Freud in 60 Minutes E-Book

Walther Ziegler

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 61

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The Viennese physician and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud moved from hypnotizing his patients to interpreting their dreams and discovered thereby the hitherto unexplored dimension of the unconscious mind. Each of us, argued Freud, has hidden wishes, desires, and drives which influence our actions below the level of our awareness. A great role is played here, already from childhood on, by sexual desire and pleasure. The nursing infant still lives entirely by the “pleasure principle”, taking everything into his mouth, crying when he wants something, and laughing when he is satisfied. But he must soon learn to obey the rules set by his parents, teachers and society in general. The infantile “pleasure principle” is brutally superseded by the “reality principle”. This is an experience we all must undergo. But it is also one which sometimes leads to grievances and traumatization, as do other aspects of the development of our sexuality and of our relationships. Freud was a doctor and practiced a revolutionary method of treatment: psychoanalysis. He was the first to discover that the way people experience their own lives is often to be traced back to experiences which cannot, indeed, be altered but can be emotionally re-evaluated. Furthermore, Freud impressively explains how our “psychical apparatus” functions day to day and how we process in every second, with lightning speed, our drives, thoughts and perceptions. The small book “Freud in 60 Minutes” explains Freud’s new and revolutionary perspective on human life step by step, by means of many examples and over forty quotes from Freud’s own works. In the second part of the book it is asked: “Of what use is Freud’s discovery to us today?” It is astounding how important and helpful his insights can be for forming and directing our own lives, provided they are applied rightly. The book forms part of the popular series “Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes”.

Leseprobe

My thanks go to Rudolf Aichner for his tireless critical editing; Silke Ruthenberg for the fine graphics; Lydia Pointvogl, Eva Amberger, Christiane Hüttner, and Dr. Martin Engler for their excellent work as manuscript readers and sub-editors; Prof. Guntram Knapp, who first inspired me with enthusiasm for philosophy; and Angela Schumitz, who handled in the most professional manner, as chief editorial reader, the production of both the German and the English editions of this series of books.

My special thanks go to my translator

Dr Alexander Reynolds.

Himself a philosopher, he not only translated the original German text into English with great care and precision but also, in passages where this was required in order to ensure clear understanding, supplemented this text with certain formulations adapted specifically to the needs of English-language readers.

Contents

Freud’s Great Discovery

Freud’s Central Idea

Oral, Anal and Phallic Stages

The Oedipus Complex

The Conflict of the Drives

The Human Mental Apparatus

Libido and Drive Satisfaction

Sublimation

Repression

Defence and Symptom-Formation

Therapy and Transference

Cure and Psycho-Synthesis

Id Must Become Ego

Civilization and its Discontents

Of What Use is Freud’s Discovery for Us Today?

Obeying the Pleasure Principle: Maximizing Pleasure and Avoiding Unpleasure

Id Must Become Ego – From the “Pleasure Principle” to the “Reality Principle”

Between Scylla and Charybdis – the Secret of Good Upbringing

Anxiety is a Part of Life – Learning to Live Means Learning to Deal with Fear

Bibliographical References:

Freud’s Great Discovery

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is without a doubt one of the most important thinkers of the 20th Century. He has marked the way modern Man sees and understands himself more deeply, perhaps, than any other writer. It is largely due to Freud that we nowadays no longer look on ourselves as creatures of pure reason but rather as beings governed by feelings such as anxiety, longing and desire. For two thousand years, philosophy interpreted Man only in terms of his reason. The “I think, therefore I am” of the French philosopher Descartes, for example, amounted to a claim that logical thought formed the essence of what it was to be human. The body was seen as a mere servant of the mind.

