*HELP* Freud account of the unconsious

[ya ya ya]

Hi there

I am studying a degree in computer science in Liverpool university
(England). My course consists of 3 computer based modules and 1
subsidiary module, per semester. I chose philosophy as my subsidiary
subject (I think this was a mistake but to late to change it now).

At the end of this semester we have to write an essay on "Freud's
account of the unconscious", and prove it to be a truly scientific
theory or not. I can say it is not truly scientific but proving it is
another matter

I am posting here in the hope that someone can shed a little light
onto my dim brain. I have been poising and researching this subject
for 3 days, with little results, I am just pathetic at this sort of
thing.

I was wondering if someone could give me some points and possibly
explanations, that I could use in my argument to prove Freud's account
of the unconscious to be none scientific.

I am really stuck, I have found out that my mind is best when
computing a problem or writing program code (I came top out of 205
students in java programming.) Being an academic philosopher is
something I am just not too good at.

Any help that anyone could give me would be GREATLY appreciated.

Thaks in advance to any kind soul who replies to this desperate post!

Brett Halligan

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[NotSoQuick]

"ya ya ya" <burnt...@newsfeeds.com > wrote in message
news:mempvvsda8i7idcuu...@4ax.com...

I might like to share some ideas but I wonder why you want to prove
something is unscientific instead of trying to find out if it is or not.

[ya, ya, ya]

>I might like to share some ideas but I wonder why you want to prove
>something is unscientific instead of trying to find out if it is or not.
>

Hi there
Good question!
To be honest with you, I have never read fraud before this course. my
main interests in philosophy are around evolution the origin of the
species.

I know fraud can be called none scientific in the since that the
theory isn't falsifiable, that is to say one cannot perform an
experiment based on the theory giving the same results in each
experiment.i.e. the theory cannot be proved true every time by the
same tests (take Frauds account of mental condition cannot be proved
scientifically using his theory as the causes and effects of states of
mind / madness etc are not fully known.)

Basically for my essay I have to discuss why it isn't scientific, and
give examples etc. What I have said in this post is all the evidence I
can come up with so far.
For more examples on why his account of the unconscious is none
scientific I am still looking.

I am asking for help here out of desperation!
I am not a good analytical reader of work, I find fraud hard to read.

So basically I was just asking for some help here, I understand if you
don't want to give any ideas out.

Any ides to why frauds "account of the unconscious" could be classed
as none scientific would be of great advantage

Thanks for reading the post any how :)

Brett

[Not so quick]

"ya, ya, ya" <burnt...@newsfeeds.com > wrote in message
news:2qeqvv8hcck37lm7e...@4ax.com...

So, not only do you decide something is unscientific and go about proving
your preconception, but you don't understand the information and want
someone
else to do your work. Fraud indeed.

[The Immortalist]

"ya, ya, ya" <burnt...@newsfeeds.com > wrote in message news:<2qeqvv8hcck37lm7e...@4ax.com>...

> >I might like to share some ideas but I wonder why you want to prove
> >something is unscientific instead of trying to find out if it is or not.
> >
>
> Hi there
> Good question!
> To be honest with you, I have never read fraud before this course. my
> main interests in philosophy are around evolution the origin of the
> species.
>

Some think Frued was a Darwinist and his ideas give reference to
attempts to synthesise Darwin and psychology.

> I know fraud can be called none scientific in the since that the
> theory isn't falsifiable, that is to say one cannot perform an
> experiment based on the theory giving the same results in each
> experiment.i.e. the theory cannot be proved true every time by the
> same tests (take Frauds account of mental condition cannot be proved
> scientifically using his theory as the causes and effects of states of
> mind / madness etc are not fully known.)
>

Isn't some sort of ego or "I think therefore" set of necessities going
on? Sad news is that Evolutionary Psychology has recently begun to
confirm some of Frueds ideas and reveals that there has been science
hocky pocky going on politicising nature/nurture for a very long time.
A displeasurable feeling arising from the notion of nativism probably
has little to do with how much our instincts are united in
consciousness.

> Basically for my essay I have to discuss why it isn't scientific, and
> give examples etc. What I have said in this post is all the evidence I
> can come up with so far.
>
> For more examples on why his account of the unconscious is none
> scientific I am still looking.
>

You might get a good grade this.semester on bunking nativists but that
day is about to come to a shocking end; genome in a word then? BUT in
the meantime have fun bashin that sucka' and getting SSSM's* all riled
awhile:

The Myth of Irrationality is about how language and culture shape the
human mind, giving us all our higher mental powers. This social
constructionist or Vygotskian story stands in stark contrast to the
usual assumption that human mental abilities such as self-awareness,
imagination, creativity, recollective memory and "sophisticated"
emotions are innate. Much of the book actually traces the history of
why we believe what we believe about the mind, focusing especially on
the Romantic myth that the most important parts of us are buried deep
in our unconscious brains (and hearts) rather than being
socially-created in childhood. Read the first chapter. And how feral
children prove the case. Or this paper on freewill. Or this chapter
debunking Freud.

The Myth of Irrationality - The Science of the Mind from Plato to Star
Trek by John McCrone
http://www.btinternet.com/~neuronaut/webtwo_book_intro.html

This here complete chapter chronicles ego/irrationality up till about
Frued
http://www.btinternet.com/~neuronaut/webtwo_features_irrationality.htm

------here we jump into the jumpin Frued's bones!

The most famous of the many scientists to champion the myth of
irrationality was Sigmund Freud. The story of Freud is worth lingering
over because of the immense influence he has had on 20th Century
thought. No matter how discredited Freud's work has become, his
theories continue to seduce Western intellectuals and the vocabulary
he created has come to be the standard one with which we talk about
the mind.

Born in 1856, Freud was the bright first-born son of a Jewish cloth
merchant. A star pupil at school, Freud sailed into Vienna
University's world-leading medical academy. Until his 30s, Freud
followed a quite conventional career in neurology. He studied animal
nervous systems and human brain diseases under such renowned
professors as Ernst Brucke and Theodor Meynert. It seemed Freud was
set to make a modest name for himself in research and eventually
achieve a dull but worthy position as a professor. Privately, however,
Freud had little appetite for such an orthodox career. He had a
yearning to make his name with a really dramatic scientific
breakthrough. As he wrote to his fiancée in 1884, he was on the
look-out for "a lucky hit" that would set them both up for life.

Freud's first go at striking lucky turned into a tremendous
embarrassment. In the 1880s, samples of the newly discovered
stimulant, cocaine, had just been refined by German chemists from a
batch of coca leaves gathered on a recent expedition to South America.
Freud heard tales about how Andean Indians chewed the leaves to help
them till their fields and thinking that the drug could have a huge
potential, decided to test some on himself. Freud's experiences with
cocaine made a terrific impression on him and he became an ardent
champion of the drug. In an extravagantly worded paper, "Uber Coca",
published in 1884, Freud claimed cocaine to be a drug of near-magical
powers.

Freud soon was promoting the drug as a cure for ailments ranging from
seasickness to diabetes. Freud began to take cocaine regularly
himself: "...against depression and against indigestion." He also
prescribed it to his future wife and friends. Freud's championing of
cocaine brought him the attention he had been seeking. However the
affair ended badly once the drug's addictive and poisonous
side-effects became apparent. Freud was forced to back away from his
association with cocaine in rather a hurry.

Freud's second attempt to strike lucky came when he was offered a six
month research grant giving him the freedom to go and study whatever
he wanted. Demonstrating his nose for the spectacular, Freud abandoned
the pickled brains and specimen slides of his neurology laboratory in
Vienna to travel to Paris to study hysteria under Jean-Martin Charcot.

Charcot was the famed professor of brain disease at the Salpetriere,
Paris's asylum, who had in his care a collection of "hysterics":
patients given to all manner of alarming convulsions, contortions,
trances and paralyses. With the benefit of medical hindsight,
Charcot's hysterics now are believed to have been sufferers of
epilepsy - the electrical "brainstorms" which in severe form can
result in a loss of consciousness, but in milder forms, can lead to
symptoms such as those exhibited by Charcot's patients. Charcot
believed, however, that the fits were too extraordinary to be caused
by anything else but some mad disturbance taking place in the deeper
levels of the psyche - possibly as a result of sexual frustration or
"menstrual congestion".

Freud was dazzled by the convulsive displays of Charcot's hysterics.
To Freud, the fits were his first glimpse of the hidden power of the
unconscious mind. He returned to Vienna in 1886 full of excitement and
gave a lively account of Charcot's work to the city's Society of
Physicians. However his talk was poorly received. The Viennese doctors
already were familiar with Charcot's patients and had realised that
their hysteria was likely to have an organic rather than a
psychological cause. Freud came away from the meeting feeling that he
had been snubbed by "the high authorities" of the city because his
ideas were too revolutionary. Later he was to see this talk as marking
the beginning of a lifelong feud with the narrow minded members of
Vienna's medical establishment.

Despite this second set-back, Freud was undaunted. Almost immediately
he plunged into yet a third enthusiasm. Josef Breuer, a respected
doctor and friend of Freud's, had been attempting to cure an oddly
behaving patient through the use of hypnosis. Breuer believed that the
21-year-old girl, Bertha Pappenheim (known to psychoanalytic
literature as Anna O.), was suffering a hysteric collapse brought
about by having to nurse her dying father. Pappenheim had been looking
after her father for some months when she took to her bed with a
strange assortment of symptoms that included paralysis,
hallucinations, fits and loss of speech. Breuer was convinced that
Pappenheim was feigning illness to conceal her traumatic feelings. But
again with the benefit of hindsight, modern medical writers like Henri
Ellenberger tell quite a different story.

Bertha Pappenheim's father had been dying of tuberculosis and it
appears that she too had caught the disease. But instead of
contracting tuberculosis of the lung, she had developed a much rarer
form of the infection - one that affected the brain. This would have
caused all the symptoms Breuer described, but for physical, not
psychic, reasons. As revealed in his notes on the case, Breuer in fact
did consider himself the possibility that his patient might be
suffering from tuberculous meningitis. But he dismissed this
diagnosis, saying that her symptoms were just too bizarre (the
strangest of these being that Pappenheim lost the ability to speak
German when she lay down in the evening and could talk only in
English). Pressing on in the belief that he was dealing with a
hysteric, Breuer hypnotised Pappenheim and tried to get her to "talk
out" the repressed memories that he thought must be troubling her.

