Sigmund Freud’s Impact: Theories and Concepts

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The name of Sigmund Freud is not unfamiliar to most people in the modern world regardless of their level of education. This name has become synonymous with psychoanalysis, the science he essentially invented at the beginning of the 19^th century. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was a medical doctor who worked with mental patients in Vienna prior to 1959 and is considered one of the founding fathers of modern day psychology because of his development of the psychoanalytic theory.

Originally trained as a neurologist, Freud’s work with his patients, frustrated by a mediocre ability to hypnotize, necessarily took on a more imaginative turn that revolutionized the way people approached the treatment of the mind. Although others had been doing work to understand the inner workings of the mind before him and others have come after him to refine and build on his theories, as well as add theories of their own, Freud is generally credited with the first break-through in treating the mind as an entity separate from the body. His identification of different levels of thought and how these levels interact and intertwine led to his development of psychotherapy. Within this theory, Freud outlines three major components of an individual’s psyche – the id, the ego and the superego.

Although the concept of the unconscious mind had existed well before Freud began his work, and the concept of hypnosis had been around for at least a century prior to his failure to work with it, it was Freud’s understanding of what the effects of hypnosis were in the treatment of the mind, as well as why these effects manifested themselves, that ultimately led to his development of the psychoanalytic process and the concepts therein.

To place his theory in basic terms, Freud determined that the human mind consisted of three main elements, which he called the Id, the Ego and the Super-ego. The id is the essentially biological element of the human mind that conceives of basic impulses and instinctual desires. As such, this element of the brain is treated as being essentially unconscious. The conscious mind was more associated with the ego, which was the socializing element of the human mind, functioning to help us navigate through the outer world by bringing the impulses and the desires of the id into socially acceptable bounds.

This was ruled over by the super-ego, what most people term their conscience, in which judgments are made regarding whether the individual’s determination to act or not to act on a specific impulse, including the methods in which any action is pursued, was good or bad. This area of the mind is also the one to dispense punishment whenever the rules are broken in the form of guilt. “Put more idiomatically: The Id says, ‘I want it now!!’; The Ego says, ‘No wait, please. Accept this substitute’ (sublimation); and the Superego judges either ‘Well done!’ or ‘You shouldn’t have done that. Now you will have to suffer guilt.’” (Landow, 1988).

Through the concept of the preconscious mind, Freud introduced the possibility that the conscious and unconscious mind were indeed linked in sophisticated ways, each affecting the other in a process ultimately geared toward protection and defense against traumatic events. This concept of the mind has informed a great many approaches to psychology over the years, as the following studies demonstrate.

The year of Freud’s death, his theories were already being recognized for their strength in multiple applications. In his article “The Contribution of Freud’s Insight Interview to the Social Sciences,” author Harold Lasswell (1939) illustrates the tremendous advantage Freud’s approach provided in terms of understanding the various dynamics involved in interpersonal relationships. This is primarily because Freud’s theory changed the focus of investigation from an extensive standpoint focused on exterior causes and responses, to an intensive standpoint. “An intensive standpoint has two distinguishing characteristics: it is prolonged and complex.

The observer focuses his attention upon the subject for a protracted period of time and uses special ways of exposing structure and functions” (Lasswell, 1939: 375-376). This longer observation period, coupled with a deeper understanding of the working of the mind, eventually reveals patterns in communication that, in turn, reveal deep internal causes and responses that had previously defied adequate explanation.

While a wide variety of observational positions had been developed and put into place spanning the entire continuum of extensive vs. intensive approach, Freud’s theory provided a scientific backdrop to these approaches. “The psychoanalytic standpoint is scientific and therapeutic. It is used to obtain data which are relevant to the confirmation or the disconfirmation of a body of explanatory propositions, and it is used to heal disease” (Lasswell, 1939: 376). Thus, Freud’s theory provided a basis of science for the investigation of the mind as well as a means of applying that science for the betterment of his patients.

At the same time that Freud’s theories broke the traditional approach to mental health, he also changed the relationship that was customary between the observer and the patient. “The participants know that they are being studied, and they know something about the special procedure by which they are studied” (378). This, too, had been a part of more traditional therapies but was fundamentally changed with Freud’s theory in that the observer takes an active role in the interview process, encouraging the participant to continue with free association techniques and, when appropriate, suggesting possible connections. “The interviewer offers ‘interpretations’ to the subject which are intended to assist him in recognizing and avowing with serenity those aspects of himself which are concealed from full waking awareness, or which are recognized, if at all, with great perturbation of affect” (381).

