally ill patients came in a hospital where some doctors used hypnosis to assist them in their treatment of hysteria (a mental illness characterized by intense emotions that interrupt the body's normal functioning). Freud was deeply impressed by the power doctors were able to gain over the minds of people who had been hypnotized. He was convinced that by understanding the nature and functions of this hidden and largely unharnessed power, it could become a significant tool for psychological healing. This began his lifelong search for better and better explanations of the unconscious.

Those of you who have been hypnotized or have seen others being hypnotized will have some idea why Freud was so impressed. Once I saw a hypnotist tell a woman from the audience to lay down across three chairs. After she was hypnotized, the hypnotist told her to make her body rigid like a board. He then removed the middle chair, leaving the woman to be supported only by her head and feet. She remained horizontal, just as if she were being supported by a board. But as soon as the hypnotist "awakened" the woman, her body went limp and she could no longer support herself on just two chairs. It was amazing! Seeing patients in mental hospitals undergo painful procedures without experiencing any pain when they were hypnotized convinced Freud that the human unconscious must play a more significant role in healing than the conscious.

Soon Freud began seeing private patients with various sorts of emotional problems. Mainly he tended to work with rich, European women who were "neurotic". Neurosis develops in a person as a way of responding to very stressful (traumatic) situations. It is characterized by specific abnormal behavior patterns. For instance, a person who had nearly been hit by a train as a young child might have an irrational fear of riding in trains as an adult. Or a person who nearly drowns in the bathtub at a young age might be unable to learn how to swim, no matter how many lessons he or she takes. If the stress of a person's life is so intolerable that the person's overall personality disintegrates, then a "psychosis" will develop. Unlike a neurotic, who might function quite normally in most social situations, a psychotic copes with life's stress by inventing a false reality and behaving in generally abnormal ways, completely detaching their personality from the "normal" world. As we shall see next week, Carl Jung's first patients were psychotics-a difference that could be partly responsible for the different views Freud and Jung had on the nature and purpose of therapy.

The name Freud gave his approach to therapy, "psychoanalysis", conveys the fact that he viewed the unconscious the way medical doctors in those days were taught to approach physical diseases: as a problem to be dissected and analyzed into its constituent parts, traced back to its determining causes, and then mechanically repaired by reversing those causes. The main challenge Freud faced during the early years when he was first developing what would become psychoanalysis (i.e., roughly from 1885 to 1897) was to discover ways of obtaining knowledge about the unconscious roots of his patient's problems. Today we'll have a look at several of the early insights that provided the background for his most important discoveries.

One of the first psychoanalytic methods Freud discovered was "free association". By encouraging his patients to speak spontaneously about their problem (or about any situation), without heeding the social constraints that normally moderate our speech, he found that solutions (or other relevant insights) would sometimes emerge from the unconscious. In other words, his patients would suddenly say something unexpectedly, something previously hidden from their conscious mind, and this could be analyzed in a way that revealed it to be a key to solving their problem. Sometimes he used hypnosis to encourage free association to be more spontaneous. But other therapists (most notably, Jung) soon developed what came to be regarded as a more systematic method: association tests.

An association test is a list of words the therapist draws up and reads to the patient, one by one. After the therapist says a word, the patient must say the first word that comes to mind, whether or not there is any "logical" relationship between the two. The therapist records the patient's responses, and analyzes them to find any evidence of patterns that might be determined by the unconscious. By carefully selecting appropriate lists of potentially relevant words and insuring that the patient gives spontaneous, unplanned answers, Freud and Jung believed such tests could stimulate associations that would be more likely to suggest a solution to the patient's problems. Consider, for example, the following association test, where the first word is said by the therapist, and the second is the response given by the patient, with an asterisk (*) indicating that the patient pauses before answering:

1. dog - cat	6. holiday - lonely	11. head - hair	16. boat - ****
2. blue - green	7. death - *life	12. sad - orphan	17. moon -
3. water - *dirty	8. white - pure	13. mother - mom	18. stars -
4. child - fear	9. black - night	14. sea - *swim	19. flower -
5. house - home	10. eat - food	15. shoes - socks	20. love -

Note that most of the answers can be easily explained through some conscious, logical connection (e.g., "life" is the opposite of "death", "cats" are the main alternative to "dogs" as house pets, etc.). But a few of the answers are quite strange (e.g., "holidays" are not usually "lonely", and the word "child" would not remind most people of "fear").

The unusual answers are typically regarded as clues to the recovery of past memories that had been forgotten, because the original events were too painful. This process, called "repression", involves pushing painful memories into the unconscious. Freud shocked the Victorian culture of his time by claiming that all repression is ultimately sexual in nature and takes place mainly before a child reaches puberty. (Previously, sexual development was believed only to begin at puberty.) Freud initially believed the contents of the unconscious are made up entirely of such repressed memories of sexual frustration. In Lecture 8 I'll explain how he revised this extreme view in his more mature theory of childhood development. For now the important thing to note is that Freud regarded repression as the true cause of all mental disorders. Becoming aware of these forgotten memories is the key to psychological healing, and is the basic purpose for engaging in psychoanalysis.

