discomfort of guilt feelings”. Another resolution of the dilemma might be a life of crime, available to those with a weak love instinct. In contrast to depression, it achieves a victory over society, and over those individuals directly harmed by the crime. The price of the victory is to spend some time locked away, but only if caught.
Since empathy love and altruism are the things most often mentioned above in connection with pleasure, and assuaging of the entrenched fear, it should be wise to latch on to these and try to become aware of our empathy with all humanity, particularly with those who irritate us or worse. They too are doing their best (with the interaction of their genetic make up and the environment) to deal with the human condition, and we might well feel sorry rather than angry when they do badly. In our minds let us recruit everyone, not just those like ourselves, for mutual assistance in living – while retaining the readiness to compete for survival when necessary.
In Conclusion
The scientific philosophy of this thesis is that nothing is ultimately explained, so any hypothesis is the best until a more useful one appears.
See below for the review paper.
The Review paper
A CENTURY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
George J. Cole 2012
Abstract
Interest in Psychoanalysis (Google showed more than twelve million results in September 2011) has not been extinguished by a hundred years of therapeutic inadequacy. Eysenck declared the theory of Psychoanalysis “pseudo scientific doctrine” and this has been the tone of assessment over the years. This paper offers a reason for its lack of therapeutic success. It also contains a brief account of its principal claims and includes comments on their validity.
In 1937 two years before he died of cancer, Sigmund Freud wrote a lengthy and convoluted paper in which he virtually admitted that psychoanalysis was not a therapeutic success. There were few cures, and even when a cure was apparently achieved, a relapse could not be ruled out. It can be argued that no key advances in the therapy have been made since Freud wrote this, and since the theory of psychoanalysis and the therapeutic technique evolved together, it must be asked “is the theory then worthless”.
Not necessarily. Freud believed that if he could gradually lead patients to an awareness of the origin of their dysfunction this would enable them to begin living rationally instead of neurotically. It may be that this was his error. A general explanation of any therapeutic failure can be postulated: If the pain of behaving rationally is greater than the pain of behaving neurotically then the neurosis can be expected to persist.
Ernest Jones’s biography of Freud states that after graduating in Medicine in 1881 young Freud worked in various psychiatric departments of hospitals and conducted significant research in neurology. He opened his own medical practice in 1886 and also married in that year. His neurological interests attracted patients suffering “hysterical” symptoms and he began treating them using the current methods that had little effect. For a while hypnosis seemed promising, but better was the technique of allowing the patient to talk about past experiences. From this evolved Freud’s method of “free association” in which the patient was instructed to say anything that came into his or her head without regard to embarrassment or apparent irrelevance. This was the basis of “Psychoanalysis” and dates from about 1895. It was in that year he published a book that included the significant phrase ‘much is won if we succeed in transforming hysterical misery into common unhappiness’. At that time Freud himself was not free of psychological dysfunction and it was about then that he began his self analysis, effected largely by interpreting his own dreams.
The first thing that could be noticed during free association was the tendency of memories to keep going further and further back into childhood itself. He discovered memories of sexual “traumatic” events that seemed to be associated with hysterical patients’ symptoms, but was to discover during deeper analysis that most of such memories were in fact fantasies originating in the child’s own sexuality. Further experience with the technique of free association led him to describe stages in human development from infancy onwards as first ‘oral’, in which the intake of nourishment was the primary interest and pleasure, and secondly ‘anal’, in which the expelling of feces was the interest and pleasure. Finally around the age of four the genital stage was reached in which the child developed a sexual attachment to the parent of opposite sex and regarded the other parent as a rival.
This he described as the Oedipus situation after the ancient Greek myth in which a man who had been separated from his family in infancy kills another in a fight and later marries that man’s widow. He then discovers the man he killed was his father, from which it follows that he had then married his mother. In self punishment he blinds himself. Interest in the myth has continued to the present day in the form of plays and movies. Freud considered that residuals of the Oedipus complex were the basic cause of neuroses, but (as implied in Eysenck’s comment) we have no way of testing this experimentally. Nevertheless the Freudian interpretation of primitive social rituals and myths in terms of the Oedipus Complex is compelling. In his famous book “Totem and Taboo” first published in 1913 and republished and reprinted many times since, he deduces that the “original sin” of the Christian doctrine is patricide. The ecclesiastical version is that the original sin was Adam’s, in defying his Maker.
Freud extended the meaning of ‘sexual’ to include the oral and anal stages of development, which may reveal an unfounded enthusiasm for sexual explanations. The duo of survival and reproduction (here sexual activity) is the necessary and sufficient condition for the continuation of all life. Survival and reproduction are separately necessary but not sufficient, so the one cannot be regarded as more important than the other. While evolutionary forces have endowed both the processes of survival and reproduction with the experience of pleasure, the absorption of nutrient and expelling of waste are profoundly associated with survival. To suggest instead that these stages are sexual is unconvincing, even if these “pregenital” pleasures may at times be utilized (as in kissing and buggery) to extend the pleasure of reproductive (sexual) activity. Similarly Freud insisted that “repression” of unbearable ideas or feelings concerned only sexual matters whereas there are surely non sexual ideas or feelings that an individual may find unbearable.
The mental phenomenon “repression” is a fundamental tenet of psychoanalytic theory. Some disturbing idea or feeling is repressed and becomes unconscious. The hypothesis states that it resides in the “unconscious” which is a part of the mind and is held there by the repressive forces. But surely the repression of a feeling of fear should be as likely as the repression of a sexual feeling. An individual might be immobilized by some fear if it became conscious, or a fear might be too shameful to acknowledge, and it is strange that Freud rejected such possibilities. The psychoanalyst Rycroft wrote “I find it hard to believe that thoughts about the health and survival of oneself and one’s loved ones do not preoccupy us unconsciously and contribute to slips and dreams”. He could have added ‘and neurosis’.
According to Freud the repressed material in the unconscious is not obliterated and can generate impulses that motivate our actions without our knowledge. For example forgetting someone’s name can sometimes follow repressing our dislike of the person who then potentially feels unimportant and thus satisfies our repressed urge to hurt him or her. The struggle between the repressed feeling or idea and the repressing forces uses up mental energy and in some cases leaves little energy over for everyday activities. In anyone’s life, laziness and chronic fatigue might sometimes have such an origin. Many other symptoms, psychological or physical, are claimed to show evidence of the internal struggle.
Dreams are also claimed to arise from the conflict between the repressed and the repressing. According to the theory, a dream is a disguised expression of a repressed wish, and represents a compromise between the opposing forces. If the repressed material is about to break through and b
ecome conscious the dreamer awakes to avoid this, as happens in a nightmare, which can therefore be regarded as a failed dream. The function of the dream is to keep the sleeper asleep, and the fact that some dreams clearly and primarily serve this purpose shows that repression is not always involved. A simple example of this is the dream that the sleeper has added another blanket because the night has got colder. Sleep continues for a while until increased discomfort finally awakes the sleeper who then actually adds the blanket.
Another Freudian idea was that the pleasures and frustrations experienced during the oral and anal stages of development can give rise to “fixations” that color the behavior of adult life. Thus a person might be described as predominantly an oral or anal character because of such fixations. A person described in slang as a “sucker” might well be an oral character who, acting like an infant, puts a deceiver in the position of the mother who provides milk, or the “omnipotent adult” who provides solace of some sort. The fact that the outcome of such infantile behavior is a loss of money or an emotional shock does not dissuade the sucker from