Freud was fascinated by Breuer's treatment and followed the case
closely. He adopted the idea of the talking cure for himself and
eventually persuaded a somewhat reluctant Breuer to jointly publish a
book on the great discovery. In Freud and Breuer's Studies in
Hysteria‚ the case of Bertha Pappenheim was celebrated as the first
psychoanalytic cure. It was claimed that the patient had been cured
the instant certain painful childhood memories were brought back to
the light of consciousness. However, in reality, the truth was very
different. As Ellenberger and others have discovered by tracking down
the original medical records, Pappenheim's condition actually worsened
during Breuer's treatment. His therapy had to be cut short when
Pappenheim became so ill that she was taken away to a Swiss
sanatorium. It took four further months for her illness to abate and
the worst of her symptoms to disappear. Even years after Breuer's
supposed cure, Pappenheim still suffered from excruciating neuralgia
pains.

Freud knew the full details of Pappenheim's case yet still chose to
represent it as an instant cure and use it as a springboard to launch
himself into his psychoanalytic career. As quickly as he could afford
to, Freud divorced himself from his conventional work at a children's
out-patient clinic and set up a private practice in which he could
treat other hysterics and neurotics using the talking cure.

Perhaps feeling guilty about the way the Pappenheim case had turned
out, Breuer lost interest in the treatment he had invented and
eventually broke with Freud. Breuer later commented grimly: "Freud is
a man given to absolute and exclusive formulations: this is a
psychical need which, in my opinion, leads to excessive
generalisation." Freud pressed on regardless. He abandoned hypnotism
as a means of regressing patients, saying he found it too unreliable,
and instead developed his own technique of analysis based on free
association and the interpretation of dreams. For the next decade,
Freud sat at the head of the psychoanalytic couch, gradually
developing a model of the mind from the revelations he was gaining
from his patients.

****

In considering Freud's model of the mind, it is important to realise
that Freud was not quite the revolutionary that many of his
biographers make him out to be. In fact the vision of the mind
underlying his theories was thoroughly rooted in the Romantic movement
that had got under way a hundred years earlier. At a time when his
Vienna colleagues were making great strides in understanding the
neural structure of the brain and the organic nature of many mental
diseases, it was Freud whose thinking harked back to medicine's
unscientific past.

It was rare for Freud to acknowledge the debt his work owed to the
romantic tradition - even if he admitted it was Goethe's essay, An Ode
to Nature, which inspired him to take up medicine in the first place.
However others, such as Lancelot Whyte and Ernest Gellner, have shown
how heavily Freud was influenced by the philosophy of Nietzsche and
Schopenhauer. The two philosophers' conception of a seething,
irrational will had many similarities with Freud's vision of a
sex-obsessed unconscious. The general hydraulic flavour of Freud's
view of human nature - where the urgings of a dark unconscious well up
in the mind and if dammed in their expression, cause the psyche to
spring leaks elsewhere - also came directly from the romantic
tradition. The idea of the mind as a fluid energy dated back to the
Naturphilosophie movement, a romantic science founded by Friedrich
Schelling in the 1800s, and before that, all the way back to
Aristotle.

As has been seen, Aristotle developed a physiology of the mind based
on the four humours - blood, mucous, and yellow and black bile.
Different balances of these humours gave rise to different states of
mind. Aristotle also saw the soul as an organic life-force which in
"dilute" form gave the simple awareness of lower animals, and in
concentrated or elevated form, gave the self-conscious and rational
awareness of humans.

Aristotle's theories about vital fluids became part of Western thought
through the medical writings of Galen, the Second Century Greek
physician. While Plato's model of the mind became entwined with
Christian belief to become the West's dominant theory of the mind,
Aristotle's ideas became a vaguely related sub-theme of the myth that
expressed itself mostly in the thinking of Medieval and Renaissance
doctors. Aristotle's idea of a surging life-force and four bodily
humours gave a physical explanation of the mind that complemented
Plato's metaphysical idea of mankind poised halfway between the animal
and the divine.

Influenced by Aristotle's hydraulic view of the mind, Renaissance
anatomists came to believe that the networks of nerves that laced the
body were, in fact, pipes down which vital animal spirits flowed. The
ventricles of the brain - a system of fluid-filled chambers at the
centre of the cerebral hemispheres - were seen as the seat of
consciousness. Such plumbing analogies took on a renewed popularity
with the rise of the Naturphilosophie movement, a school of medicine
linked to Romanticism that flourished in Germany during the first half
of the 1800s. The movement attempted to found a new science based on
the belief that there was a common world soul (weltseele) connecting
all forms of life. In its purest form, this world soul welled up
within the human body to give rise to rational consciousness.

Naturphilosophie caught the public's imagination with its religious
overtones and promotion of intriguing phenomena such as animal
magnetism. But as a science, the movement soon became discredited.
Certainly, by the time Freud started his medical studies in the 1870s,
enough was known about the nervous system to make the hydraulic
metaphors of Naturphilosophie outdated. Indeed, Freud was studying
under the very physiologists who finally had laid romantic medicine to
rest. Yet the image of a psychic pressure cooker still was to become
the foundation of Freud's theories.

The picture of the man who sat down in the 1890s to formulate the
psychoanalytic model of the mind is not a particularly flattering one.
Freud had shown himself to be an able student and had had the good
fortune to be working in Vienna at a time when it was the centre of
modern medicine. But Freud also had shown a gullibility, a reckless
ambition, and a dishonesty in the reporting of cures that put a
question-mark over his suitability for his lone venture.

There is good evidence that one further problem for Freud was that he
had become addicted to the cocaine he earlier had experimented with.
Freud's personality during this period showed the classic symptoms of
cocaine abuse. He worked in great bursts of activity which were
followed by bouts of black depression. He had the intense
preoccupation with sex which cocaine excites, but judging from
comments in his letters, he also had the impotence that is a
side-effect of heavy use of the drug. In addition, Freud appeared to
suffer from the paranoia that is another common symptom of cocaine
abuse - Freud was famous for the way he suddenly broke with many close
friends and his conviction that the world was against him and his
theories. Finally, Freud suffered from a variety of cocaine-related
physical ailments such as heart irregularities, fainting fits and
ulcers of the nose.

It is not disputed that Freud took cocaine while working on his
psychoanalytic theory - even his official biographer, Ernest Jones,
made reference to the fact. The question is how much influence the
habit might have had on Freud's character and on the ideas he was
developing. Some have suggested that a cocaine habit would explain why
the idea of sexual energy played such a prominent part in his theories
and also the messianic conviction with which he tended to argue his
case.

****

Freud's model of the mind was complex and was to undergo several
revisions. But boiled down to its basics, his argument was this: the
mind can be divided into three parts, the id, the ego and the
superego. The most basic part, the id, is the primal unconscious; the
energy source that drives the whole personality. In terms of the myth
of irrationality, the id is the pit of bestial desires; the deeply
buried part of the mind that is illogical and amoral.

While the id bubbles away in its unseen depths, the ego is the
self-aware and rational part of the mind. The ego is equipped with
defence mechanisms to keep the dark forces of the id in check. However
such is the seething energy of the id that occasionally it will breach
these defences and break through into awareness, expressing itself in
irrational and neurotic behaviour. The way Freud portrayed the ego was
almost as if it were a polite but nervous parent trying hard not to
notice the noisy tantrums being thrown by an unruly child at its feet.
The third component of the mind was the superego - Freud's name for a
person's moral conscience. Freud believed the superego was formed by a
child absorbing the customs and standards of its parents and peers.
This moral code then sank down into the unconscious where it lay in
wait, ready to nip the heels of the ego when it got out of line.

In some respects, this division of the mind into primal instincts, the
self-aware ego and a social conscience could have been a reasonable
starting point for a modern view of the mind. Unlike traditional
versions of the myth of irrationality, Freud was not claiming that any
aspect of the mind was divine or supernatural. In the superego, Freud
also had reserved a small place for the moulding influence that
society has on the human mind. However Freud fleshed out this simple
model with a complicated demonology of sexual urges, complexes and
repressions and gave the whole system a false hydraulic energy. For
Freud, sex - or what he called the libido - was the primary source of
all mental energy; a driving obsession that lay behind every action.
Even more controversially, Freud claimed that the full force of sexual
desire was experienced not just in adulthood but from the moment a
person is born.

This belief that sexual energy exerts a constant pressure on
consciousness from the moment of birth led Freud to his particular
view of childhood development. Freud claimed that every child has to
pass through a series of erotic stages. To begin with, the focus of
sexuality is the mouth and the act of breast-feeding. It then shifts
to the anus and bowel control, before finally settling on the correct
adult zone of the genitals. Mental problems were thought to be caused
by a child's progress becoming stuck at one of these early stages.

In addition, Freud claimed that, at the age of four or five, every
child experiences what he called the Oedipal crisis. Boys were said to
feel a universal urge to make love to their mothers and girls to
possess their fathers. Worried that their parental rival knew about
these incestuous feelings, children were supposed to fear castration
(or in the case of girls, assume that castration had already taken
place, thus leading to their special complex of penis envy in which
they wanted to reclaim their lost member). It was not until children
had managed to resolve this crisis by erecting a brick wall of
repression around their fears and desires that they could go on to
develop a proper superego and become normal adults.

Freud felt his discovery of the Oedipus complex, and its female
counterpart, the Electra complex, was his crowning achievement - "a
discovery fit to rank besides that of electricity and the wheel," as
one critic put it. However the evidence that Freud gathered to back up
his ideas about childhood sexual complexes was weak in the extreme.
Too much depended on Freud being able correctly to divine the secret
meaning behind the dreams, word associations and slips of the tongue
of his patients.

Freud, himself, never seemed to doubt his ability to uncover the
sexual fantasies that lay beneath the surface of ordinary thought. He
could see a penis in every protruding object and a vagina in every
receptacle. As he wrote, there was no doubt that in dreams: "...all
weapons or tools are used as symbols for the male organ: Eg, ploughs,
hammers, rifles, revolvers, daggers, sabres, etc. In the same way,
many landscapes in dreams, especially any containing bridges or wooded
hills, may clearly be recognised as descriptions of the [female]
genitals."