One of Freud's greatest early insights came when he realized what is now a standard assumption of most types of psychotherapy: when a person is able to recover an awareness of some repressed "memory" and in some sense to relive the painful event, the symptoms caused by the repression will disappear-sometimes immediately, like magic! In the above example of an association test, Freud might ask the patient to talk further about the connection between "sad" and "orphan", in hopes that a memory would be uncovered of some childhood event that made the patient feel like an orphan, unloved by his or her parents. Or he might inquire as to whether the patient remembers childhood as a happy or fearful time of life (see word 4). The goal of all such inquiries is to bring to light whatever secret the unconscious is trying to hide from the patient's conscious mind, so that it can be analyzed and properly understood. This takes away its power to cause mental disturbances.

Before we go on, please note that I did not say psychoanalysis enables us actually to remember forgotten memories. In some cases, a genuine memory of what had previously been forgotten may result. But many of the repressions dealt with by psychoanalysis relate to events that happened when we were too young to remember. I have a friend, for example, who once told me he "remembers" the day his parents conceived him! Obviously, in such extreme cases, when the person's brain has not yet even been formed, we are not talking about actual memory, but about other ways of gaining knowledge (or awareness) of past events. Thus, Freud carefully expresses his insight not in terms of real memory, but in terms of an analytic procedure that allows us to gain awareness of what must be presumed to lie deep in the unconscious (ID 191): "Where it has been possible to trace a pathological idea [i.e., a mental illness] back to those elements in the psychic life of the patient to which it owed its origin, this idea has crumbled away, and the patient has been relieved of it."

Another, closely related breakthrough came when Freud noticed that at certain points in the process of association most patients will encounter "resistance". That is, patients will come to a point when their mind just "goes blank"-e.g., they will find themselves "stuck" on one word of an association test, unable to give any further responses. In the above example, the experiment stopped at word 16, because the patient encountered such a resistance, as represented by the "****". When this happens, the therapist assumes there must be something about the word ("boat") that caused the patient's unconscious to block the spontaneous answer that would have otherwise come up. Presumably, this happened because remembering that association would be too painful for the patient to bear. Other moments of hesitation during the test might provide clues as to why this happened. For instance, the therapist might question whether "life" was really the first word that came to mind in response to "death"; perhaps the patient's conscious mind stepped in and substituted a "safer" word for one that would have brought the analysis too close to whatever the unconscious is hiding. Likewise, he might ask for further associations relating to dirty water (see word 3).

Resistance, by the way, is an important psychological phenomenon to keep in mind while you are doing your dream diary project. A strong resistance to dream interpretation can manifest itself in several ways. The most obvious is when we remember very few dreams and/or only fragments: not enough material is available, making us reluctant to begin even trying to interpret what we have. But remembering numerous long dreams every day can also lead to a form of resistance: we become overwhelmed with too much material, so that the really important material is difficult to detect and we end up not interpreting anything! If you experience either type of resistance, your first response should not be to try harder to invent some interpretation. If you do this, the interpretation is likely to be relatively meaningless. Instead, focus your attention on the resistance itself: feel the resistance. That is, do not run away from the problem in hopes that it will just fix itself. Face up to it. Try to understand why it is happening. Make it part of your interpretation! Along these lines, Bosnak (LCD 17) gives the following advice about what to do when resistances give you negative feelings about your dreamwork: "Try to feel the resistances as deeply as you can.... Learning to sense resistances is much more important than eliminating them." The same applies any time you have trouble either remembering or interpreting a particular part of a dream that seems important. Instead of just giving up hope or forcing a false solution, focus your attention on your own feeling of inability, trying to experience the resistance. In many cases doing this will break its power over you and an idea for a meaningful interpretation will suddenly appear "out of nowhere".

Rather than being discouraged by such resistances, Freud taught that we should focus on them and seek to understand why they occur when they do; for in this way we can eventually break through to the unconscious root of the repression that caused the resistance in the first place. The problem Freud encountered, however, was that many patients were simply unable to engage in this difficult task. Their neuroses had produced too many defense mechanisms to allow even the most skilled therapist to break through the resistances. After several years of frustration in this regard, Freud accidentally stumbled across another insight-one that turned out to be the greatest discovery of his life.

One of Freud's patients, who had been bed-ridden for some time due to a severe neurosis, spontaneously told Freud a dream she remembered from the night before. At first he ignored this as an irrelevant fantasy; but suddenly he realized that the dream provided a crucial clue to the forgotten memory that would enable this patient to be healed. He pursued the idea and within a short time, the patient was completely cured of her neurosis. In the third lecture this week (Lecture 9) we shall examine Freud's theory of dream interpretation in detail. But first we'll take a closer look (in Lecture 8) at how sexuality plays a fundamental role in Freud's understanding of the origin and structure of the psyche.

To conclude this lecture, let's briefly assess Freud's claim that all repressed material is sexual in nature. Most psychotherapists nowadays (including most Freudians!) agree that Freud was wrong to emphasize sex so exclusively. The question is, why was he so convinced he was right? Three considerations are noteworthy here. The first is that his understanding of what counts as "sex" was far broader than the ordinary use of this word would allow. His theory becomes more believable (though still highly debatable) once we realize the spectrum of desires he regarded as sexual in nature. This will become more clear in Lecture 8. The second point is that Freud's theory may have been accurate for the majority of his patients without being universal. Initially, he based his conclusions largely on his own self-analysis. He was convinced that his own neurotic tendencies were rooted in repressions of his early childhood sexual urges. Of course, one cannot necessarily make a universal judgment about the nature of unconscious repressions based on only one case. But, as I mentioned earlier, nearly all Freud's patients were wealthy European women. These women were all born and raised at the height of the Victorian Age (roughly, the last half of the 19th Century), an age perhaps best known for its strict suppression of overt sexual expression. Naturally, in such a cultural climate a large majority of neuroses are likely to arise as a direct result of this overly strict cultural suppression. With this in mind, we can suggest that many, if not most, of Freud's diagnoses were probably correct; his mistake was that he did not see clearly beyond his own culture, to the deeper layers of the unconscious that are shared by all human beings.

