Week 3 Flashcards
(37 cards)
Surface vs. depth metaphors
Freud tells us that consciousness is closer towards the surface of
the psyche. The unconscious is more in the ‘depths’ of the psyche…
-In our introductory class, we said that when something is ‘repressed’ it is ‘pushed down into’ into something like a holding tank—pushed down into the depths of the psyche, where it remains…The ‘repressed’ then ‘crops back up’ in the form of
symptoms etc. (what is pushed down ‘returns’)
The Unconscious
-We know that, for Freud, the unconscious is not simply what is ‘latent’ (if we’re not currently conscious of something—say something we read about and remember reading about and ‘know we know,’ but can’t quite recall in its specificity at the moment—it is ‘latent’…Freud associates latent things with the ‘preconscious’ in the
essay, the ‘Pcs’ system…
-Some drive energies are ‘located in the unconscious’…
-Things that are ‘unconscious’ in the Freudian sense have been actively repressed and resistances keep them from becoming conscious: “the repressed is the paradigm for the unconsious” (107)…
-But notice that he also complicates this last idea: “while it remains correct to say that all of the repressed is Ucs, it is not also the case that all of the Ucs is repressed” (109): The patient’s (or analysand’s) resistances are also unconscious and yet they are not ‘repressed’ (so something that is not repressed can still be unconscious)…Freud locates these resistances in the ego
in this essay, but note that he in a way takes this formulation back in his later essay “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”
The ego (or the I)
-The part of the psyche that we, speaking in an everyday way,
might just call the self.
-Freud tells us this is the part of the psyche which is responsible for repression (the story is complicated, though, because what he calls the ‘super ego’ is also going to have an important role to play, when it comes to repression—it makes sense that Freud would be a bit messy here, because he also tells us that the ego
and the super-ego are not separated from each other in a tidy way: they bleed into each other)
The ego and the ‘reality principle
-The ego makes sure that drive energies are directed in ways that are
socially acceptable. In this sense, it follows what Freud calls ‘the
reality principle’ in its doings (the ‘reality principle’ is one of the
principles supposed by Freud to govern the psyche):
It assesses the social world (and ‘reason’ and ‘common sense’) and its
rules and assesses the drive, and sees if the drives can be vented in
the way they want to be without defying the requirements of the social world…
*If the drives can’t be channelled the way they want to be while abiding by the requirements of the social world (say channelling them that way will get the person into trouble), they’ll have to be repressed or redirected or transformed…
*The ‘ego-drives’ are drives that serve the end of self preservation
Note about how the sexual drives in
particular can transform
-Possible ‘vicissitudes’ of a drive (possible ways it can transform to relieve the pressure/displeasure it causes):
1) Reversal into its opposite (love can become hate; hate can become love; an active drive can become a passive one)
2) Turning upon the subject’s own self (A sadist can become a masochist)—note the Nietzsche connection…
3) Repression
4) Sublimation
-These ‘vicissitudes’ have some relation to what Freud is calling ‘defense mechanisms’ in
“Analysis Terminable and Interminable”…
-Note: In the English translations of Freud, ‘drive’ and ‘instinct’ refer to the same thing…
-Note: In Freud’s framework, when we’re talking about things that are ‘economic,’ we’re specifically talking about drive energy, a certain ‘economy’ of drive energy…
-The drives are a source of constant internal pressure
-There are different kinds of drives: Sexual drives (the life drives), ego-drives…and death drives (which Freud posits some time AFTER he develops his thinking on the life drives and ego drives)
The Super-Ego
-The super-ego is connected to the ego in some sense, or bleeds together with it, but it also can operate independently of the ego and can attack the ego.
-It lines up with what we would talk about, when just speaking casually, as our conscience or sense of morality. It is an agent of self-criticism.
-It measures the ego against its values and can condemn it if it falls short.
The super-ego is guided by a particular idea, which Freud terms the ‘ego-ideal.’
-A person’s ego-ideal is the result of early childhood experiences (with
parents—Freud associates it, in our text, with the ‘law’ of the father) and
also, later, comes to be shaped by things like education and culture.
-Like the ego, the super-ego can also extend into the unconscious.
Think about the relation between the super-ego and pathologies:
unconscious guilt can be a source of pathology…Interesting that an agent of ‘morality’ can be a source of pathology…
Is the super-ego more related to
‘conscious’ phenomena?