Freud was prepared to make the most tenuous connections in
interpreting his patients' thoughts. One woman's tale about being
afraid of stepping near a window for fear of falling was analysed by
Freud as the repression of an unconscious desire to lean out an open
window and beckon men like a prostitute. There was no point the poor
woman protesting against Freud's interpretation because Freud would
see this merely as added proof of her need to repress such a shameful
urges.

Two further patients show the quality of the evidence that Freud
gathered to support his theories and the ease with which he seemed
able to satisfy himself of the correctness of his analyses.

One of Freud's most famous cases was that of the Wolf Man, a patient
who had a dream about seeing six or seven white wolves sitting in a
walnut tree outside his bedroom window. After several years of
analysis, Freud decided that the patient's dream was a transformed
childhood memory of witnessing his parents making love three times one
afternoon while he was aged only one-and-a-half years old.

Breaking down the symbolism of the dream, Freud said the whiteness of
the wolves obviously stood for the parent's underclothes. Their
extra-bushy tails were an oblique reference to an old children's story
about a tailless wolf - which, in turn, was a disguised reference to
the patient's fear of castration by his "wolf" father. The fact that
there were six or seven wolves rather than only two was another
attempt by his ego defence mechanisms to disguise the knowledge that
the dream was about his parents having intercourse. By several more
such twists of logic, Freud eventually arrived at the idea that the
secret which was so distressing the Wolf Man in his adult life was a
repressed wish to be sodomised by his father!

It was typical of Freud's methods that sometimes he read symbols
directly - the whiteness of the wolves signifying white underclothes -
but at other times he read them indirectly - the bushy tails of the
wolves concealing the idea of a tailless wolf and their number
concealing the fact that just two people were involved. If Freud had
chosen, he could have decided that the whiteness stood for something
black - a funeral shroud perhaps - and that the half-dozen bushy tails
represented the genitals of twice as many naked men. The eternal
problem with Freud's method of interpretation was that the evidence
always could be twisted to fit just about any theory and no one
interpretation appeared to have any more justification than any other.

The rejoinder of the supporters of psychoanalysis is that the proof a
particular interpretation has hit the target comes when it produces a
cure. Like lancing a boil, bringing a repressed desire to the light of
consciousness should bring about a cathartic release from the neurotic
symptoms that were troubling the patient. However - as with Bertha
Pappenheim - the case of the Wolf Man was not the triumphant cure that
psychoanalytic literature made it out to be. In the 1970s, scholars
checking up on Freud's claims discovered the Wolf Man's real identity
and approached him. Over 80 years old, the Wolf Man was still seeking
out psychoanalytic help - saying that while the treatment did not seem
to have done him much good, at least he enjoyed his sessions on the
couch.

The Wolf Man confessed that Freud's elaborate interpretation of his
dream never made much sense to him, saying it all seemed "terribly far
fetched". For a start, coming from an aristocratic Russian family
where he was cared for by a nanny, there was little chance he could
have witnessed his parents in bed together. However, while he did not
accept Freud's interpretations and he agreed that psychoanalysis did
not appear to make much long-term difference to the depression he
suffered from, the Wolf Man clearly was struck by Freud's magnetic
personality. If nothing else, he said, the years in analysis had been
a fascinating experience.

A second patient (who appeared as no more than a footnote in The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life was even more revealing of Freud's
apparently unshakable faith in the correctness of his interpretations.
Freud's words speak for themselves: "M l was a 14-year-old girl, the
most remarkable case I had had in recent years, one which taught me a
lesson I am not likely ever to forget and whose outcome cost me
moments of the greatest distress. The child fell ill of an
unmistakeable hysteria, which did in fact clear up quickly and
radically under my care. After this improvement, the child was taken
away from me by her parents. She still complained of abdominal pains
which had played the chief part in the clinical picture of her
hysteria. Two months later she died of [cancer] of the abdominal
glands. The hysteria, to which she was at the same time predisposed,
used the tumour as a provoking cause, and I, with my attention held by
the noisy but harmless manifestations of the hysteria, had perhaps
overlooked the first signs of the insidious and incurable disease."
Clearly, Freud was troubled by this incident, yet he did not seem to
see that he might have been just plain wrong in his diagnosis.

There is not room here to give more than a taste of the casework that
Freud drew on to support his psychoanalytic model of the mind.
However, others have examined the evidence exhaustively and despite
the high public standing of Freud's theories, nearly a century of
careful investigation has failed to provide any convincing proof in
favour of them. Every interpretation could have had been made
half-a-dozen different ways and reviews of the success rates of
psychoanalytic treatments have shown that psychoanalysis is not a
reliable method for dealing even with minor mental complaints such as
phobias and depressions.

In cases where psychoanalysis does appear to help patients, it seems
to be the talking through of problems that brings the benefit rather
than any Freudian process of catharsis - a fact that has led many
modern versions of analysis, such as cognitive therapy, to drop the
dead weight of Freudian theory and to concentrate on allowing patients
to "reprogram" themselves by talking through their thoughts aloud.
Certainly, the Freudian approach of dream analysis and the uncovering
of childhood sexual traumas has proved a complete failure in curing
true mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.

If Freud's method of therapy has fared badly, his model of the mind
has gathered even less scientific support. His claim that humans are
driven by the constant pressure of sexual feelings, and that all
children share the same ripe fantasies about their parents, goes
against the evidence of modern psychology. When we come to look at
emotions, dreams, creativity, humour and thought, we will see how
Freud's whole concept of a mind with a separate, walled-off
unconscious, filled with hydraulic energies - sexual or otherwise - is
false. It also will become obvious that children lack the language to
think the complex thoughts that Freud ascribed to them, let alone
arrive at identical possession and castration complexes.

Summing up the experimental evidence that Freud's followers have put
forward in support of psychoanalytic theory, the English psychologist,
Hans Eysenck, concluded: "...over 80 years after the original
publication of Freudian theories, there still is no sign that they can
be supported by adequate experimental evidence, or by clinical
studies, statistical investigations or observational methods...As
another great scientist, Michael Faraday, once said: 'They reason
theoretically, without demonstration experimentally, and errors are
the result.' These words might well be carved on the grave of
psychoanalysis as a scientific doctrine."

****

Given that Freud's teachings have never had the support of objective
evidence, the puzzle is how psychoanalysis could have become so
central to modern culture and how Freud has come to be feted as one of
the greatest of all scientists. Even a harsh critic of Freud, such as
E M Thornton (who detailed Freud's abuse of cocaine), had to admit:
"Probably no single individual has had a more profound effect on 2Oth
Century thought than Sigmund Freud. His works have influenced
psychiatry, anthropology, social work, penology, and education and
provided a seemingly limitless source of material for novelists and
dramatists. Freud has created `a whole new climate of opinion'; for
better or worse he has changed the face of society. The vocabulary of
psychoanalysis has passed into the language of everyday life. Freud
himself has been described as a genius of the stature of Newton,
Einstein, Darwin and Copernicus."

In an attempt to explain the enormous appeal of psychoanalysis, the
Cambridge professor of social anthropology, Ernest Gellner, says
Freud's theories have a compelling drama about them. As an explanation
of human nature, psychoanalysis simply is more exciting than the
woolly answers offered by academic psychology or even the ascetic,
self-denying teachings of Plato and the Christian church. Gellner says
what gives psychoanalysis this high drama is its mixing of the
familiar and the shocking.

As has been argued, much of Freud's theories are nothing more than a
restatement of accepted romantic psychology - what Gellner calls the
pays reel of popular psychology: the traditional conception of:
"...man as half-angel, half- beast." Gellner says a "scientific"
theory that openly embraced the romantic view was bound to be warmly
received. But what gave psychoanalysis its dramatic tension was that
it spiced this traditional view with shocking new claims about the
treacherous unconscious and repressed incestuous desires.

Gellner comments: "A compelling, charismatic belief system...must
engender a tension in the neophyte or potential convert. It must tease
and worry him, and not leave him alone. It must be able to worry and
tease him with both its promise and its threat, and be able to invoke
his inner anxiety as evidence of its own authenticity. Thou wouldst
not seek Me, if thou hadst not already found Me in thy
heart!...Demonstrable or obvious truths do not distinguish the
believer from the infidel, and they do not excite the faithful. Only
difficult belief can do that."

Ambiguity about the scientific standing of psychoanalysis only adds to
this dramatic tension. On the one hand, psychoanalysis is respectable.
Its founder was a doctor who frequently asserted the scientific nature
of his work. Its practitioners also are doctors and are members of
analytic societies that hold conferences and publish learned journals.
Psychoanalysis has all the oak-panelled prestige of an established
branch of medicine. Yet on the other hand, psychoanalysis deals in the
poetic, the mysterious and the sexual. It has set up its camp in areas
that seem to be off- limits to normal science and medicine.

The spicy tale told by psychoanalysis goes some way to explaining why
it has caught the popular imagination. But psychoanalysis is more than
just a story with good box office appeal. Gellner argues that Freud's
theories would not have had the same hold on Western culture unless
the process of psychoanalysis itself had produced a core of
emotionally- committed followers. Gellner says that to understand
psychoanalysis's grip, it has to be seen as a religious cult that
comes complete with a charismatic leader, a seductive liturgy and a
well-oiled machinery of indoctrination. It is a hardcore of passionate
believers that drives psychoanalysis. To justify this claim, Gellner
points to the ways in which the process of analysis is like a rite of
initiation.

Undoubtedly, psychoanalytic treatment is emotionally demanding. A
classical course of analysis assumes that the patient will spend at
least three or four hours a week on the couch and that treatment will
last months, or even years. Gellner notes that when patients enter
analysis, the first thing that happens is that they are placed in a
state of disorientation. They learn that according to psychoanalytic
theory, their most innocuous thoughts are likely to conceal the vilest
unconscious urges. Patients enter a no-man's land where suddenly their
own thoughts have become untrustworthy and if they want to know what
they really feel and desire, then they will have to await the truths
that will emerge out of analysis. Gellner argues that the requirement
that patients free associate - say whatever comes into their heads -
while the analyst listens in silence, is also an important ingredient
in fostering this state of initial disorientation: "The analyst's
silence does indeed constitute or engender, not so much sensory, as
conceptual deprivation. The patient is not allowed to erect and
maintain patterns of his own (that would not be free association), and
he is initially denied any patterns by the prestigious therapist."
Softened-up by a month or two of such treatment, Gellner says the
patient becomes so hungry for explanations that when finally one is
offered by the analyst, it is grabbed at uncritically.