Finally, toward the end of his life Freud himself softened his extreme view that sex is the source of all repression. As we shall see in the next lecture, he began to acknowledge two basic instinctual drives: the sex drive and the "death" drive. Moreover, he acknowledged the presence of "ancestral memory traces" residing in the deepest layers of the unconscious. We'll see how these operate when we examine Freud's view of the structure of the psyche (Lecture 8). For now it is enough to say that, although psychoanalysis began with an emphasis on sexuality as the source of all unconscious repressions, neither with Freud nor his followers has it ended with such an exclusive emphasis on sex.

8. The Origin and Structure of the Psyche

One of Freud's main hypotheses, as we saw in the previous lecture, was that all neuroses are caused by the repression of sexual urges. These urges constitute what Freud often calls the "libido" (i.e., the sex drive). Why did he believe the libido is responsible for so much? This question cannot be answered apart from an understanding of Freud's view that the sexual development of a typical child actually generates the structure of the adult psyche. Let us therefore begin today by examining this theoretical foundation for psychoanalysis.

The psyche of a newborn baby is entirely unconscious. It consists wholly of what Freud calls "Das Es" ("the it")-a term normally translated into English as "the id". "Id" can be regarded as an abbreviation for "instinctual demands" (or drives or desires), and is also contained in the word "libido". Through its contact with the outside world (regarded by Freud as the only "reality"), the psyche gradually begins to form a small portion of consciousness out of the undifferentiated id. Eventually, as the child becomes more and more aware of things in the external world, he or she develops "Das Ich" ("the I")-a term normally translated into English as "the ego", this being the word for "I" in both Latin and Greek. As Freud puts it in his book, The Ego and the Id, the "ego is a specially differentiated part of the id" (EI 28).

How does this differentiation take place? The child's perception of the outside world has an impact on the (originally unconscious) psyche that produces the possibility of conscious self-awareness. Anything we as adults perceive or remember about our past experience but do not actively focus our attention on (i.e., anything we could make conscious, but do not) is part of what Freud calls "the preconscious". The child's whole conscious mind would be preconscious, with no distinct ego developing out of the id, if it were not for the operation of a third major aspect of the human psyche: the "superego". By clearly distinguishing the conscious from the unconscious, the superego provides focus for the conscious mind, bringing the ego itself into being.

The superego is the part of the human psyche that is produced in response to the influence of parents, teachers, and other authority figures on the young child. It is the psyche's storehouse for all our ideas of right and wrong. When the young child's perception of the external world begins to produce consciousness, the libido's urges all seem quite acceptable at first. However, the child soon learns that certain urges are "right", while others are "wrong" (according to the society's norms). When parents tell a toddler "No! Don't touch that!", the child's psyche responds by realizing that this urge is unacceptable and pushing it back down into the unconscious. The urge does not go away; it is merely repressed. As a result, the growing child's conscious mind becomes filled mainly with "permitted ideas", while the unconscious becomes the receptacle for all that is "dirty" or "bad". The superego therefore develops into what is commonly called the "conscience": the adult's sense of right and wrong, including the tendency to feel guilty when this inner "voice" is disobeyed.

Freud viewed these various components of the human psyche as parts of one and the same organism. Although he was not always entirely consistent in his explanations of their interrelationships, it may be helpful to construct a "map" that enables us to see these complexities as parts of a whole; this will prepare us to look more closely at Freud's theory of childhood sexuality. If we think of the psyche as a circle (as in Figure II.2), touching the outside world through our perceptions, then the "topography" of a fully-developed psyche would look something like this:

Figure III.1: A Map of Freud's Theory of the Psyche

The sizes and shapes of each part will, of course, differ with each individual. But the basic relationships remain the same. The id is entirely unconscious; the ego is the focus of the conscious mind, with preconscious and perceptual elements on its periphery; and the superego is both conscious and unconscious, giving "shape" to our personality through its differentiating function.

With this map in mind, let's take a closer look at the nature and functions of each of the psyche's three main components. The id is the unconscious part of the psyche that seeks to fulfill basic instinctual demands. That is, it seeks pleasure. Operating on this "pleasure principle", the id is the source of all psychic energy (i.e., "libido"), and is essentially sexual in nature. As the oldest part of the psyche, it serves to connect us to our "roots". In the later part of his career Freud came to believe that certain "ancestral memory traces" had settled like sediment into the deepest regions of the id. (This view corresponds to Jung's far more sophisticated theory of the "collective unconscious", which we shall examine in Stage Two of this course.) These memories do not have any genuine reality, according to Freud. Rather, like everything unconscious, they are ultimately "illusions". One of the tasks of psychoanalysis is to teach patients to do away with such illusions, and learn to face the real world, harsh though it may be. This view has ominous implications for religion, as we shall see in Lecture 31.