-“[I]t is not only the basest appurtenances of the ego that can remain unconscious, but also the most elevated ones” (118)
-“[T]he super-ego always has a very close relationship to the id, and can act as its representative vis-à-vis the ego. It secretes itself in the very depths of the id, and in consequence is further from consciousness than the ego” (139)…
Notice how complicated things are getting here: Can the super-ego have a relation to the ‘reality principle’ if it is this aligned with the id in this way?
Does the id, which is supposed to be governed by the pleasure principle
have a relation to the reality principle if it is so related to the super-ego and
the ego-ideal?
-So we know, like the ego, the super-ego can also extend into the
unconscious. Think about the relation between the super-ego and pathologies: unconscious guilt can be a source of pathology…Interesting that an agent of ‘morality’ can be a source of pathology…
The Oedipus complex and the ego-
ideal
-The ego-ideal, in our text, Freud suggests, is partly the effect of how the child navigates the ‘Oedipus complex’…(it grows out of the Id in some sense)
-The simple version of the latter: The boy child starts to be attracted to his
mother and starts to view the father as a rival. The girl child starts to be
attracted to her father and starts to view the mother as a rival.
-When Freud connects this situation to the development of the ego-ideal, he discusses the boy exclusively: The father, as an authority, indicates to that child what they ought to do…The boy child also learns what they ought
not to do through their navigation of the Oedipus complex: the father
teaches them what they are not allowed to have and what they must not do:
the child is NOT allowed to have the mother in a romantic way, for instance.
There are respects in which the ego-ideal that develops, then, tells them
NOT to be like their father: not to do as he does.
The ego-ideal is a crystallization of
alterity in the self, of the social world in the self
-‘Nuff said…
-Or has enough been said? Freud casts the ego as responsive to
the external world (its demands); he casts the Id as responsive to
the internal world and then casts the super-ego and the ego-ideal
as developments that emerge out of the Id…
-Is the ‘internal world’ Freud is thinking about ever ‘pure’ or at any
point not already constituted by the demands of the social
world…
-The ego-ideal itself can be unconscious, we’re told in this text…
The ‘Id’ (or the It)
The Id aligns with the drives (the life drives/sexual drives initially) and obeys the ‘pleasure principle’: it pursues pleasure and avoids the opposite, without regarding the potential consequences of the way it is pursuing pleasure/the way it is trying to vent its drives…
-Things get complicated when we also consider that Freud locates the
‘death drives’ in the Id (so it doesn’t JUST pursue the pleasure principle; the death drives point to the existence of a principle BEYOND the pleasure principle)…
-The ego and the Id blur together in some ways (Freud casts them as able
to ‘communicate’)
“The ego is not sharply separated from the Id, but flows down into it, such that both then merge” (115)
“The repressed is cut off from the ego only by the resistances generated by
the repression, and can communicate with it via the id” (115)
Interesting metaphor for the relation
between the ego and the Id:
“In its relationship to the Id [the ego] thus resembles a rider charged with bridling the superior power of his horse—with the difference that the rider tries to do this by using his own strength, the ego by using strength it has borrowed from elsewhere…Just
as the rider who doesn’t wish to be parted from his horse often has no alternative but to lead it where it wants to go, so too the ego habitually enacts the will of the id as though it were its own”
The Ego is threatened in multiple ways!
-Threatened by external threats
-Threatened by the Id/drive energy needing to vent itself (internal
threats)
-Threatened by the super-ego!
“Analysis Terminable and Interminable”
-This is the text in which Freud attempts to think about whether
psychoanalysis can ever truly end…
-Relatedly, he considers whether analysis can be ‘sped up’…
-PA takes a long time!
-Otto rank: trying to speed it up analysis (adapt it to the fast pace
of American life): Fixing the primal trauma caused by birth as the
means to this end for Rank…
-Freud’s ‘fire service metaphor’ to jab Rank & American prosperity…
Freud describes trying to speed up therapy
-His initially wealthy patient ‘the Wolfman’—childhood neurosis at the
base of his pathology…
-This patient was too comfortable—he wasn’t working to change/overcome his pathology
-So Freud sets a deadline! And it seems to work!
-Freud initially believes him to be permanently cured…but then there
are resurgences of pathology down the road…
-He returns from the war a penniless refugee (so endures subsequent
traumas)
-Freud understands his later bouts of illness as offshoots of a lifelong
neurosis
Setting a deadline/’blackmailing
-Freud casts deadline-setting as an effective technique
-At the same time, he tells us the deadline will make some of the
pathological material available while making other pathological
material inaccessible…It will be “lost to the therapeutic project”
-He also tells us deadlines only work only if the analyst chooses
to use them at the right moment (it’s hard to determine when this
is, he says, and if you make a mistake you will radically undermine therapy!)