Perhaps Gellner makes too much of the psychological pressure that
psychoanalysis brings to bear with its techniques. After all, many
patients, like the Wolf Man, take the interpretations of their
analysts with a pinch of salt. To liken psychoanalysis to a form of
brain-washing seems too strong. However Gellner says it is important
to note that the explicitly-stated aim of a course of analytic therapy
is to achieve a phenomenon known as transference.

Transference is the name psychoanalysts give to the strong emotional
attachment that patients form for their doctor. Analysts believe this
attachment to be an essential part of effecting a cure. According to
Freud, the neurotic symptoms that bring a patient to analysis are
caused by a repressed libido becoming entangled in a narrowing circle
of unhealthy fantasies. By getting patients temporarily to transfer
the focus of their libido to the figure of the analyst, their symptoms
will be drained of their sustaining energy and so will vanish. The
price paid for this redirection of the libido is the "transference
illness" - an intense love/hate relationship that the patient develops
with the analyst. However, wrote Freud, once the transference illness
has works itself through, the libido will be released once more and
the patient restored to full mental health. Gellner dismisses Freud's
explanation, saying it is obvious that transference is nothing more
than the emotional bond that a vulnerable patient forms for the
prestigious authority figure of the analyst - the same kind of tie of
respect that is necessary in any ceremony of initiation.

Gellner argues: "Transference is the covenant, the bond, the social
cement, the social contract of the whole movement...Binding, loyalty-
requiring organisations normally possess...solemn rites de passage‚
oaths, initiation ordeals, which ensure that the entrant henceforth
has a psychic investment in membership and does not easily or
carelessly relinquish it. Transference does this for the
psychoanalytic system, and does it supremely well." Gellner adds that
it is not just patients who undergo the emotionally-committing
experience of transference. All psychoanalysts must themselves have
undergone a three year training analysis before being allowed to
practice.

Seeing psychoanalysis as a pseudo-religious cult which binds believers
to it through the process of analysis helps explain the hold Freud has
taken on the 20th Century imagination. Of course, the number of people
who have come into direct contact with psychoanalytic therapy is
limited (although, it numbers in the millions) and most people are
aware of Freud's ideas only through second-hand sources. However the
existence of an emotionally-committed core gives psychoanalysis a hot
centre that an ordinary body of scientific ideas lacks. Psychoanalysis
radiates such an intensity of belief in itself that even the casual
observer cannot help but feel there must be something in Freud's
theories for people to be making such a fuss.

****

Freud is important to our story because he took the myth of
irrationality and sanctified it. The romantics had given the myth its
poetic voice. Freud then threw the mantle of science over it, making
it respectable. Having said that, Freud's version of the myth did have
its idiosyncrasies that made it somewhat different from what had gone
before. As has been said, in its most traditional form, the myth of
irrationality portrays the rational ego as being suspended halfway
between heaven and hell. At least Freud did not argue for supernatural
explanations of the mind and saw both aspects of human nature as being
firmly rooted in the physical reality of the brain. With his concept
of the superego, Freud also went a long way towards acknowledging the
importance of social upbringing. He understood that humans have to
learn such culturally-valued attitudes as mercy, charity and loyalty,
rather than them being discovered within like some divine gift. Yet
despite these minor revisions, Freud's model was still the romantic
one. He believed that a brutish, unreasoning animal beat within every
breast. He also was convinced that imagination, dreams and fantasies
were irrational processes with their roots buried in the unconscious.

When Freud's ideas started to emerge into public view in the 1920s and
1930s, they struck a chord with intellectuals. For writers, artists,
philosophers, political theorists, sociologists and other
opinion-formers of the day, it seemed as if finally a scientist had
confirmed their age-old poetic vision of humanity. Intellectuals
seized upon psychoanalysis as a fashionable prism through which they
could take a fresh look at any subject from history to architecture.
They began to speculate about the Oedipal tendencies that drove
Napoleon on his trail of conquest or the hidden phallic symbolism of
the modern skyscraper. Freud's theories lent an aura of profundity to
the plots of dozens of novels and provided a rationale for new art
movements like Surrealism. More than anything else, Freud brought a
confidence-boosting sense of legitimacy to a generation of romantics
at just the moment when science was mounting its strongest challenge
to the romantic outlook.

The outbreak of the Second World War caused the break up of the close
circle of analysts that Freud had gathered around him in Vienna. Many
were forced to flee before the Nazis and seek refuge overseas. But
this flight only served to spark a second and even greater explosion
of psychoanalytic thinking once Freud's followers gained new footholds
in academic establishments in England and America. During the 1950s,
Freud's ideas became highly influential in areas such as psychiatry,
education and social work. Eventually, the very language of Freud
started to become part of everyday life. People began to speak about
the mind in terms of egos, defence mechanisms, Freudian slips,
repressions, neuroses and complexes. Rather than calling someone
prissy, they would call them anal-retentive, or instead of selfish, it
would be egocentric. Psychoanalysis had worked its way into Western
culture at every level.

So far psychoanalysis has been talked about as if it were a single
faith with a single leader. While Freud and his theories still form
the hub of psychoanalysis, its very success has led to a broadening
and splintering of the movement. Most of the schisms have been led by
members of Freud's circle in Vienna who have fallen out with Freud
over some article of faith, then departed to set up their own analytic
school.

The most famous of these wayward disciples was Carl Jung, a Swiss
psychiatrist who was being groomed as Freud's heir apparent until he
broke with the master in 1912. The son of a Protestant minister, Jung
was enthusiastic about Freud's analytic treatments but never had much
sympathy for Freud's insistence that sexuality was the sole driving
force of the human mind. After cutting himself free of Freud, Jung
developed his own psychoanalytic model which took analysis towards the
realm of the mystical and the occult.

In many ways, Jung brought back Platonism in all its pomp. Jung added
a new level to Freud's model of the mind, saying that beneath the
irrational pit of desires that made up the Freudian unconscious lay a
still deeper level of mind, the collective unconscious. Jung had been
puzzled that the same mythical stories and figures seemed to crop up
repeatedly in the culture of many different countries. To explain
this, Jung suggested that every person must share a "race memory"
filled with the same collection of archetypal images and symbols.
These archetypes include the creation myth, the virgin birth, the form
of the snake, the Great Mother, the mandala, the eternal feminine,
Paradise, four-foldedness, and the number three.

The parallel between Jung's unconscious archetypes and Plato's pure
forms is obvious. The difference is that where Plato had seen this
ultimate level of the mind as a celestial realm filled with
mathematical and moral essences, Jung saw it as a genetic reservoir
filled with arcane symbols. Somewhat of a recluse, the impact of
Jung's ideas were not felt immediately. But in the 1960s and 1970s,
Jung became immensely popular - the overtones of Platonic spirituality
and occult folklore that he brought to Freud's psychoanalytic model
striking a resonant note with the times.

Jung was only the most prominent of Freud's followers to split off and
form his own psychoanalytic cult. Others to do so included Alfred
Adler, Otto Rank and Wilhelm Reich. Like Jung, Adler rejected Freud's
sexual complexes, arguing instead that a desire to dominate was the
prime motivation of the unconscious - a theory which was, in effect, a
return to Nietzsche's idea of the striving will. Otto Rank's twist on
psychoanalysis was to go back beyond childhood and the Oedipus complex
to seek the primary trauma of life in the moment of birth - a project
that was to inspire therapeutic techniques such as rebirthing and
primal screaming therapy. The third of this trio, Reich, was the most
extreme. Reich believed that a magical force, orgone, was released at
the moment of orgasm and he became famous for the special boxes (built
of alternate layers of wood and metal) which people could sit inside
to trap this energy.

The splintering of psychoanalysis continued into the second and third
generation of analysts. People like Melanie Klein, Harry Stack
Sullivan, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney and Jacques Lacan all developed
their own distinct brands of psychoanalytic theory. From this
profusion of ideas sprang an even greater variety of therapeutic
practices. As a writer on psychoanalysis, Steven Marcus, has remarked,
therapies now span a spectrum that: "...ranges from a variety of drug
therapies, encounter groups, marathon and weekend catharses to
sensitivity training, touching courses and feeling games, primal
screaming, aggressiveness-raising, consciousness- lifting,
meditations, massages, and who knows what else. Most of these
practices are overtly hostile to psychoanalysis, though many of them
consist of taking one or two pieces of psychoanalytic discovery,
procedure, or insight and transforming it or them into an entire
therapeutic regime."

Insiders to the psychoanalytic profession remain sharply aware of the
distinctions between their differing brands of theory. But to the
wider world, the Freudian legacy has become a blurred hotch-potch of
ideas. However, this has done little to harm Freud's high status
within intellectual circles. If anything, the way that fragments of
the movement have reconnected with past strands of irrational
mythology - for example, Jung forging a link with Plato and the
occult, and Adler with Nietzsche - has served only to weld
psychoanalysis more firmly into place at the heart of Western culture.

****

In the 1960s, this ever-broadening Freudian legacy played a large part
in inspiring the rise of a new psychological school, Humanism. At the
time, Humanism was thought to be a reaction against Freud and his
black European vision of the helpless ego, tossing upon the sea of a
sex-obsessed unconscious. The movement was started by American
psychotherapists and university academics who wanted to put forward a
more positive view of the human condition. Humanism also saw itself as
a reaction against the behaviourist school that dominated the academic
psychology of the day -....

More left in this article
http://www.btinternet.com/~neuronaut/webtwo_features_freudmyth.htm

http://www.btinternet.com/~neuronaut/webtwo_features_freudmyth.htm

Freud
For the sake of brevity, I assume the reader is familiar with
the basic Freudian concepts--id, ego, superego; resistance, libido,
Oedipus complex; and the five stages of psychosexual development. The
basic idea was that from the id, two drives emerge: the erotic drive
and the self-destructive drive. The aim of the former is possession
of the parent of the opposite sex; the aim of the latter, the
reduction of all tension and a return to the inorganic state. The
attainment of either goal would have antisocial consequences, so only
displacements, substitute gratifications are possible. These reduce
tension but do not eliminate it. The ego develops through the fives
stages of psychosexual development to cope with the outside world,
where there are objects that psychic energy, libido, can be invested
in. The superego develops out of the internalization of prohibitions
laid down in childhood. The aims of the two drives are so terrible
that they cause anxiety, and hence are repressed by the superego.
This allows an individual to retain socially acceptable illusions
about himself. Repressed material can cause various neuroses;
analysis consists of bringing repressed material to consciousness, one
small dose at a time.