The main function of the superego is to keep repressions in place through the enforcement of basic moral demands. It does this by causing feelings of guilt to arise whenever we allow the id's pleasure principle to determine our actions in an "inappropriate" situation. A normal superego will allow some forms of libido to "seep" through into consciousness (as represented by the break between the two sides of the superego in Figure III.1). But in many cases the superego transforms these sexual urges before allowing them to become conscious. This, Freud claims, is the source of the "higher values" we associate with culture and civilization. (We'll examine this connection between culture and guilt-consciousness in Lecture 31.) Another interesting function of the superego is to provide us with a "self-image" (sometimes called the "ego ideal"); that is, it represents the psyche to itself. A person with a "low self-image" is likely to have a superego that is too overpowering (perhaps stemming from parents or teachers who were too demanding), whereas a person who is "stuck up" or conceited is likely to have a superego that is too weak (perhaps stemming from a lack of proper discipline in childhood).

Of the three parts of the psyche, Freud's bias clearly lies with the ego. He believes a psychologically healthy person should allow the ego to be the focal point that controls the whole psyche (as represented by the focus marks around "ego" in Figure III.1). The ego's two main functions relate to its need to control the superego and the id, respectively. Externally it guards against the disintegrating forces that would eventually destroy the psyche if the superego were to gain control (see below). Such self-preservation is accomplished through the use of memory, defense mechanisms (protecting potentially harmful ideas from being consciously recognized), control of bodily actions, etc. Internally it controls the id in much the same way, insuring that desires for pleasure are allowed to be fulfilled only in appropriate situations. "Appropriate" here refers not to moral standards, but to the realization of maximum pleasure. The ego's job is to determine whether the amount of pleasure produced by "giving in" to the id will be outweighed by the guilt produced by the superego as a result, and to delay gratification if the weight of guilt is likely to be too great. Freud calls this the "reality principle", because it reflects the ego's need to focus on what is real to a person, in contrast to the illusions generated by the unconscious. (For a good description and critique of Freud's reality and pleasure principles, see LIPN 79-87.)

Freud sometimes compares the psyche's operation to a "civil war" (e.g., OP 63), with the therapist offering to act as the "ally" of the patient's ego, in its battle against the id and superego ("the enemies"). As long as the superego is winning this "internal conflict", a person will not be able to control the unhealthy behavior patterns that we associate with a neurosis. After initially believing that the sex drive alone is responsible for all psychological illnesses, Freud later realized that the superego actually has its own distinct drive, which ultimately produces a "death wish". Just as the id, if left to itself, would expend all psychic energy on immediate gratification of pleasure, so also the superego, if left to itself, would kill the psyche with its self-condemning guilt. The goal of therapy is to strengthen the ego by putting it closer and closer in touch with "reality", so that it can take up its proper position as the arbitrator of all disputes between the id and superego. This need of the patient to latch onto some thread of reality, in order to allow the therapist to reinforce this connection, explains why psychoanalysis does not work on psychotics: they have lost touch with the outside world so completely that Freud's call to "face reality" falls on deaf ears (see OP 63-64).

By regarding the outside world as a constituent part of Freud's theory, we can map the psyche's structure onto a "second-level analytic relation" (cf. TP, Ch.11). Figure III.2 shows how the "illusions" of the id and superego contrast with the "reality" of the ego and outside world:

Figure III.2: Psychic Reality vs. Psychic Illusion

On either side of the diagonal-illusion being the unconscious (-) side and reality being the conscious (+) side-we find two terms that are chiefly distinguished by their ability (+) or inability (-) to transcend pleasure. As we shall see in Stage Two of the course, this tendency to reduce all the contents of the unconscious to mere illusion is one of Jung's main complaints against Freud's theory.

Freud's belief that the unconscious is the source of illusion is rooted in his theory of the four stages of sexual development we pass through during childhood (see Figure III.3). Children begin to express libidinous urges from the moment of birth. The first expression of sexuality is manifested in the sucking instinct. This demarcates what Freud called the "oral" stage of childhood sexuality, wherein pleasure is obtained mainly through the mouth. As long as the baby's urges are properly satisfied-normally by drinking from the mother's breasts-these urges gradually subside and are replaced by other ways of obtaining pleasure. But if for some reason the libido's urges are not adequately satisfied, the child develops a "fixation" at that stage. That is, the child fails to pass from the object of pleasure-gratification appropriate to one stage (e.g., the mother's breasts) to the new object presented in the next stage. This impairs the child's sexual development; he or she may pass through some or all of the later stages in a more or less satisfactory way, but the child's id will remained "fixated" at this lower level. The urges that were not adequately satisfied at the proper time will come back to haunt the adult in the form of a neurosis that demands repeated satisfaction of the (now encrypted) urge.

Figure III.3: The Four Stages of Childhood Sexuality

After about a year and a half in the oral stage, a normal child will pass into the "anal" stage, during which the id seeks pleasure mainly by exploring bodily functions. Whereas the pleasure obtained in the first stage related mainly to taking in the mother's milk, this new form of pleasure relates mainly to giving out bodily wastes (especially feces). These are the years when a child has normally stopped breast-feeding and is being toilet-trained. This second stage lasts roughly another year and a half, until the child is about three. Once again, if the id's urges are not properly satisfied in this stage-if, for example, the child experiences pain or guilt rather than pleasure and a sense of satisfaction when learning to use the toilet-then the unsatisfied desires will be repressed, and a fixation may develop. Taken together, the first two stages represent the time when a person's level of self-esteem is determined. Insufficient oral satisfaction may produce a pessimist or a compulsive pleasure-seeker, while insufficient anal satisfaction may produce a stubborn or excessively neat adult.

