Personality & Psychoanalysis

"Dreams are royal road to the unconscious" - Sigmund Freud

1. Introduction to Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis, besides being a theory of personality , is also a method of psychotherapy, a technique for helping individuals who are experiencing a mental disorder or even relatively minor problems with living. Psychoanalysis can be thought of as a method for deliberately restructuring the personality. The connection between the psychoanalytic theory of personality and psychoanalytic therapy is very strong. Principles of psychoanalytic therapy are based directly on the psychoanalytic theory about the structure and functioning of personality . Freud developed his theory of personality while treating patients in therapy.

In 1899, Freud introduced his theory of unconscious with interpretation of dreams.

2. Techniques for Revealing the Unconscious

The goal of psychoanalysis is to make the unconscious conscious. Mental illness, problems with living, and unexplained physical symptoms can all be viewed as the result of unconscious conflicts. Thoughts, feelings, urges, or memories have been forced into the unconscious, because of their disturbing or threatening nature. Due to the dynamic nature of the human mind, these conflicts or restrained urges may slip out of the unconscious in ways that cause trouble. They often obtain expression as psychological or physical symptoms.

The first aim of psychoanalysis is to identify these unconscious thoughts and feelings. Once the patient can be made aware of this material, the second aim is to enable the person to deal with the unconscious urges, memories, or thoughts realistically and maturely. The major challenge facing the psychoanalyst is determining how to penetrate the unconscious mind of the patient. By its very definition, the unconscious mind is the part of which the person has no awareness. Freud and other psychoanalysts have developed a set of standard techniques that can be used to dredge up material from the unconscious minds of patients.

2.1. Free Association

If you were to relax, to sit back in a comfortable chair , to let your mind wander , and then to say whatever came into your mind, you would be engaging in free association. Chances are, you would say some things that would surprise even yourself, and you might even be embarrassed by what comes out. If you were able to resist the urge to censor your thoughts before speaking, then you would have an idea of how a patient spends much of his or her time in psychoanalysis. The typical psychoanalytic session lasts 50 minutes and may be repeated several times a week; the sessions may continue for years. The goals of the sessions are to enable patients to identify unconscious material that might be causing unwanted symptoms and to help them cope with that material in an adult fashion.

In free association, the psychoanalyst must be able to recognize the subtle signs that something important has just been mentioned—a slight quiver in the way a word is pronounced, a halting sentence, the patient’ s immediate discounting of what he or she has just said, a false start, a nervous laugh, or a long pause. An effective psychoanalyst will detect such signs and intervene to ask the patient to stick with that topic for awhile, to free associate further on that issue. Archeology is a good metaphor for this type of work, as the psychoanalyst is digging through all sorts of ordinary material in search of clues to past conflicts and trauma.

2.2 Dreams

Thinkers have always speculated about the meaning of dreams, and it has long been thought that dreams are messages from deep regions of the mind that are not accessible during waking life. In 1899, Freud published his book The Interpretation of Dreams, in which he presented his theory of the meaning and purpose of dreaming. He held that the purpose of dreaming was to satisfy urges and to fulfill unconscious wishes and desires, all within the protection of sleep. Freud would argue, because the dream contains wishes and desires in disguised form.

Dream analysis was a technique Freud taught for uncovering the unconscious material in a dream by interpreting the dream’s content. Freud maintained that we must distinguish between the manifest content of a dream (what the dream actually contains) and the latent content (what the elements of the dream represent). He believed that the direct expression of desires and wishes would be so disturbing that it would waken the dreamer.

The ego is still somewhat at work during sleep, and it succeeds in disguising the disturbing content of our unconscious. The wishes and unacceptable impulses have to be disguised in order to allow the person to keep sleeping, which is necessary, yet must be expressed in order to satisfy desires. Thus, although our dreams often appear to be ridiculous and incomprehensible to us, to a psychoanalyst, a dream may contain valuable clues to the unconscious.

Freud called dreams “the royal road to the unconscious.” According to Freud, dreaming serves three functions. First, it allows for wish fulfillment and the gratification of desires, even if only in symbolic form. Second dreams provide a safety valve by allowing a person to release unconscious tension by expressing his or her deepest desires, although in disguised form. And, third, dreams are guardians of sleep. Even though a lot is going on in dreams, such as the expression of wishes and desires, the person remains asleep. Although tension is being released, no anxiety is being aroused, and the person sleeps without interruption.

In many of his writings, Freud provided interpretations or translations of common dream symbols. Not surprisingly , most symbols have sexual connotations. This may be because Freud was influenced by the Victorian era in which he lived, when most people were very inhibited about sexual matters. Freud believed that, because people repressed their sexual feelings and desires, these inhibited urges came out in symbolic form in dreams. Many later thinkers have been critical of Freud’ s seeming preoccupation with sex, which they have attributed to the historical period during which he was developing his theory.

2.3. Projective Techniques

Imagine that you give a person a picture o something totally ambiguous, such as an inkblot, and ask him or her what he or she sees. A person might see all sorts of things in the shapes created by the ink splatter: a rocketship, two fish swimming, a clown. The idea that what a person sees in an ambiguous figure, such as an inkblot, reflects his or her personality is called t projective hypothesis. People are thought to project their own personalities into what they report seeing in an ambiguous stimulus. The inkblot technique, as well as other projective measures, is often criticized by research psychologists for the scant scientific evidence as to it validity or reliability.