How did Freud view religion? Freud was a radical materialist.
Almost alone among behaviorial scientists of the time, Freud was a
destructive critic of religion....

http://www.textfiles.com/occult/OTO/biblebel.txt

otherwise Freuds adapting Darwin to psychology was a bold move of an
overman?

> I am asking for help here out of desperation!
> I am not a good analytical reader of work, I find fraud hard to read.
>

PSYCHODYNAMICS

FREUD

PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY

OBJECT RELATIONS THEORY

DEFENSE MECHANISMS

OTHER PSYCHOANAKYTIC SCHOOLS

PSYCHOANALYTIC TECHNIQUES

BEHAVIOR THERAPY

GROUP PSYCHOTHERAPY

FREUD

Sigmund Freud (1856-1938) developed psychoanalysis as both a
psychological theory of the mind and as a psychotherapeutic method of
treatment. Freud elucidated two fundamental concepts of his theory -
Existence of an unconscious mind and the concept of psychic
determinism or causality .

The idea of talking cure through catharsis of feelings was known since
old time. Catholic confessions and Greek drama (as analyzed in
Aristotle's Poetics) antedated the modern concept of psychotherapeutic
Catharsis.

PSYCHIC DETERMINISM:

The assumption that mental phenomena have causes is assumed by Freud
to be proved by the demonstration of the existence of unconscious
mental processes. The assumption of psychic determinism leaves no
place for self or the use of explanation other than causal ones. The
claims of psychoanalysis to be a science is based on its
causal-deterministic assumptions .

Freud also evolved other concepts as repression , infantile sexuality
, conflict , psychic pain and defence mechanisms.

The concept of Conflict:

Opposition between apparently or actually incompatible forces is
important aspect of psychic life . The expression "dynamic" itself was
borrowed from physics were two conflicting forces produce a third
resultant force in another direction. A psychological conflict may be
between instinctual impulses (e.g. Libidinal or Aggressive) or between
structures (e.g. EGO and ID).

Freud did not restrict the psychological conflicts to sexual life, he
also recognized conflicts in other fields. For example , aggressive
feelings may be turned against the self in depression and suicidal
attempts or converted into somatic symptoms such as migraine or
hypertension.

Psychiatric disturbances certainly have a considerable genetic
predisposition and sometimes physical cerebral dysfunction play an
important role . Early psychological trauma as separation , loss or
sexual abuse may impair the ego's strength and its capacity to manage
primitive anxieties and impulses.

Neurotic conflicts originate in personal relationships during person's
formative years, which become internalized and determine the sort of
relationship formed with others thereafter.

Conflicts are only neurotic if one party is unconscious and / or they
are resolved by the use of defence mechanisms other than Sublimation.

The Concept of the Unconscious:

Sigmund Freud was NOT the first one to describe the concept of the
Unconscious Mind (that part of the mind in which mental processes are
dynamically unconscious) . The unconscious is a metaphorical
anthropomorphic concept. The unconscious processes are of two kinds:
those which become conscious easily , and those which are subject to
repression. The former are the Descriptively unconscious or
PRE-CONSCIOUS, the latter are Dynamically unconscious.

Dynamically unconscious processes conform to the primary processes of
thought, while preconscious and conscious process conform to the
secondary processes.

Freud regarded dreams as the "Royal road to the unconscious". Dreams
were the "disguised fulfillment of a repressed wish". Dreams may be
also attempts to master unpleasant experiences or to solve problems.
They have creative and imaginative aspects and may be a non-discursive
mode of communication. Artistic and scientific creativity , hysterical
symptoms , post-hypnotic phenomena ( A complicated sequence of
behaviour under the control of an idea implanted by a hypnotist of
which the subject is not conscious) , parapraxes , subliminal
perception and selective attention support the notion of unconscious
psychic activity.

Psychic Pain :

Anxiety and Guilt as a derivative of anxiety are the source of psychic
pain. In psychoanalysis , anxiety may be evoked by either changes in
the environment or by stirring of unconscious repressed forces in the
self . Freud had three theories of anxiety . the first was that it was
a manifestation of repressed libido , the second was that it
represented a repetition of the experience of birth , while the third
(the definitive psychoanalytic theory of anxiety ) is that there are
two forms : Primary anxiety and Signal-anxiety , both of which are
response of the Ego to increase instinctual or emotional tension ;
signal anxiety being an alerting mechanism which forewarns the Ego of
impending threats to its equilibrium , primary anxiety being the
emotion which accompanies the dissolution of the Ego. Primary anxiety
represents a failure of defence and occurs in nightmares.

Other forms of anxiety described in psychoanalytic literature are:

a) Annihilation Anxiety:

manifested in derealization and depersonalization

b) Separation Anxiety :

provoked by the threats to the separation from objects conceived to be
essential for survival. It occurs also in adults when intimately
attached to another person emotionally.

c) Castration Anxiety:

provoked by real or imagined threats to the sexual function.

TOP
PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY
# THEORY OF INSTINCTS
# LIBIDO THEORY:-

The libido refers to that " force by which the sexual
instinct is represented in the mind". Libido is conceived as having a
source (the body or the ID) , as existing in various forms related to
specific erotogenic zones (i.e. ORAL, ANAL, or GENITAL LIBIDO), as
being distributed between various structures or processes. In Freud's
first formulations , libido was the energy attached specifically to
the sexual instincts , but later the ego was assumed to possess libido
which is derived from libido attached to object representations
(OBJECT-LIBIDO)
The libido now comes to mean the overall mental "energy"
or drive. This theory is a Sexual Motivational theory. The Id is the
source of motivation. Aggression expressing death instinct can be
projected as aggression recognized as against the self. The LOVE
OBJECT is the person or the thing towards which the libido is directed
or "CATHECTED".

# INFANTILE SEXUALITY:-

Freud noted that infants were capable of erotic activity
from birth, and he described the various stages of sexual development
during the first few years of life.

# PHASES OF DEVELOPMENT:-
# ORAL : From birth to 1 year

The breast is the LOVE OBJECT and gratification is
attained by oral means. BASIC TRUST is the developmental task at this
phase.

# ANAL : From 1 to 3 years

Gratification is achieved by control over
defecation. A sense of self develops and the main task is AUTONOMY. It
can lead to compulsive defiant behavior (passive aggressive) or
over-compliance.

# OEDIPAL:- From 3-5 YEARS

Oedipal complex signify rivalry between son and
father for mother's affection. The child may fear imaginary castration
as a punishment by the omnipotent father. ELECTRA COMPLEX is the
equivalent in girls although it arises when she realizes that she is
already castrated.
This phase is characterized by CASTRATION ANXIETY
which is resolved by identification with the parent of the same sex.
It is also called the PHALLIC phase as the genitals are the erogenous
zone as contrasted to the anus and the mouth.

# LATENCY: school years ( From 5 to 12 years)

sublimation of impulses and displaced interests
leads to achievement in attainment of skills. It is the stage of
INDUSTRY.

# ADOLESCENCE: From 12 to 20 years

Recapitulation of earlier phases occurs in this
stage of EGO IDENTITY. Sexual drives are awakened by hormonal upsurge.

# ADULTHOOD : After 20 years

This the stage of adult sexuality and INTIMACY.

The failure to achieve genital primacy may result in various forms of
pathology . The persistent attachment of the sexual instinct at a
particular phase of pre-genital development is known as fixation.

FIXATION is an evidence of failure to progress satisfactorily through
the stages of libidinal development . The concept assumes that the
fixated person has a tendency to engage in infantile outmoded patterns
of behavior or to regress to such patterns under stress. He may choose
compulsively objects on the basis of their resemblance to the one
which he is fixated to , and suffers impoverishment of available
energy as a result of his investment in the past object . Excessive
frustration and satisfactio, excessive love and hate have all been
advanced as causes of fixation . There may be oral fixation, mother
fixation, anal fixation and father fixation.

A fixation point is that phase, period or point of infantile
development at which a person has become fixated , through which he
has not completely passed , and to which he remains liable to regress.

TOP
# OBJECT RELATIONS THEORY:-

Freud postulated that the choice of a love relationship itself , and
object relationships in other spheres of activity depend largely on
the nature and quality of the child's object relationship during the
earliest years of life and his relationships with crucial figures in
his or her environment.

Bowlby and Melanie considered the human being possessing an impulse to
make a relationship of one kind or another. The Object can be a person
, part of a person , material objects or animals.


# CONCEPT OF NARCISSISM :-

Freud proposed that a sate of primary narcissism exists at
birth ; that is , neonates are entirely narcissistic ; their libidinal
energies are devoted entirely to the satisfaction of their needs .
Later, as infants gradually begin to recognize the person immediately
responsible for his their care as a source of tension relief or
pleasure , libido is released for investment in that person , usually
the mother. thus, the development of object relations parallels this
shift from primary narcissism to object attachment. However, some
narcissistic libido is normally present throughout adult life. This is
considered healthy narcissism and finds expression in the person's
sense of well-being. In a variety of traumatic situations - such as
threats , injury , object loss, and excessive frustration - libido is
withdrawn and reinvseted in the self.

The classical theory thus distinguish between priamry narcissism , the
love of self which precedes loving others , and secondary narcissism ,
love of self which results from introjecting and identifyng with an
object . The latter is either a defensive activity or attitude , since
it enables the subject to deny that he has lost the introjected object
or part of the developmental process.

A major difficulty of the concept is that , on the one hand , the word
"Narcissism" has inescapable disparagaing overtones , while on the
other hand , it is used as a technical term to recognize all forms of
investment of energy (libido) in the self.

Narcissitic object-choice is based on the object's similarity to the
subject. Love objects may be chosen in adult life because they
resemble the person's idealized self-image or fantasized self-image or
because they resemble those who took care of the person during the
early years of life.