In contrast to the physical focus of the first two stages of childhood sexual development, the third and fourth stages have an emotional focus, for the child is now turning his or her attention outward to the world. The stage that often turns out to be most important in determining the adult's psychological health comes roughly between ages 3-7. Freud calls this the "phallic stage", because it is the period when the child develops an emotional response to his or her genitals: the boy discovers he has a penis (a phallus), whereas the girl discovers she has none. Previously, the child had experienced a sense of identity with the mother. But during this stage the child learns to distinguish between the sexes; as a result, the id now seeks pleasure by attempting to form an erotic attachment with the parent of the opposite sex. If the child perceives a threat from the same-sex parent, then jealousy and opposition will be aroused.

A fixation at this third stage is called an "Oedipus complex" for boys and an "Electra complex" for girls, named after Greek myths involving very similar psychological relationships. From before his birth King Oedipus was destined to kill his father and marry his mother. His parents, after being informed of their son's destiny by Apollo, gave Oedipus to a servant in hopes of avoiding such a fate. Eventually, he was adopted by a King in a neighboring state. Many years later, when he learned of his destiny, Prince Oedipus ran away from his foster parents (thinking the oracle referred to them), again hoping to avoid his fate. During his travels, however, he killed the King of Thebes, without realizing this man was his real father. He then helped the people of Thebes escape from the attacks of the Sphinx, and was rewarded by being allowed to marry the widowed Queen. He did not realize the identity of his new bride until it was too late. The prophecy had inadvertently been fulfilled: Oedipus had killed his father and married his mother. Similarly, Electra is the Greek heroine who arranged for her brother to kill their mother as revenge for their father's murder. In this stage the young girl feels an attraction toward her father, with an accompanying feeling of jealousy toward her mother. But nowadays "Oedipus complex" is often used as a general term covering both sexes.

Freud regards these myths as powerful symbolic representations of the phallic stage of childhood sexual development. As with the other stages, Freud stresses that the child's erotic attraction toward one parent and dislike of the other is completely normal, provided the child eventually re-identifies with the parent of the same sex and accepts the opposite sex parent as something other than a lover. If the child is unable to "face reality" in this way, then a fixation will develop. Although Freud's theory was at first met with great opposition because of its claim that infants and young children have sexual urges toward their parents, this aspect of his theory is often taken for granted nowadays. Freud himself found that nearly all his patients suffered from some form of Oedipus (or Electra) complex. (The term "complex", incidentally, was coined by Jung to refer to a group of interrelated memories and repressed desires that have a negative effect on a person's behavior and personality, often causing abnormally extreme reactions in certain types of situations [see Lecture 15].) And this may well have been the case, given the extreme nature of the sexual repression common in the Victorian Age.

That this Oedipal aspect occurs during the phallic stage is a fact I have myself witnessed in my own children. For instance, at age three one of my sons one day exclaimed to me, without being provoked: "I don't like you!" When I asked him why not, he replied very directly: "Because you like Mommy." Knowing Freud's theory helped me to take this otherwise distressing comment in stride, treating it as a normal part of my son's childhood development. Thankfully, he seemed to pass through this little Oedipal complex rather quickly. For several weeks later, he announced (once again, quite spontaneously): "I love Mommy and I love Daddy. Before, I didn't love Daddy." Since then he has shown no signs of unhealthy aversion toward me or over-attachment to his mother.

One of the important insights to be drawn from Freud's study of the Oedipus Complex is that every human psyche is composed of both a masculine and a feminine side, though Freud himself was reluctant to specify gender-based characteristics (see CID 53n). The balance between them is most likely to be determined at this stage. Children who successfully pass through the phallic stage will have a psychological disposition that matches their physical gender. But children who fully identify with the opposite sex parent, instead of re-identifying with the same sex parent are likely to develop some homosexual tendencies (for their psychological gender will then be opposite to their physical gender). Similarly, children who do re-identify with the same sex parent, but who do not find full acceptance and love from the opposite sex parent, may develop a "Don Juan" or "nymphomaniac" personality (i.e., an insatiable desire to "conquer" members of the opposite sex).

These abnormal fixations turn into complexes because the negative feelings and unfulfilled desires are repressed. Most of this repression takes place during the final stage of childhood sexuality. Freud pointed out that human beings are the only animals that experience a long period with no significant sexual development before puberty. He called this the "latency period", interpreting the years between the end of the phallic stage and the beginning of puberty as the period when the superego becomes fully formed: the child "forgets" who he or she is, including any guilt that may have been present as a result of any unresolved fixations, and learns how to relate "properly" to other members of society. In other words, the latency period allows the superego to place a memory gap between the sexually mature psyche and all of the early childhood problems that were once so troublesome. After the latency period, as we have seen, the unresolved childhood fixations become troublesome complexes that are bound to surface later in life in various forms of unconscious expression. Of these, the form that is by far most easily accessible to our view as adults is, as we shall see in the next lecture, our dreams.

In concluding the present lecture, I would like to encourage each of you to think about how Freud's theory applies to your own life. As you work on your dream diary, watch for signs of any unresolved fixations, any complexes that are currently troubling you, or any childhood memories that seem especially significant in determining who you are today. Try to identify how the "battle" between your own ego, id, and superego manifests itself in your dreams. The next lecture will provide more explicit guidance for applying Freudian theory in this way.