3. The Process of Psychoanalysis

With the help of free association, dream analysis, and projective techniques, the psychoanalyst gradually comes to understand the unconscious source of the patient’ s problems. The patient must also come to understand the unconscious dynamics of his or her situation. Toward this end, the psychoanalyst offers the patient interpretations of the psychodynamic causes of the problems. Through many interpretations, the patient is gradually led to an understanding of the unconscious source of her problems. This is the beginning of insight.

Insight, in psychoanalysis, is more than a simple cognitive understanding of the intrapsychic basis of one’ s troubles, though this certainly is a part of insight. Insight refers to an intense emotional experience that accompanies the release of repressed material. When this material is reintegrated into conscious awareness, and the person experiences the emotions associated with that previously repressed material, then we say that some degree of insight has been achieved. The patient, or at least the patient’ s ego, has expended much energy to repress the root of the problem in order to keep anxiety at bay.

As the therapist pokes at the unconscious material through free association and dream analysis, and begins to offer interpretations, the patient typically feels threatened. The forces that have worked to repress the disturbing impulse or trauma now work to resist the psychoanalytic process, in a stage of psychoanalysis called resistance.

When an analyst detects a patient’ s resistance, it is usually a welcome sign that progress is being made. Resistance signifies that important unconscious material is coming to the fore. The resistance itself then becomes an integral part of the interpretations the analyst offers to the patient.

Another important step in most analyses is called transference. In this stage, the patient begins reacting to the analyst as if he or she were an important figure from the patient’s own life. The patient displaces past or present feelings toward someone from his or her own life onto the analyst. For example, a patient might feel and act toward his analyst the way he felt or acted toward his father. The feelings that the patient transfers onto the analyst can be either positive or negative. The idea behind transference is that the interpersonal problems between a patient and the important people in his or her life will be reenacted in the therapy session with the analyst. Freud called this the “repetition compulsion,” whereby the person reenacts his or her interpersonal problems with new people.

Transference can occur in everyday life as well as in psychoanalysis. The nature of our everyday interactions with others can be influenced by past relationship patterns. Movies and other modern media often portray psychoanalysis as resulting in a flash of insight, in which the patient is suddenly and forever cured. Real life is not so simple. A thorough psychoanalysis can take years, sometimes a decade or longer . The successfully analyzed patient then has available the psychic energy that his or her ego has formerly been expending in repressing conflicts. This energy may be directed into those twin pursuits Freud said were the hallmarks of adult personality development—to love and to work.

4. Why psychoanalysis is important?

First, psychoanalytic ideas influence the practice of psychotherapy even today. Even if a psychotherapist does not engage in classic psychoanalysis, many rely on a few psychoanalytic ideas, such as free association (saying whatever comes to mind as a part of therapy) or transference (that the patient will re-create interpersonal problems with the therapist) in their practice of therapy. Similarly research psychologists may not endorse the whole of Freudian theory, such researchers are nevertheless finding empirical support for several of his ideas, either in their original form or as they have been modified by others.

A third area of influence can be found in our popular culture, where many o Freud’s ideas have been incorporated into everyday language and the logic of under standing our own and others’ behavior. Many of Freud’ s ideas have made it into everyday explanations of behavior and everyday forms of speech, such that you probably know more about Freud’ s theory than you actually realize.

Consequently, no student of personality should skip over this theory, even if the theory does not play a large role in contemporary studies of personality. Pieces of it have survived and inform various parts of current personality research and theory and so it is worth taking a good look at Freud’s classic theory as well as the contemporary modifications of it.

5. Evaluation of Freud’s contributions:

Proponents of psychoanalysis argue that it is the first and perhaps only comprehensive theory of human nature. Even those who disagree with psychoanalysis would have to concede that the theory is impressive in its scope and influence. Moreover, if we think Freud overemphasized sex and aggression, we need merely to look at the popular movies, books, and TV shows. Critics of psychoanalysis also have strong arguments. If you were to look in the pages of mainstream personality journals that publish research, you would find very little that had direct relevance to classical psychoanalysis.

If psychoanalysis is not examined scientifically, is not subjected to tests of disproof, then it is simply not supported by scientific fact Consequently, in the view of some psychologists, psychoanalysis is more a matter of belief than scientific fact. Another criticism of psychoanalysis pertains to the nature of the evidence on which it was built.

Freud relied primarily on the case study method, and the cases he studied were his patients. Who were his patients? They were primarily wealthy, highly educated, and highly verbal women who had lots of free time to spend in frequent sessions with Freud and lots of disposable income to pay his bills. These are limited observations, obtained on a narrow segment of humanity . However, from these observations, Freud con structed a universal theory of human nature.

In his writings, he provided as evidence, not original observations but his interpretations of those observations. Unlike scientists, who make their raw data available so that the results of their experiment. be checked and verified by others, Freud wrote about his interpretations of th patients’ behavior, rather than reporting or describing their behavior per se. If the actual raw observations were made available, it would be interesting to see if readers would come to the same conclusions that Freud did.

Reference:

Excerpts from the book Randy Larsen, David Buss - Personality Psychology - Domains of Knowledge About Human Nature, 3rd Edition, chapter 9.