# INSTINCTS:-

An instinct is an innate biologically determined drive to
action. An instinct , according to classical theory has a biological
source ( The part of the body from which it arises), supply of energy
derived from it , an aim ( any action directed towards satisfaction or
tension release ) and an object ( The person or thing that is the
target of this action) .

An instinct may undergo four vicissitudes: Reversal into its opposite
, turning against the self , repression or sublimation.
Freud was consistently a proponent of a dual instinct theory , holding
that instincts could be categorised into two groups which tended to be
antagonistic towards one another. Ego-instinct and the Sexual instinct
corresponds to the self-preservation and the reproductive instincts of
biology.

In his later speculative writings they were identified as LIFE AND
DEATH INSTINCTS. Frued introduced his theory of the dual life and
death instincts , EROS AND THANATOS, in 1920. These were thought to
represent the forces that underlie the sexual and the aggressive
instincts.

Freud defined the death instinct or Thanatos as the tendency of
organisms and thier cells to return to an inanimate state. In contrast
, the life instinct or Eros refers to the tendency of particles to
reunite , of parts to bind to one another to form greater unities , as
in sexual reproduction . Death instinct was thought to be the dominant
force.
# MODELS OF THE MIND

1- MEDICAL
2- SOCIOLOGICAL

3- PSYCHODYNAMIC MODELS ( META-PSYCHOLOGY):-
A. TOPOGRAPHICAL MODEL:

Conscious , Preconscious and Unconscious:

Freud considered consciousness to be at different LEVELS. Thus
something may be merely unconscious because we are not aware of it at
a particular time . A disagreeable feeling or painful memories are
suppressed , though we may be reminded of them. This is the level of
the PRECONSCIOUS. Alternatively an idea may be unconscious because it
is actively repressed. This is the level of the DYNAMIC UNCONSCIOUS.

B.STRUCTURAL MODEL :-

ID ,EGO ,SUPER-EGO --{ CONSCIOUS & UNCONSCIOUS}

EGO: is the appraising organ of the mind. It is that part of the
individual which is in direct touch with reality. The EGO mediate
between the ID impulses, The SUPEREGO prohibitions and demands of the
external reality using EGO FUNCTIONS.

EGO FUNCTIONS involve relationship with reality ( Reality Testing,
adaptive function and maintenance of sense of reality) , relationship
with other people ( OBJECT RELATIONS ) and regulation and control of
drives ( LIBIDO THEORY ). It has also cognitive , synthetic ( holding
together the components of the psyche) and autonomous functions. Some
EGO FUNCTIONS are CONFLICT-FREE. It uses DEFENSE MECHANISMS to deal
with conflicts.

SUPER-EGO: is the examiner of the mind. It is formed by introjection
and identification with the parental morals and prohibitions. Part of
the Ego is conscious and part of it is unconscious. In Transactional
Analysis the equivalent terms are Adult,Child & Parent.

PRIMARY AND SECONDARY PROCESS THINKING:-

The Primary process thinking is unconscious and based on the PLEASURE
PRINCIPLE where the libidinal drive seeks satisfaction without
consideration of reality. The Secondary Process Thinking is conscious
and based on REALITY PRINCIPLE which take into account the social
demands and pressures. The primary process thinking is prominent in
dreams.

DREAM WORK:

This is the process by which the hidden or LATENT CONTENT of dream is
turned into the reported MANIFEST CONTENT recalled by the patient. The
dream work involves condensation , displacement , ptojection ,
symbolization and secondary elaboration. The manifest content of the
dream shows OVER-DETERMINISM.

PARAPRAXES :

These are the apparent errors and omissions in everyday life which
symbolize underlying attitudes. They may be not repressed or repressed
either completely or incompletely .

TOP

# DEFENSE MECHANISMS:-

The function of defence is to protect the Ego, and defence may
be instigated by Anxiety due to increase in instinctual tension,
Super-Ego threats or realistic dangers. Anna Freud lists nine defence
: REGRESSION, repression, REACTION FORMATION, ISOLATION, UNDOING,
PROJECTION, INTROJECTION, TURNING AGAINST THE SELF, and REVERSAL -
plus tenth SUBLIMATION. SPLITTING and DENIAL are also usually listed
as defence.
It is usually assumed that defence belong to specific stages of
development, e.g. INTROJECTION , projection, denial , splitting to the
ORAL phase; reaction-formation , isolation and undoing to the ANAL
phase.

Defence Mechanisms are unconscious mental processes which are employed
to resolve conflict between instinctive needs ( The Id ), internalized
prohibitions (The Super-Ego) and external reality. They Are directed
against painful experiences. They are descriptive concepts only.


# Repression:-

It is the basic defence mechanism. There is refusal
to recognize external reality and pushing into unconscious of the
unacceptable instincts and feelings or conflicting impulses.
Thus their perception is inhibited and prevented
from reaching consciousness. Denial is a CONSCIOUS refusal of
recognition of external reality.

# Regression:-

Return to an earlier state or mode of functioning. It is a defensive
process by which the subject avoids anxiety by return an earlier stage
of psychosexual development . The stage to which the regression occurs
being determined by the existence of FIXATION POINTS.
# Displacement:-

The process by which energ(CATHEXIS) is transferred
from one mental image to another. Displacement is one of the primary
processes and in dreams one image can symbolize another. Symbolization
and SUBLIMATION depend on serial displacements.

# Avoidance:

This can occur in situations which arouse unpleasant
feelings, memories or repressed conflicting impulses. It is more
common in phobias.

# Reversal:-

Instincts are capable of undergoing reversal so that
Sadism can change to Masochism , Voyeurism into Exhibitionism, etc.
Reversal being usually , though not always from Active to Passive.

# OBSESSIONAL DEFENSES:-
# RATIONALIZATION:

Rational statement is given to avoid an inner
unconscious aspect of an impulse or feeling. The classic example of
the " Sour Grapes" in Aesop's fable. We all give justifications which
may be reasonable for our decisions, acts , feelings and whims.

# INTELLECTUALIZATION:

Here a rationalized explanation is given , but
in a rather theorizing and argumentative manner. For example a debate
and discussion about value of psychoanalysis by patient may be a
resistance against involvement in therapeutic relationship .

# REACTION FORMATION:-

This is feeling or a behavior which the
opposite of the unacceptable instinctual impulses. It is doing the
opposite where the quality of the impulse is changed in its
antithesis. For example kindness may be the declared behavior when the
impulse is to be cruelty . Obsessive cleanliness and washing may
conceal an impulse to indulge in dirty, forbidden or obscene act or
phantasy.

# WITHDRAWAL / ISOLATION OF AFFECT:-

An unconscious idea allowed into consciousness
but all affect is withdrawn from it , i.e. the idea is separated from
its associated affect. This is very frequent in obsessional (Often of
aggressive nature and accompanied by anxiety)

# UNDOING:-

A magical attempt to reverse the action of an
impulse .
Closing the gas tap may be a reversal of the wish to
open it.

# OTHER DEFENSE MECHANISMS:-
# DENIAL
# PROJECTION:

Attribution of one's own unacknowledged
feelings to others. A feeling of anger may be transformed into a fear
of people attacking the person .A denial and projection of dependency
needs may be displayed as a complaint of who other people are weak and
demanding.

# INTROJECTION
# INTERNALIZATION
# EXTERNALIZATION
# IDENTIFICATION
# DISTORTION:

Grossly reshaping external reality to suit
inner needs.

# TURNING AGAINST THE SELF:-

Unacceptable aggression towards others is
expressed indirectly towards the self. In passive aggressive ,
hypochondriacal and depressive patients the aggression is turned
inward and may terminate in suicide.

# ACTING OUT:

Direct expression of an unconscious impulse in
order to avoid awareness of the accompanying affect.

# SUBLIMATION :

A healthy coping mechanism. The indirect expression
of the instinct in a social acceptable manner without adverse
consequences.

# COMMON DEFENSE STRUCTURES
# HYSTERIA: Denial ,Projection and Identification
# PARANOIA: Splitting and Projection
# DEPRESSION: Turning onto the self
# PHOBIA: Avoidance ,and Displacement of the affect
# REGRESSION is used in Conversion Hysteria and Eating Disorders.
# REVERSAL is manifested in Passive Aggressive and Dependant
Personality Disorders.

KLEINIAN DEFENSE MECHANISMS:-


# SPLITTING:

Freud talked about splitting of the ego, but
Melanie Klein considered Splitting as a defense mechanism. The
positive and the negative fantasized relationships remain separate in
consciousness with one alternative dissociated from the other. The
child sees the Good Mother as Separate from the Bad Mother , the
patient may see the Madonna as totally different and has nothing to do
with the Prostitute.

# PROJECTIVE IDENTIFICATION:

Part of self is projected into another to harm ,
control or possess him or her. The dissociated unacceptable parts of
the self are projected onto the other then the person identifies with
the other.
TOP

OTHER PSYCHOANAKYTIC SCHOOLS

# Carl Jung ( 1875 - 1961): ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY:

Jung postulated three levels of psyche: the
Conscious or the PERSONA and two types of unconscious; PERSONAL AND
COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS. The Persona is the outer crust of the
personality which is the opposite of the Personal Unconscious on a
dimension. Other dimensions of opposites include thinking vs feeling,
sensuousness vs intuition , extrovert vs introvert ( as related to the
direction of flow of mental energy). He refused sexual motivation .

The ARCHETYPES are generalized symbols and images within the
collective unconscious. The most important of these are the ANIMUS or
the unconscious masculine side of the female persona and the ANIMA or
the unconscious feminine side of the male persona.

A complex according to Jung is a group or constellation of
interconnected ideas which arouse associated feelings and effect
behavior.


# Alfred Adler (1870-1937) : INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY

Adler highlighted the concept of Inferiority Complex
and Masculine Protest. Organ inferiority lead to psychic compensation
and fictive goals. The individual has a drive for superiority and
power and social significance. Adlerian Individual Psychology was
integrated into the schools of EGO PSYCHOLOGY .