Through this process, the observer encourages the participant to investigate numerous possible interpretations of their behaviors and thoughts in order to develop a deeper insight into the various elements of their personality. This represented a significant shift in the traditional process in that the participant, with no prior educational knowledge of the approach taken, becomes an active agent to their own cure, eventually capable of some form of self-analysis.

However, even this early in the theory’s development, modifications to the theory are mentioned to have been made to either side of Freud’s original concepts regarding the role of the interviewer. “The group analysis of Trigant Burrow is supposed to take the leader off his authoritative pedestal and to add his analysis of himself to the material furnished by the group as a whole. The modifications introduced by Alfred Adler and Carl Jung gave prominence to the part played by the physician, decreasing the scope of the subject” (380).

While Freud’s theory provided essential information regarding the close connection between mental illnesses and the cultural context in which they occur, his interpretations of various symbols and concepts were also recognized early on as necessarily connected with his own cultural environment and issues.

This realization, in itself, also helped to further psychological studies as the researchers and doctors themselves began to understand and recognize the role that cultural environment played in their own researches and practices. The reach of this knowledge extended, even in 1939, from psychology to sociology to anthropology and beyond. The importance of understanding one’s own cultural approach to science of the mind continues to be stressed within any reputable training facility.

Freud’s psychoanalytic theory can also be seen to have been effective in treating criminals both before and after they have committed a crime. In “Psychoanalysis and Crime: A Critical Survey of Salient Trends in the Literature,” author John Fitzpatrick, surveys numerous studies of crime that employ a modified psychoanalytic approach. By 1976, the year that this article was published, it was widely recognized that Freud’s interpretation of symbols almost exclusively in terms of sexual orientation and libido were somewhat limited by his own personal understandings. Later researchers began taking the ego into greater account and recognizing a much broader range of possible interpretations.

Freud’s approach to crime is illustrated as having been rooted in “instinctual expression and unconscious psychosexual conflict,” but that later psychoanalysts “minimize the role of instincts and highlight selected adaptational and environmental factors which impel one toward criminal behavior” (Fitzpatrick, 1976: 68).

Freud’s theory held that children suffering the guilt and frustration of the oedipal complex, in which the child unconsciously desires an intimate relationship with the parent of the opposite sex and the removal of the parent of the same sex, who are incapable of solving this conflict on their own eventually grow up to become criminals as they seek alleviation from this guilt through punishment. The idea that criminals are anti-social and behave in ways that will end in incarceration primarily as a means of alleviating early unconscious and unresolved emotions of guilt was continued strongly into the 1940s and then began to take on less significance as researchers began recognizing the importance of environment and cultural concerns. However, according to Fitzpatrick, the instinctual libido concept continued to hold its own even into the 1970s.

Attempts to prove that Freud’s theories regarding crime were well-founded instead tended to illustrate the importance of environment in the development of a criminal while still taking on a psychoanalytic approach. “Adelaide M. Johnson and Stanislaus Szurek, who studied the parents of a number of delinquents as well as the delinquents themselves, found that there was a striking similarity between the parents’ regressive and unintegrated impulses and the behavior of their children” (Fitzpatrick, 1976: 71).

In other words, family’s in which the dynamics tended to place one child as the ‘bad’ seed or the scapegoat for all the family’s issues tended to turn out individuals who engaged in criminal behavior. While these studies did not conclusively prove ‘nature over nurture’, they did manage to illustrate a complex combination in which a mother’s unexpressed, unfulfilled and unacknowledged unconscious sexual promiscuity were reflected in her daughter’s engagement in illicit sex or a father’s lack of conscience regarding theft and petty crime, though unpracticed, is reflected in his son’s participation in such activities.

While not quite recognized yet as being a part of a debate that would engage scientists and researchers well into the future, Freud’s theory is thus seen to have unintentionally sparked a significant shift in human studies as we attempt to discover whether our behavior is brought about by our genetic disposition or our early environmental experiences.

Despite the libido approach to criminal investigations, by the time of Fitzpatrick’s article, the theory had mostly been discounted as comprising the dominant motivation behind criminal behavior. This was first because the theory seemed too simplistic to comprise the various elements involved in crime and secondly because of emerging evidence regarding the ego portion of the mind. Other reasons why a strictly instinctual theory was abandoned were because the mitigating factors of environmental stresses and experiences could not be responsibly ignored, particularly as attention on the family as a primary agent of socialization was explored to greater depths.