-Whatever you do, don’t extend the deadline! Note re: Rebecca
Comay’s interesting work on deadlines…
is there a natural end to therapy? Can the therapist and patient
get there?
-There are two conditions for ending analysis: 1) the patient’s symptoms, anxieties & inhibitions have resolved;
2) there is no fear they will return because repressions have been lifted or rendered sufficiently conscious… (176)
-Curious moment, while thinking about whether therapy can
help a person achieve a stable state of ‘absolute psychological
normality’ and definitively master their drive-conflicts (conflicts
between the ego and the drives, or the ego and the id), he states:
“You have to first consult your own experience, to see if anything
like this ever actually occurs, and then the theory, to see if it is at
all possible in the first place”
What is the relation between
psychoanalysis and theory
-Freud did create ‘theory’…He called it ‘metapsychology’…
-You’ll notice the moment in this text when he calls metapsychology a ‘witch’!
-“There is no easy answer to the question of the route and the
means by which [drives are brought into harmony with the ego].
You have to tell yourself to ‘call in the witch’—the witch of metapsychology, that is. Without metapsychological speculation and theorizing—I almost said ‘fantasizing’—you cannot move
forward an inch” (181).
Theory vs. empirical observation
-Freud says analysts have experienced meeting the two
conditions for ending therapy described above…Does he think
the ‘theory’ suggests these conditions are never met, though, and that when they seem to be met, it only SEEMS as if they’ve been
met?
Examples and how to interpret them?
-Woman with hysterical symptoms; treated successfully; had a difficult subsequent stretch of life but remained psychologically ok; then had a hysterectomy after dealing with heavy bleeding; after that traumatic event, she was ill for the rest of her life…
-Guy whose initially healthy relationship with his analyst eventually sours…He was
originally (and seemingly successfully) treated for a neurotic element in his relations with men and women…
Different ways a person could interpret what happened and understand its consequences for therapy: The new illness could be a different illness (so the treatment WAS originally successful); the new illness could be a resurgence of the
original illness (in which case treatment only SEEMED successful); perhaps analysis effects permanent cures, but it had to be perfected as a technique, so some patients who underwent analysis when it was just ‘under development’ became ill ONLY because analysis had not yet been perfected when they underwent it…
Freud devotes most of the essay to creating a catalogue of factors that contribute to making therapy unsuccessful vs. successful…All, of
course, in an attempt to grapple with the main question highlighted above (does analysis truly come to an end; can it truly be completed)
What factors?
-Drive strength
-‘Transformations of the I’ (defense mechanisms)
The strength of the drives really matters!
-If the drive gets stronger or the ego gets weaker than it was in therapy, when a solution of some kind was arrived at, then the illness can come back…
-We can put it this way: The solution only worked for a specific ratio of drive power to ego; if that ratio changes, the solution stops working…Drives that were ‘tamed’ can announce their demands once more…
The taming of the drives
-Taming the drives is not about making drive energy vanish:
“In general that is impossible, and would not be desirable. No,
what is meant is something else, what roughly might be referred
to as the ‘taming’ of the drive. That is to say, the drive is completely subsumed into the harmony of the I, is open to influence from other tendencies in the I, and no longer
follows its own path to gratification” (181)
-Note the new vision of ‘therapeutic cure’ we’re getting here
Some factors that affect drive-strength
-We’re told drives become stronger at different points in a life: e.g., puberty & menopause…
-New traumas & enforced privations can also strengthen the
drives (182)
Are people who have gone to therapy so different from people who haven’t?
-Freud initially says yes, then reconsiders his claim without definitively rejecting it…
“[A]nalysis allows the mature and stronger I the opportunity to revise these old repressions; a few are dismantled, others are acknowledged but rebuilt out of more solid material. These new dikes have a very different kind of durability from the earlier ones; they can be trusted not to give away so easily to the flood waters of intensified drives. The later correction of the original process of repression…is thus the real achievement of analytical
therapy…” (183)
-Note the new vision of ‘therapeutic cure’ we’re getting here…
-Repressions happen in early childhood—all of them. No new ones are forged, Freud tells us here, but old ones are pressed into service for new reasons/to control the drives (183).
So what does therapy do? Help lift repressions? Help modify repressions
and, relatedly, fortify the ego (so that it can repress things more effectively or differently???)