# NEO-FREUDIANS

This group is influenced by Adler in his shift of
emphasis from the biological to the social processes, from the
intrapsychic to the inter-personal processes and from the past to the
"HERE AND NOW".
THE BRITISH SCHOOLS

# KLEINIAN PSYCHOLOGY

Melanie Klein is well-known for her work with
pre-oedipal children using PLAY THERAPY . She considered the Ego and
its defence mechanisms as structures present from birth and that the
super-ego to be present before the age of two.
PARANOID -SCHIZOID POSITION: (0-4 months)

This develops first . The mind of the child split objects into good
and bad , unattached to each other . He sees bad objects as
persecutory. The good aspects of the mother are introjected but are
threatened by the externalised bad aspect.
DEPRESSIVE POSITION: ( > 4 MONTHS)

Here the child realizes things as whole objects : the mother
gratifying and frustrating , good and bad . He takes the depressive
position because of anxiety of losing the mother when attacking her
during his frustration , fear and guilt of destroying the loved one
with hatred .
# TRANSITIONAL OBJECTS

WINNICOT one of the Post-Freudians developed
the "Object Relations Theory", with Fairbairn , Guntrip and others. He
saw that satisfaction is sought in relationships , not only in sexual
gratification .
Personality , according to him, develops from
internalized early relationships , partially with the mother ("Good
enough Mothering"). A Transitional Object is an intermediate between
oral eroticism and true object relationships.

# ANNA FREUD:-

She stressed the importance of EGO DEFENCE
MECHANISMS and was one of the pioneer of EGO PSYCHOLOGY. She
considered the therapeutic relationship with the child as more
educational than analytical.

# KAREN HORNEY:

She attributed sexual difficulties especially
in the female to social rather than biological causes.

# HARRY STACK-SULLIVAN :-

The self consists of the "reflected
appraisals" of others and the roles it has to play in society. In
therapy there is " Consensual Validation " when the therapist and the
patient interact to validate each other's experiences.

# BOWLBY:

His work on MATERNAL DEPRIVATION pointed to
the importance of SEPARATION ANXIETY which passes in three stages of
PROTEST , DESPAIR AND DETACHMENT.
TOP
PSYCHOANALYTIC TECHNIQUES

For understanding the unconscious FREE ASSOCIATION of words and
thoughts, OF DREAMS and exploration of PARAPRAXES are used.
There are three important therapeutic tools: , THERAPEUTIC ALLIANCE or
Working relationship and TRANSFERENCE/COUNTER-TRANSFERENCE.
# TRANSFERENCE:

is repetition of the past in the present,
transferring unconscious memories into consciousness and shifting of
an emotional attitude from a past object or person onto the therapist.
COUNTER-TRANSFERENCE is the therapist's attitude towards the patient.

# THERAPEUTIC ALLIANCE

is the normal , adult relationship between the
therapist and patient. It leads to TRANSFERENCE NEUROSIS in the form
of transference and counter-transference . The of the transference to
the patis a useful tool. The counter-transference may or may not be
interpreted to the patient.

WORKING THROUGH is repeatedly experiencing and interpreting a conflict
in the transference situation till it is resolved.


# INTERPRETATION:
Interpretation is the most effective therapeutic tool in
psychoanalytic psychotherapy. It is sometimes criticized for the
possibility that it is imposing a system on the patient. It may also
become just a technique and may be used destructively. Its
unreliability was also exposed.
Interpretation is an intellectual act derived from experience . It is
an inference that goes beyond the actual material. Some analysts claim
that it must include the word "because", but most advocate that it
must be organized and structured.
A valuable interpretation represents an affect rooted in the
analyst's unconscious. Its validity can only be ascertained in the
analytical interview.
Interpretation is directed to understanding resistance , or making
the patient aware of his unconscious material resisted. Resistance
stems from the Ego due to repression. A shift in the patient's
associations indicating less resistance may foretell the impact of
interpretation. The analyst interprets the here and now in term of
transference ( Transference is the main therapeutic agent in all
analytical procedures ). It is interpreted when the patient's affect
is alive in the present using the "mutative" energy of the
interpretation (MUTATIVE TRANSFERENCE INTERPRETATION). Premature
interpretations are useless.

Interpretation can be classified into different varieties:
DESTRUCTIVE/SYNTHETIC, PART/WHOLE , CONTENT, DEFENCE, TRANSFERENCE
DIRECT, AND MUTATIVE INTERPRETATION.

The content interpretation comprises relating of manifest surface
material to childhood wishes and phantasies or the translation of
symbolic meaning in dreams and phantasies. Interpretation can be
utilized in terms of environment (persons or objects) in the past or
present or in terms of parts of the patient himself.

Timing of interpretation is crucial. If the analyst can perceive what
is going on and the patient is giving enough evidence to the analyst
that the latter can express to him what is observed , then there is no
reason for withholding the information.

ASSESSMENT OF SUITABILITY OF PATIENTS FOR DYNAMIC PSYCHOTHERAPY:

1- The patient's problem must be understandable in psychological
terms.

2- The patient must be willing and able to understand his or her
problems in psychological terms . A test may be used to assess the
patient's response .

3- The patient too must have adequate EGO STRENGTH , that is the
ability to cope with the tensions arising from inner conflict.

4- He must be able to form and sustain a psychotherapeutic
relationship.

TOP
BEHAVIOR THERAPY

A means of adjusting to things,not treating patients. For most cases
there is no total cure;the aim is adaptation.

PREPAREDNESS OF PHOBIA:-

Some people are more vulnerable to phobia. That is a vulnerability
transmitted genetically. Incidence of phobia runs in families.

THEORY OF HABITUATION:-

Extinction is a subset of habituation.

Exposure therapy is more effective on the long term (i.e.1 hour is
better than five minutes 12 times). Habituation should be as complete
as possible by the end of the session.

Extinction bursts can occur.

OPERANT CONDITIONING:-

Reinforcement (rewarding) of apparently a voluntary behavior.

Reinforcers should be tested in reality (e.g. Sweets can be
unsuccessful reinforcers >> nauseating to a hungry child).

Intermittent reinforcers give more reliable reinforcement and is more
difficult to extinguish (e.f. Gambling machines)

Contingency of reinforcement is important.

Avoidance behavior ( e.g. not going out ) increases the likelihood of
avoiding, as the association of reduction of anxiety with avoidance
leads to further avoidance.

PUNISHMENT:-

It should follow behavior immediately. It is not the same as negative
reinforcement.. In negative reinforcement , the reinforcer is specific
to the punishable behavior and the animal has free access to any other
repertoire of behavior.

Time -Out is a short period when positive reinforcement is withheld.

Operant Conditioning Methods:-

A Antecedents

B. Behavior

C. Consequences

It is used to modify the effects of institutionalization in
Schizophrenia , in Autism and withdrawal and for motivating the
physically and mentally handicapped , as well as in disturbed behavior
of children.

TECHNIQUES OF OPERANT CONDITIONING:-

1-Reward desired behavior rather than punishing the undesired one.

2-Ignore undesired behavior.

3-Use small steps(shaping)

4-Graded reinforcement.

5-Time out.

6-Token Economy.

Smacking a child is unsuccessful to modify his behavior as the
behavior is reinforced and punished at the same time.

Intermittent reinforcement is better than giving it all on one
occasion.

TOP
GROUP PSYCHOTHERAPY

Most social activities take place in groups. Individuals act as
representatives of groups (e.g. class, race, age, sex, nation..ect.).
The forma use of groups in medical treatment developed in the 20th
century.

Schneidlinger (1982) classify groups according to :

1- members and how selected

2- Specific aims

3- Theory or ideology regarding the aetiology of problems as well as
the group process

4- Specific techniques employed

5- Professional training and work experience of practitioner

He differentiates the following types of "people-helping groups":-

1. Group Psychotherapy:

Run by a mental health professional who assess each member and uses
the emotional interaction in the group to ameliorate personality
dysfunction .

2. Therapeutic Groups: Not run by trained staff. They include activity
groups , community meetings, occupational therapy group.

3. Human development and training groups

4. Self-help groups

Slavson, The "father" of American group psychotherapy thought five
therapeutic factors were important in groups: transference, catharsis,
insight, reality testing, sublimation and resistance. Slavosn divided
groups into:

1) DIRECTIVE GROUPS:

Inspirational , didactic, recreational ..etc. The leader actively
guides towards specific activities, free association is at minimum.
This results i corrected attitudes and values, imporved
self-awareness, and a more wholesome view of self and world. The aim
is to support, helping the participants to deal more adequately with
specific personal problems. The first therapeutic groups of TB
patients that Joseph Pratt held were of this sort.

2) PSYCHOTHERAPY GROUPS:

A. ACTIVITY GROUPS:

Slavson run activity groups for adolescents. Moreno , a pupil of Adler
, used drama with teenagers in 1930's and this developed into drama
therapy.

B. ANALYTIC GROUPS:

The earliest of these conducted individual psychoanalysis in a group
setting: the individual in the group perspective . During the WW2
interest in the therapuetic potential of groups stemmed from the
rehabilitation of shell-shocked soldiers in special units at
Northfields Hopsital ( now Hollymoor) and Belmont Hopsital ( now
Henderson) .

Bion stressed the " group as a whole" perspective : the group at the
expense of its individual members . He founded the group programme at
the Tavistock Clinic . He suggested that when groups fear for their
dissolution the cease to work at their appointed task ( overcoming
emotional problems) and become preoccupied by " basic assumptions" of
survival : Dependency, Fight or Flight and Pairing.

Ezriel and Whitaker developed the group as a whole approach (GAW)
further . When the group get "stuck" in the face of a "focal conflict"
between "disturbing motive" and a "reactive motive" , a solution is
adopted which may be either facilitating ( move things on) or
restrictive ( lead to "stuckness").

The GAW approach developed in the USA under the influence of the
gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin whose "field theory" led to the
practice of "T" ( for training) groups as means of self-understanding.

> So basically I was just asking for some help here, I understand if you
> don't want to give any ideas out.
>

How about all that help?! Wow, it might be a job constructing a thesis
from all that microcosm of the junk available on the internet.

> Any ides to why frauds "account of the unconscious" could be classed
> as none scientific would be of great advantage
>

Party now, because the news ain't hit acedemia yet: the unconscious is
scientific. I was reading one of the latest theories about free will
and neurology and the author talked of orders of neural activity and
the massive simplicity of the unity of the self as an whole with
parts. They are chasing down some strange turf between determinism and
freedom in the unconscious assembly hall of idiots merging the "I am
[a] compound 1"

> Thanks for reading the post any how :)
>

Dogma Central, you name em we debunk em?