9. The Principle of Wish-Fulfillment

Each of the two preceding lectures on Freud has ended up focusing our attention on the same phenomenon-a phenomenon that constitutes the centerpiece of his whole psychological theory. Examining the development of his understanding of psychoanalysis led us through a roundabout path to the same core element as did our discussion of his theory of the structure of the psyche: both topics point to dreams as the key to the proper understanding and treatment of psychological problems. In this week's final lecture let us therefore look in some detail at Freud's theory of the nature and interpretation of dreams, paying special attention to his famous principle of "wish-fulfillment".

Soon after realizing the potential healing that can come from recalling dreams and interpreting them as clues to unconscious repressions, Freud carried out a thorough investigation of this topic. His great book, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) begins with a chapter tracing various historical approaches to dream interpretation. His main point is that no scientific theory of dream interpretation had yet been developed. Dreams had previously been viewed either as collections of cryptic signs ("ciphers") waiting to be deciphered by those who know the secret code, or as allegorical symbols pointing to some deeper meaning, such as foretelling the future (see ID 188-189). The unscientific character of such views contributed to the tendency of scientists to ignore dreams, assuming them to be meaningless figments of the imagination. Freud's goal was to develop a scientifically meaningful theory of dream interpretation -i.e., one that could be universally valid and thus applied to every dream to explain its psychological meaning.

Before examining Freud's theory of dream interpretation, let's look briefly at his account of how the mechanism of dreaming actually operates. Though it lasts for "only a short duration", Freud believes a dream can be regarded as "a psychosis, with all the absurdities, delusions and illusions" that accompany a long-term psychosis (OP 61). This rather surprising claim becomes less outrageous once we recall that "psychosis" refers to the mental sickness whereby the psyche denies its connection to the real world and replaces it with its own, imaginary reality. The "perceptions" that normally anchor us to the external world (see Figures III.1-2) are replaced by internal fantasies concocted by the imagination. The same thing happens whenever we dream.

Understanding why we all experience these temporary psychoses during sleep is quite straightforward, once we recall Freud's view that a healthy person's ego is normally in control of the psyche. As long as our conscious mind is fully active, the repressions that threaten to cloud our perception of reality with various illusions will remain unconscious. However, whenever we fall asleep, the ego loses much of its controlling power, allowing such repressions to come to the surface. When the id's demands are too strong, the psychic disturbance they create threatens to wake us up, so that the ego can regain control once again and decide what to do. This happens, for instance, when we wake up in the middle of the night in order to use the toilet or get a drink of water. In such situations the weakened ego sometimes responds to the id's demands by attempting to strike a "compromise" (OP 56-57): the ego satisfies the repressed desires with the mental images that make up our dreams; in return, the id allows the ego to stay asleep. In this way our dreams function as "the guardian of sleep" (57); if successful, they prevent psychic disturbances from repeatedly awakening us from sleep.

Freud believes the mechanism of dreaming provides a clue to a scientific way of interpreting dreams. Just as "every dream is an attempt to put aside a disturbance of sleep by means of a wish-fulfillment" (OP 56-57)-i.e., "the wish to maintain sleep" (54)-so also the content of each dream can be regarded as fulfilling some unconscious wish. Thus Freud concludes his account of "the method of dream-interpretation" by stating the following principle: "When the work of interpretation has been completed the dream can be recognized as a wish-fulfilment" (ID 207). The key point to note here is that Freud is not claiming that every dream actually does fulfill an obvious wish, but only that a skilled interpreter can recognize such a wish, often in a repressed form or concealed in a symbolic image.

Freud recognizes two main sources for the wishes fulfilled in our dreams: "preconscious" details from our recent waking life, and unconscious repressions from our id. In the former case, dreams perform what is sometimes called a "mental housecleaning" function. They remind us of the "residue of preconscious activity" (e.g., unresolved conflicts, unmade decisions, unfulfilled plans, etc.) that the ego has not yet properly dealt with during waking life (OP 54). These may or may not be expressed in terms of obvious wishes; but Freud claims the dreams that bring them to our attention are all expressions of the ego's wish to settle such matters. In the case of unconscious wishes, the libidinous nature of the dream is more obvious, yet we tend to feel a strong resistance to the idea that this really is a genuine wish of ours. When interpreting such dreams, we must remember that the wish is unconscious-the dream is making us aware of a wish we have repressed, perhaps long ago-so we'll naturally be unaware of it until we see it in the dream. Of the two types, conscious wishes are easier to detect, but unconscious wishes are likely to be more important to a person's long-term personal growth.

Helping dreamers to see the wishes implied by their dreams is one of the main jobs of a psychoanalyst. To accomplish this task, Freud does not abandon but transforms his method of free association. In Chapter 2 of The Interpretation of Dreams he uses a self-analysis of his own dreams to illustrate how this can be done. First, he divides the dream text into its smallest meaningful parts-usually a phrase or a short sentence or two. He then "associates" each textual "atom" with whatever comes to mind from his daily life, his conscious wishes, or his symbolic imagination. Likewise, analysts are to encourage their patients to select small parts of the dream, one at a time, and talk freely about their associations with whatever word, image, person, or event is the focus of that part. Eventually, this process inevitably leads to the discovery of preconscious and/or repressed wishes. Freud believed this method should be pursued until the sexual nature of the repressions comes to light-though psychoanalysts are rarely so restrictive nowadays.