Freud fundamentally contradicts this way of seeing things. Man – such was Freud’s provocative stance here – is, on the contrary, essentially a creature of drives and instincts, a homo natura. It is, first and foremost, these drives, instincts and needs that Man obeys and his mind is just these drives’ servant, a mere secondary phenomenon. For, as Freud writes:

Our perception of the world and our actions are, said Freud, determined not so much by reason as by feelings and emotions of which we are not aware. We believe, indeed, that we are acting logically and rationally but in fact we are governed by unconscious wishes. If we face the truth, says Freud, we are forced to the conclusion that:

The philosophers, then, had erred in their overestimation of reason and had, for two thousand years, followed a false path. This radical insight brought down on Freud the hostility of many practicing philosophers. Heidegger accused him of “gawking at states of the soul” and the other great German existentialist Karl Jaspers even dismissed Freud’s discovery of unconscious desires and drives as mere “philosophy of the anus”. Freud reacted calmly to such criticisms, noting merely that:

Philosophers did indeed initially dismiss Freud’s idea of an “unconscious mind” as a logical impossibility. If as Freud claimed, they argued, the human psyche comprises an “unconscious realm”, then we cannot, by definition, consciously know anything about this realm; it is inaccessible to knowledge and it is impossible that books, such as Freud’s, should be written about it. But if, on the other hand, we can in fact seize and know this realm well enough to speak or write about it, then what we seize and know cannot really be called “unconscious”; it must be considered part of our conscious understanding. One way or the other, then, the idea of an “unconscious realm” is superfluous, indeed senseless.

Yet Freud insisted that the unconscious mind did exist, even if it mostly remained inaccessible to rational understanding. He rebutted his critics by specifying that this unconscious mind was something which we do not constantly rationally cognize but rather sporadically recognize. It is in dreams, hypnosis, attacks of laughter or tears, or through involuntary misspeaks, defence mechanisms, symptoms or slips, that what is contained in the unconscious emerges, albeit in disguised form, to the conscious surface of our minds. In dreams, for example, wishes and anxieties that we have pushed out of our waking mind find expression. Some dreams are downright insistent, recurring again and again with slight variations. For Freud, this indicates that unconscious impulses refuse to be simply shut out and repressed. They make sure that they are heard by slipping their message stubbornly into dream after dream. Freud writes:

Only when we pay attention to a dream’s specific content, decipher its meaning (which can often be more helpful than we expect), and integrate this meaning into our life, do we free ourselves from these constantly returning impulses out of our unconscious. Dreams, then, can contain helpful messages.

The accounts his patients gave him of their experiences were also, for Freud, evidence of the existence of an unconscious mind. Treating them made him conversant with the phenomenon that people sometimes do things that they do not consciously want to do. Thus patients with a washing compulsion, who wash their hands up to twenty times a day, can find, no matter how hard they think about it, no conscious explanation for this. They are even aware that this constant washing does not improve hygiene but, on the contrary, harms their skin. Not only, then, do they lack a rational explanation for what they do; all their efforts to stop doing it are in vain. From this Freud concludes that there must exist, in addition to consciousness, a second unconscious force which insistently compels to this hand-washing for reasons that remain hidden from the conscious mind.

Another phenomenon which reveals the effects of the unconscious is recurrent bedwetting. First-born children sometimes begin to compulsively wet the bed again, to their own embarrassment, at ages as late as five to ten. This phenomenon mostly occurs when a second child is born and the parents naturally pay more attention to the needier newborn. The firstborn then feels neglected and is jealous of the new arrival – but is also keenly aware that his parents expect him rather to feel glad at having a sibling. The jealousy that he is forced to push out of his consciousness manifests itself through an unconscious, unintentional bedwetting. Sleeping, he slips back into infancy – that is, into a phase of life in which he received all his parents’ attention. Freud calls this a “regression”, a term derived from the Latin word for “stepping back”, i.e. an unconscious retreat into a past state that had been experienced as pleasurable. The interesting thing here is that this behaviour does indeed elicit more attention from the child’s parents so that the conflict is solved. This reaction, then, although unconscious, is not without sense and meaning.