To support his contention that psychologists were beginning to move away from the strictly id-based concepts of unconscious guilt as a motivator for crime in favor of more ego-driven responses to the prevalent culture, Fitzpatrick cites the work of Franz Alexander. Alexander was unable to explain the various motivations of a group of criminals in America based upon strict application of Freud’s theories of criminality. “Alexander held that culture can not be conceptualized merely as either a magnified individual or a force that exerts a constant and common impact on all the people exposed to it. Instead, culture reflects a multiplicity of phenomena that need to be studied in their own right to determine how they influence the exceedingly complex etiology of crime” (Fitzpatrick, 1976: 72).

Erik Erikson took these ideas one step further and identified adolescence as the crucial period in an individual’s life in which they determine whether they associate themselves with a vocation and a productive ‘normal’ existence or if they will embrace a life of crime.

Through his synopsis of Freud’s theory as it is applied to criminal behavior, Fitzpatrick illustrates the many ways in which psychoanalytic theory had evolved between its original presentation, in this context in 1916 in a paper written by Freud, and the mid-1970s.

Having been presented as primarily concerned with the operations of the subconscious mind, or id, as the primary motivator for a life of crime, the theory underwent numerous studies and comparisons in which it was discovered that while some innate tendencies seemed to contribute to an individual’s choice to participate in criminal activity, there were other, equally compelling motivations and associations having to do with the individual’s environment and understandings based upon that environment. Thus, the ego was seen to take on a stronger role in the application of psychoanalytic theory not only in the criminal justice sector, but in other realms of mental health services as well.

Moving into more recent years, psychoanalytic theory has seen a number of changes and applications and remains a well-respected method of treatment for numerous types of patients in a variety of fields. Rebecca Curtis (1996) discusses the various ways in which psychoanalytic theory can be usefully integrated with a cognitive-social approach as a means of attempting to explain why people behave the way we do yet continues to call for a new model that more accurately depicts the knowledge gained so far.

Launching off of Freud’s original model of the human mind as essentially a three part system – the id, the ego and the superego – psychology has advanced to the point where the self, identified by Freud as essentially the ego, is now defined in a variety of different ways and placed on an entire shelving system of relative hierarchies. For instance, “Klein presented the idea that the term self provides an integrative function, which the term ego cannot. He pointed out that the ego cannot be both in conflict with a drive and also create the conflict. The self would be aware of such a conflict between ego and drive” (Curtis, 1996: 29). As this suggests, the field of what constitutes the unconscious id, the self as ego or the governing factor of the superego has thus been blown wide open.

As these fields are explored, a great deal of overlap has been found between various different theories and psychological approaches, either forcing the psychoanalyst to ignore compelling evidence or entertain the possibility that another approach may be equally or perhaps even more effective in adequately explaining variances. At the same time, questions are being asked regarding the various processes handled by the individual elements of the mind as defined by Freud such as “primary process thinking is now no longer considered by some psychoanalysts to be the exclusive province of the id.

Freud was attempting to include this irrational self in his concepts of the preconscious and unconscious, but his rejection of the spiritual self, which he connected with religion, led him to regard aspects of this type of processing, so frequently related to aspirations for a union with universals … as pathological rather than as a search for a repetition of a previously rewarding experience” (Curtis, 1996: 30).

As psychoanalytic theory has developed, it has moved away from the formal interpretations offered by Freud in the early 1900s and taken on new significance with the realization of the role environment plays upon available interpretations of various acts and behaviors. This reinterpretation of symbols and other particulars was taking place even as early as 1939, the year of Freud’s death. Freud’s theory has also been shown to have greater depth to it than he seemed to imagine as Freud focused upon the unconscious id-like motivations for various behaviors, both positive and negative, exhibited by individuals.

Investigations into why this should be so further helped to advance the field as the significance of the cultural role began to be realized to greater extent. This placed emphasis upon the mitigating effects of the ego as it attempted to find a means of balancing the inner needs of the id with the outer needs of the cultural environment and the individual’s experiences within it. Finally, the fundamentals of psychoanalytic theory, with its useful model of the human mind, has been adapted and adjusted to be combined with other human behavior theories in an attempt to come to a more accurate idea of just how the individual personality develops in all its complexities and disconnects.

References

Curtis, Rebecca. (1992). “A Process View of Consciousness and the ‘Self’: Integrating a Sense of Connectedness with a Sense of Agency.” Psychological Inquiry. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Fitzpatrick, John J. (1976). “Psychoanalysis and Crime: A Critical Survey of Salient Trends in the Literature.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Sage Publications.

Landow, George P. (1988). “Freud and Freudianism.” Victorian Web. Web.

Lasswell, Harold D. (1939). “The Contribution of Freud’s Insight Interview to the Social Sciences.” The American Journal of Sociology. University of Chicago Press: 375-390.

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Sigmund Freud’s Impact: Theories and Concepts

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