In addition to his basic insight that free association can help us to see dreams as the fulfillment of psychic wishes, Freud develops a number of other, subordinate principles for dream interpretation. Without understanding some of these, we are likely to misunderstand and reject his theory prematurely. For instance, anxiety dreams are often cited as a reason for disagreeing with Freud. Most people report that many dreams are so disturbing that they could not possibly be fulfilling any wish. Freud has at least two replies to such an objection. First, the mechanism of dreaming suggests, as we have seen, that dreams attempt to fulfill our desire to stay asleep, even though they sometimes fail. Second, the claim that the content of our dreams fulfills an unconscious wish does not preclude anxiety, but explains it (OP 56): "Something that is a satisfaction for the unconscious id may for that very reason be a cause of anxiety for the ego." The reason these wishes were repressed in the first place is that they caused anxiety; so when they reappear in our dreams the ego is likely to have an adverse reaction.

Another factor that helps to explain why some dreams do not appear to convey a clear wish is the principle of distortion. Freud argues that the psyche, recognizing the danger of allowing us to become aware of certain repressed wishes, will sometimes change certain key facts in its representation of the dream situation. For instance, a woman with an unconscious wish to be taller might have a distorted dream of being so tall that buying clothing becomes impossible. This satisfies her id's repressed wish, yet leaves the woman feeling anxious and thus totally unaware of her hidden desire. Likewise, a man who unconsciously wishes to have sexual intercourse with his friend's wife might dream he is unlocking a bedroom door with a large key-this being a distorted representation of their sexual organs coming together.

Two common types of distortion are "displacement" and "condensation". Displacement happens when the true object of desire is replaced by a "safer" alternative. For example, a woman in love with a married man might dream about a stranger she saw on the street the day before. Or a man who is thinking about buying a new car might dream about his son's toy car. Condensation occurs when a single thing or member of a group represents the larger entity of which it is part. Thus, a family cat might symbolize the entire family, or one student might represent a teacher's entire class. These and other forms of distortion are the ego's defense mechanisms against the unconscious. In terms of Freud's war analogy, we can say that when the id or superego wins a "battle", the wish can be clearly detected in a dream; if the ego wins, the true wish is distorted in order to minimize any disturbance to the psyche's conscious life. As such, distortion is like the "wild card" of the psychoanalytic game: the interpreter can apply it to any dream content that does not appear to be a wish in order to regard it as a "hidden" wish.

Whether you agree or disagree with Freud's principle of wish-fulfillment, each of you should make a serious effort to use it to interpret at least some of the dreams you record in your dream diary. To assist you in doing so, I'll demonstrate how Freud's theory might be applied to the two sample dreams I quoted in Lectures 2 and 3.

The first sample, as you may recall, was short and simple, consisting of only two main points: the statement "sleep has a structure", and the ambiguity as to whether I was speaking or listening to this statement. My associations with the first point are fairly obvious. The dream was the first entry in a new dream diary I was starting in connection with teaching this course. I dreamt of sleep because the phenomenon of sleeping and dreaming had been a significant part of the "day residue" that was left in my preconscious from the preceding few days. The wish being fulfilled by this dream was a conscious one: that my dreams would be orderly and meaningful enough to be useful as examples for my students. My inability to remember whether I spoke the sentence or heard someone else speaking it (and my lack of associations, due to the absence of any visual image in the dream) could reflect the fact that I did not yet know my students; it may also indicate an unconscious desire to remain anonymous in a class where I "bare my soul" more than teachers normally do. Freud, of course, would not be fully satisfied with such an interpretation until it revealed some sexual repression-perhaps that I had been molested as a child during my sleep-but without further evidence from the dream itself, I would not recommend making such extreme speculations.

My second sample dream (the one with Bill and Hillary Clinton in their London home) is too long to give a thorough analysis here. Indeed, I can find at least 25 distinct "atoms" of meaning in the text. Some of these point to wishes that are obviously rooted in my preconscious, such as my wish to develop my photography skills (something I rarely have time for these days), and perhaps also my wish to visit England (where I lived for seven years before moving to Hong Kong). We'll come back to some of these other aspects of this dream several times during this course; but for now I'll focus mainly on two points: the Freudian interpretation of Bill Clinton's appearance in my dream, and the symbolic meaning of my conversation with Hillary.

Bill Clinton was in his third year as President of the United States when I had this dream. I did not vote for him and was not particularly impressed by his leadership ability at the time of the dream; yet to anyone who (like me) is a U.S. citizen, he obviously represents the highest "authority figure" in the political realm. My first memory of the Clintons was during the election campaign in 1992, when they appeared on a television talk show and answered questions about difficulties they had experienced earlier in their marriage. At the time, Clinton was still far from being the favorite among the Democratic candidates. But I remember being impressed by the Clintons' frank responses to the interviewer's questions about Bill's moral integrity.

If I were to present these initial associations to a Freudian therapist, I would probably be asked to talk further on the other "authority figures" in my life. Since I am not personally acquainted with the Clintons and do not follow their lives with any special interest, the President's presence in my dream would be interpreted as a displacement for some other authority figure who really is significant to me. My associations on authority figures would soon reveal that at the time of my dream I was engaged in a dispute with a person who had previously been a close friend, but who believed he had to cut off our friendship in order to take up a position of authority over me. (Let's call this person "Dr. M".) Presumably, my id had a repressed desire to see Dr. M in a certain light, but my ego knew I would be unable to cope with a dream explicitly about him; so my psyche put Bill Clinton in place of Dr. M.