> Brett
>
>
>
>
>
> ----== Posted via Newsfeed.Com - Unlimited-Uncensored-Secure Usenet News==----
> http://www.newsfeed.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! >100,000 Newsgroups
> ---= 19 East/West-Coast Specialized Servers - Total Privacy via Encryption =---

*Standard Social Science Modelist's

[ya, ya, ya]

OMG WOW

What can I say? speechless! ...

Thank you so much,

[Robert Cohen]

i am herein commenting subjectively on what i have read so far in the thread

re: Is Freud a fraud?

re: Is Freudianism a "science?"

If Freudianism is not "science," then is it therefore nearly worthless or
definitionally "fraudulent?"

Imho:

1. Freud has probably been controversial since day one in Vienna. Sex (except
in Mead's "fraudulent" Polynesia) ain't beanbag: Sex is totally caught-up in
the folkways, mores, customs, traditions, taboos, old wives tales, myths,
superstitions, religions, embarrassments, passions, et cetera of mankind

2. Jung (and Adler?) was a prominent critic with a differing (and less sexy
emphasis) theory (which apparently pleased hitler)

3. Is Freudian psychology invulnerable to criticism? Of course not. It has been
attacked in Victorian times, in Hitlerian times, and here in post-modern times.

4. Is Freud at a minimum tremendously insightful? Of course.

5. Is the Oedipus (sp?)story insightful? I suppose the classic Greek stuff is
what Freud was perceiving/studying/ testing/developing/elaborating-on and
communicating in scientific jargon

6. Is the scientific method totally applicable to psychology, the study of the
human mind? To some extents & in some
hypotheses/propositions/theories/applications

7. Where do psychology & neurology leave-off and philosophy begin? wherever ya
want 'em to

8. Is Freudian pychology pure science? I would venture that it's more an
"art" or "insight" or "process" or "practice" or phenomenon that is not totally
measured quantifiably, because there are dimensions in humanity that (still)
transcend or escape pure science, goshdangit

8. furthermore, "social sciences," imho, paticularly "behaviorism," seem to me
to leave-out pertinent realities, and tend to distort inconvenient phenomena

in conclusion, the teacher is probably attempting to motivate the student to
study freud's work and to think about what constitutes science, perhaps in
order to communicate the opinion to the student that reality is not solely
superb puter logic and gifted math techniques

[ya, ya, ya]

thanks again for all the ideas, I shoudl be able to write a good essay
from the ideas and information I have gleaned from your posts.

They are a great help and are most appricated.

Kind regards

[Not so quick]

"Robert Cohen" <robt...@aol.com.spam.no> wrote in message
news:20040108163123...@mb-m01.aol.com...

The fact that behaviorism is based on unconscious processes,
the fact of post-hypnotic suggestion, and the fact that we can
remember anything, which means that it is coming from an
unconscious place should be enough to prove that there are
unconscious elements in human life.

[Robert Cohen]

interesting book review comparing/contrasting freud and jung

i had not realized the freud started as a neurologist

http://washingtontimes.com/books/20040111-122006-4806r.htm

[jillar...@webtv.net]

Dear Brett Halligan,

This is about thinking straight and understanding the symbols of the
language in the question to be solved as posed by the professor. You
should do as good as your programming skills. Start with an abstract.
(This is your global program reference.) The first direction I suggest
is how does one define a science? There are standards for this. Think
first about classifications- hard science versus soft science. How
flexible should the definitions be? Or how limiting? Look twice before
you leap. Good luck.

Jillar

[The Immortalist]

"ya, ya, ya" <burnt...@newsfeeds.com > wrote in message news:<qd1rvvso9o4idg1rn...@4ax.com>...

> OMG WOW
>
> What can I say? speechless! ...
>

Certain of the unnecessary pleasures and instincts are deemed to be
unlawful; every man appears to have them, but in some persons they are
subjected to the control of law and reason ["sublimated"], and the
better desires prevailing over them, they are either wholly
suppressed, or reduced in strength and number; while in other persons
these desires are stronger and more abundant. I mean particularly
those desires which are awake when the reasoning and taming and ruling
power ["censor"] of the personality is asleep; the wild beast in our
nature, gorged with meat and drink, starts up and walks about naked,
and surfeits at his will; and there is no conceivable folly or crime,
however shameless or unnatural-not excepting incest or parricide
["Odipus complex"]-of which such a nature may not be guilty. . . . But
when a man's pulse is healthy and temperate, and he goes to sleep cool
and rational, . . . having indulged his appetites neither too much nor
too little, but just enough to lay them to sleep, ... he is then least
likely to be the sport of fanciful and lawless visions. ... In all of
us, even in good men, there is such a latent wild beast nature, which
peers out in sleep.

Plato - The Re-public (571-2)
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/3963/books/republic.htm

[Unknown]

On 8 Jan 2004 07:46:18 -0800, reanima...@yahoo.com (The
Immortalist) wrote:

>> Thanks for reading the post any how :)
>>
>
>Dogma Central, you name em we debunk em?

Thanks for the help

did you write all that in that message or is that coppied from a
website or book ?

Burnt

[Not so quick]

<ya, ya, ya> wrote in message
news:034f00d7gfd747aqt...@4ax.com...

If you make a more or less complete list of the 'defense
mechanisms', it would save me some time.

[Robert Cohen]

Subj: Books of The Times | 'Jung': Jung's Life, Built of Psych oanalysis,
Fantasy and Cruelty

if ya doesn't find this review interesting, then ya ain't read it


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/21/books/21SMIT.html

free registration is required for the nytimes on-line
exploitative-capitalistic-marketing- profit-seeking cookie, or spend 93 cents
at kroger (with the kroger card) for a hard copy of the actual sheet

[Not so quick]

To me this book is suspect.Not because I have any investment in
Jung's work but because there is a political aspect to psychiatry
which I have seen in affect in real life.

I'm not talking about the 'normal' turf wars and jeaslousies that happen
in many, if not all, professions. Our government, in the United States, is
fighting over money. One of the more costly programs is services for the
mentally ill. Theories like psychoanalysis demand 'in depth' therapy for
long periods of time which is costly. To discredit modes of treatment that
require actual therapy instead of pills or 'brief therapy' is in the
interest of
those who would rather spend the money for something else, whether it
is for oil subsidies or health care for children. I don't have any
particular
preference for how the money is spent, ie between the health care for
kids, perscription aid for the elderly, etc. or mental health services but
I do object to the attacking of long term therapy for the benefit of those
with hidden agendas.

Children from my previous state of residence, Arizona, were denied
necessary therapy, by almost any non-involved person's standards, by
the rules and statutes for dispersment of funds for mental health services.

This book claims that Jung was a co-founder of psychoanalysis, something
I have never heard. Freud was the only founder. Does anyone else have
information to the contrary? There were others working on similar ideas and
from whom Freud may have been inspired but the word psychoanalysis was
coined by Freud and Jung was not even one of the original group that Freud
worked with as sort of disciples. Here is a quote from the review of the
book mentioned above, in which Jung is called "an illegitimate great
grandson
of Goethe".

Carl Gustav Jung was an insufferable egotist, cruel to his family, a
womanizer,
with bad table manners to boot. He was a founder of psychoanalysis, but
today
his teachings have little importance in the treatment of mental illness.

His writings on flying saucers, astrology and parapsychology read like those
of
someone on the edges of sanity himself. He is remembered mostly for his
psychological
autobiography, "Memories, Dreams, Reflections," and for terms he used: "New
Age,"
"the Age of Aquarius," "archetypes," "anima" and "animus."

Jung, born in 1875 in Switzerland, was said to be the illegitimate
great-grandson of Goethe. His mother, Emilie, claimed she saw ghosts. His
father, Paul, was an impoverished country pastor who eventually got a job at
a mental institution. Jung was an odd child. As a boy he experienced two
personalities, which he referred to as "No. 1" and "No. 2," and which his
mother had also known.

After studying psychiatry, Jung worked at the Burghölzli Mental Hospital in
Zurich and developed a method of word associations to study patients' mental
processes.

Like generations of Jungs before him, he married a wealthy woman, Emma
Rauschenbach, relieving him of the need to earn a living. They built a grand
house near Zurich, where Emma became housekeeper, secretary and kept the
children quiet so he could think. Jung played sadistic pranks on them,
setting a firecracker off between a daughter's legs, rendering her deaf in
one ear.

Sometime around the birth of his fifth child, in 1914, Jung began a
relationship with a young patient, Toni Wolff, that lasted for decades. Ms.
Bair describes Emma bearing up nobly as Jung insisted that Toni become part
of their household, saying Toni was "his other wife." He frequently attended
professional functions with one on each arm.

In 1907 Jung met Freud. Freud, anxious that psychoanalysis not be a "Jewish
science," designated the Christian Jung as his crown prince. Almost
immediately the two began squabbling about the nature of the unconscious,
Freud saying it was sexual, and Jung insisting it was not.

Hoping to spread their beliefs, they visited New York together in 1909.
Once, when they were arguing, Freud urinated in his trousers. Jung bundled
him into a cab and as they drove down Broadway, cried: "This is a
psychogenic neurosis because you, - you - you have the wrong attitude! I
will get around it, I will analyze you!"

The relationship reached a crisis in what is called the "Kreuzlingen
gesture." In 1912 Freud went to Kreuzlingen, near Zurich. Signals crossed,
he neglected to visit Jung. Jung felt slighted. Their break became final in
1913, when Jung published "The Psychology of the Unconscious."

Meanwhile Jung was developing his theories of the collective unconscious. In
1901 a patient was admitted to Burghölzli with hallucinations in which he
saw the sun with a gigantic phallus. Jung's student Johann Honegger kept
notes on the patient, but Honegger was insane himself and committed suicide.

Jung saw similarities between the patient's hallucinations and rituals of
pagan sun worshiping cults and used them as proof of the existence of the
collective unconscious. He was accused of stealing Honegger's research, but
Ms. Bair sides with Jung. "Objectivity should allow him to take credit," she
writes.

[Not so quick]

"Not so quick" <goodidea...@lvcm.com> wrote in message
news:3wyPb.41936$Ar1.4860@fed1read04...

I didn't mean to send this. Sorry. It needs a lot more editing and I didn't
mean to send the whole article.