An Examination of Psychoanalysis (Part 3/13)

Freud's Second Model of the Mind: A Tripartite System

By 1914, Freud had reformulated his view of repression. He had originally conceived of the process as occurring in a simple and straightforward manner: the ego was the agent of repression, and the unconscious was the receiver of the repressed material. Now he contended that "a special psychical agency" was responsible for repression, which he called ego ideal, so named because it contained the ego's ideals, and had as its tasks repression, morality, conscience, censorship, etc. By 1923 Freud had changed the name of his new agency to superego, thus establishing his famous tripartite model of the mind.
In a nutshell, this model classified mental activity in terms of its
degree of accessibility to consciousness (whether it was unconscious, preconscious, or conscious), and in terms of its function: whether it was a part of the duties of id, ego, or superego. The ego and superego could operate on both conscious and unconscious levels, but the id remained wholly unconscious. Both ego and superego emerged out of the id, which was the prime material of the mind, and contained "the core of the unconscious, the source of all passions, and the biologically innate in man."[1]
Freud's last discussion of his model of the mind occurred in An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1938). Herein he maintained the germinative position of the id, and reaffirmed the same general topographic divisions and qualities of mental functioning described above.


Freud's three mental divisions often describe the interactions of the three levels of consciousness at a psychological level. The Freudian model does not correspond to the real neurological structures and functions which science is finding today.
Nevertheless, there are aspects of the Freudian model which cannot be discarded altogether. To be fair, the Freudian formulation does broadly imply (if it never specifies) some correspondence with underlying neurological structures. The psychological components of id, ego, and superego are seen as common to all of us, and therefore must rest upon those physiological attributes which as members of a species we have in common. In other words, the physiological side of the body-mind duality which Freud initially set his sights upon establishing and then abandoned must nonetheless have remained as a background to his thinking. Just because he could not see the connection does not mean that he ceased to believe it existed. We feel certain that if Freud had had the same experience and knowledge that is available to us now, he would have had little hesitation in renouncing (or drastically redefining) the id-ego-superego model in favor of a formulation which could be used interchangeably by both psychology and neurology. That is, after all, what he set out to discover when he embarked upon his Project.
Freud could not "see" the full unconscious, so he called it "blind." Because he did not realize that it could be known directly through feeling, he decided that it was "unknowable."

A Sexual Etiology of Neurosis: The Road from Trauma to Instinct

In addition to his work on The Interpretation of Dreams in the late 1890s, Freud was formulating his sexual theory of neurosis. Since patient after patient had reported infantile and childhood seduction traumas, Freud first conclu ded that these experiences were the cause of adult neurosis: the memories of the trauma had to be repressed, and so various neurotic defense mechanisms were developed. By May of 1897, however, he had shifted this view to what he termed "a big advance in insight" in which he now saw impulses rather than memories as the cause of the problem:

The psychical structures which in hysteria are subjected to repression are not properly speaking memories...but impulses deriving from the primal scenes.[2] 

Thus, what Freud had originally viewed a result of personal traumatic experience, he now saw as a result of universal and innate impulses.
By June of 1897 he had conceptualized the Oedipal Complex (hatred of the same-sexed parent by the child), and by July he was "viewing the psychoneuroses in terms of a vicious and dynamic circle of perverse libidinal impulses undergoing continual repression and resurgence."[3] {Emphasis added.} Freud himself wrote:

The result (of the repression and resurgence process) is all these distortions of memory and phantasies, either about the past or future. I am learning the rules which govern the formation of these structures, and the reasons why they are stronger than real memories, and have thus learned new things about the characteristics of processes in the unconscious. Side by side with these structures perverse impulses arise, and the repression of these phantasies and impulses...gives rise to new motives for clinging to the illness.[4] {Italics added}