What do these associations suggest about the hidden wishes this dream might have been trying to fulfill? The displacement implies that a literal interpretation of the dream would be inappropriate. I have no wish to meet President Clinton, conscious or unconscious. Instead, the dream symbolically expresses a wish to exclude Dr. M from the important conversation "in the living room" by putting him "in the kitchen"-i.e., a wish to take away his authority and put him in a position of subjugation (as a mere cook). Consciously, I had no such desire to see Dr. M removed from his leadership position; so this interpretation reveals a repressed wish. Becoming aware of this desire gave me power to control the negative effects it might otherwise have produced in that situation.

But my imaginary Freudian therapist would not be satisfied with this insight alone. Rather, she-let's say she is a woman-would want to dig deeper to find the cause of this repressed wish. She might question me about my relationship with my father when I was a young child. Was he a strong or a weak family leader? Would he ever ask me for advice? Did he ever cook? Etc. Eventually, though, we would come back to the dream for evidence of any further repressions. One possibility would be to look for a meaningful interpretation of the "parking ticket" I was given in the second part of the dream. This probably represents a rule I accidentally violated (perhaps as a child) and was punished for, and seems to be connected in the dream to my failure to "make some change" (see §I of the dream text). That is, the dream is hinting that my inability or unwillingness to change something led to an embarrassing punishment ("Feeling silly ..." [§II]). By asking me to give associations for other related dream images, such as the bank, the high ceiling, the driveway, or the iron gate, the therapist might attempt to uncover a repressed childhood experience or fantasy, or some other life situation that could have caused the dream to occur.

The kind of word play involved in this interpretation, whereby "making some change" is given a double meaning (exchanging paper money for coins and altering the personality), is a very common tactic of Freudian dream interpretation. Another example we could explore would be the use of the word "turkey", which I associate not only with the bird Americans traditionally eat at Thanksgiving, but also with a slang way of referring to someone who lacks common sense, or acts in an irresponsible way. Freud's interpretations often focus on such word plays, treating key words not only as cryptic references to a different meaning of the same word, but also as distortions of other words that have a similar sound or a similar meaning. (For instance, the "iron gate" [§I] might be taken to suggest the presence of "great irony" in the dream.) This is based on Freud's conviction that the meaning of every dream is "intimately connected with [its] verbal expression" and is therefore dependent to a large extent on the dreamer's own language (ID 191n). Thus, when attempting to determine its meaning, "A dream is, as a rule, not to be translated into other languages."

Inevitably, the therapist would ask me to focus on the role played by Hillary in my sample dream, for here the dream text conveys an obviously sexual content ("Leaning toward me in a suggestive manner, she asks if I know that she and Bill are about to get a divorce"). Like Bill, Hillary has to be regarded as a displacement. In this case (if my therapist were female), Freudian theory might regard Hillary as a displacement for the therapist. My unconscious wish, then, would be that the therapist would develop an emotional attachment to me. Freud regards such an attachment, called a "counter-transference", as a natural response to the patient's "transference" of emotions and various repressed wishes from their original object (e.g., one of the patient's parents) to the therapist. (Remember that most of Freud's patients were women, many of whom were powerfully attracted to his dominating personality.) Freud believed this transference and counter-transference of otherwise forbidden emotions (e.g., anger or love) was a crucial step in the healing process, and ought to be encouraged-provided neither party mistakes it for a genuine emotional attachment, such as "falling in love" (see Lecture 29).

I won't go into any details here as to how my associations with the image of Hillary Clinton might indicate repressed feelings toward a female authority figure (e.g., my mother). Instead, it will suffice merely to point out that in the dream I felt some resistance to Hillary's advances. The therapist would encourage me to allow myself to respond to her the way I would have liked to respond to the Hillary image in my dream. In this way any repressed anger, hurt, attraction, etc. could be brought to the surface. The goal of this procedure would be to break the power of any inappropriate behavior patterns that might be caused by my failure to recognize and deal with these repressed wishes for what they are: illusions created by frustrating experiences with females in my childhood.

By now each of you should have at least several dreams recorded in your own dream diary. As you begin to think about possible interpretations for these dreams, you should pay special attention to the need to record associations raised by the contents of each dream. Then look for evidence of repressed wishes-especially those that might stem from the id (the sex instinct) or from the superego (the death instinct). Pay special attention to any symbolic distortions that might enable you to draw deeper insight about yourself from the dream. But do not get too bogged down in Freud's theory. For Freud represents only the turning point of modern dream interpretation. His contribution can be compared to breaking out of the "egg" that had previously confined psychologists to non-scientific approaches to dreams. Unfortunately, Freud was in several respects "stuck" in what is now an outdated (reductionistic, mechanistic) way of thinking. Over the next few weeks we'll see that quite a different "caterpillar" emerged from the broken shells of the Freudian egg.

QUESTIONS/TOPICS FOR GROUP DISCUSSION

1. Do you agree or disagree with Freud's view that all dreams can be interpreted as fulfillments of an unconscious wish?

2. What are the strengths and weaknesses of Freud's theory that the psyche's structure arises out of the child's sexual development?

3. Share a dream that relates to your daily life, and explain how it might be regarded as fulfilling a conscious wish.

4. Share a dream that arises out of your id, and explain how it might be regarded as fulfilling an unconscious wish.