By September of 1897 Freud had completed his fundamental writing to his friend Fleiss about "the great secret which has been slowly dawning on me in recent months." The great secret was a realization that the reports of early seductions from his patients were, in most instances, simply not true. This was no easy admission for Freud to make, as it brought into serious question the validity of psychoanalysis as a method of psychological investigation. After some inner turmoil, however, Freud reasoned that the commonality of the reports was in itself significant, and that surely it was reflective of some common, underlying principle of human behavior.
Freud now moved on to solve his theoretical dilemma by proposing just such a principle: reports of childhood seduction traumas actually represented infantile seduction wishes. These wishes were secondary manifestations (derivatives) of underlying (primary) instinctual impulses. In other words, infants and children have innate, sexual impulses toward their parents. These biological impulses give rise to mental wishes which must be repressed because of societal sanctions. The wish then surfaces in adulthood as a report of trauma, because that is the only acceptable way to express it.
What is the significance of Freud's theoretical shift? It seems twofold.
First, by minimizing the role of trauma in neurosis, Freud moved the focus of psychoanalysis away from personal, concrete experience and placed it on impersonal, imperceptible instincts and impulses. One of Freud's biographers, Ernst Kris, contended that, with this revision, Freud "turned psychoanalysis into a psychology of the instincts." The irony here is that although instinct is a legitimate scientific concept, Freud's successors have not brought Freudian instincts any closer to scientific (neurobiological) validation than they were in Freud's day.
The second significant aspect in this shift is the validity and meaningfulness Freud attributed to internal psychological processes. Although the memories of seduction traumas were not true in terms of external events, he contended that they did represent a kind of "pseudo-memory" which was a significant and meaningful fact in its own right. He further understood that repressed fantasies and wishes (which arose as the pseudo-memory of trauma) could exert the same lasting effect on personality as the actual experience. This innovative viewpoint really constituted a new view of reality. Intangible wishes, emotions, and fantasies --in short, the invisible inner worlds of man -- were recognized as having a directive impact on us equally as potent as the impact of the visible, external world.

Freud's Mechanisms of Pathology

Three more concepts in Freud's theory of infantile sexuality bear discussion. After 1900, Freud proposed three "fundamental mechanisms of pathological development," which were the vehicles of adult neuroses: fixation, regression, and the pertinacity of early impressions. He drew all three concepts from the biological sciences, reinterpreting them in a psychological context.

Fixation 

As we know, Freud by this time strongly believed in infantile sexuality. The question was not whether or not one had had some kind of early sexual experience, but what the consequences of those experiences had been. If the consequences were painful or punitive, a "pathological fixation of the libido" would probably occur, putting the child squarely on the road to adult neurosis.
Freud saw fixation in the psychological sense as the persistence of an unconscious wish , which had been dominant at an earlier stage of development. A simple example of this would be the adult who is plagued by compulsive overeating: in psychoanalytic terms he would be described as fixated at the oral stage of development. Freud initially emphasized the impact of sexual experience producing fixation. By 1905, however, his thinking had shifted to a new direction, now establishing heredity (rather than the actual sexual experience) as the critical factor which determined the outcome of the fixation:

He (Freud) recognized libidinal fixations as having three possible consequences -- neurosis, normality, or perversion -- with the particular outcome being attributed largely to heredity -- that is, to whether there is an organic disposition toward repressing the fixation.[5]

Theoretically, a person with the right genes could undergo a sexual trauma in infancy or childhood and come through it "normally." The main (if not only) variable in the issue of infantile sexuality thus became heredity. Sexual experiences were bound to occur; fixations were bound to occur; but neurosis would result only if there were an unfortunate "organic disposition toward repressing the fixation."

Regression

In Freud's concept of regression, he again moved his thinking away from actual experience in favor of hypothesized forces. According to Freud the regression that occurs in the "severely neurotic" is governed by the "hereditary constitutional factor." This factor was itself a convergence of three different layers of experience -- familial, ancestral, and species-related -- which were either innate or inherited.[6]
Although the relevance of personal life experience was again minimized in this formulation, Freud somewhat reinstates its value with his third concept.

Pertinacity of Early Impressions

In the third formulation of this time period, Freud proclaimed "the pertinacity of early impressions" as another critical factor in his childhood etiology of neurosis. Recognizing the principle as a "provisional psychological concept," he offered a biological analogy from embryological experiments to justify his position: sticking a needle into an embryonic cell mass results in much more serious damage when it is done during the early stages of growth. The psychological corollary was that the earlier a trauma occurred, the more serious and enduring its impact.
Freud believed that early experiences were important to the degree that they affected libidinal development, and that relatively minor experiences could result in adult neurosis. Sulloway explains that Freud's "belief in the primacy of early experience...allowed Freud to attribute the neuroses of adults to relatively small disturbances in childhood libidinal development."[7] Thus instinct (libidinal development) remained the centerpoint for even this principle; it served to further minimize the role of trauma and experience in the creation of adult neurosis by reducing it to "relatively small disturbances".


[1]Sulloway, op. cit., p. 374.
[2]Sulloway, op. cit., p. 204.
[3]Sulloway, op. cit., p. 206.
[4]In Sulloway, op. cit., p. 206. (Original source: Origins, p. 212.)
[5]Sulloway, op. cit., p. 212.
[6]See Sulloway, pp. 289-309, for a detailed discussion of this factor.
[7]Sulloway, p. 389.