Philosophy Sigmund Freud Enumerates That the Human

Philosophy

Sigmund Freud enumerates that the human psyche consists of the unconscious id, the ego (which is partly conscious and partly unconscious), and the superego (also partly conscious and partly unconscious). At first, a newborn has only an id, which consists of blind drives that seek satisfaction. In a few months, the ego is developed when the newborn experiences resistance and frustration of its drives by the outside world: it realizes that it is separate from that external world and develops a sense of self. The superego will develop later, when it has internalized the rules, prohibitions and ideals of its parents. In the meantime, the ego is the infant's structure that relates with the outside world on the basis of the reality principle, whereby the developing child learns to weigh its choices according to the consequences. This it does while pursuing or fulfilling the innate pleasure principle, whereby it seeks to gratify as many of its desires as possible.

Freud believes that the infant's developing sexual drive is focused on its mother, who becomes its first love, and views the father as a competitor and thus resents him. But while it feels this way towards its father, it also loves him. Out of fear of revenge from the father, the infant represses both its desire for the mother and its resentment for the father. The ego dumps that desire and that resentment out of consciousness for good by identifying with the same-sex parent (towards the father if the infant is male, and towards the mother, if female). When it succeeds, the superego develops.

The superego is a resident controller in the psyche: it knows what is in the conscious mind and either approves or disapproves it. Knowing this, the ego strives to repress or deny from consciousness anything that the superego disapproves of, or it will punish the ego with the discomforts of guilt. This places the ego between the strong but blind urges of the id and the omnipotence of the superego and the impositions of reality as well.

Sometimes too many desires or urges that need to be repressed can overburden the ego and these escape control in the disguise of slips of the tongue or accidents, oversight or forgetfulness. Two other ways by which this happens are through dreams and neuroses.

Freud maintains that the ego sometimes allows the expression of a repressed urge or desire but in a disguised and evasive form, which the superego will not detect and therefore approve. The repressed urge is expressed in imagery when in the form of dreams and in action or behavior when in the form of neurosis.

Because the ego becomes weak during sleep, repressed desires take over and express themselves in disguise as dreams. Dreams, like slips of the tongue and forgetting, are a way of compromising with repressions.

While dreams are an unconscious and private expression of repression, a neurosis is not private. It is bad, because the person is aware of his behavior or action, but cannot explain the cause of it (being unconscious). His irrationality can be a source of ridicule, fear or annoyance to others, which in turn, is cause for his unpopularity.

Dreams and neuroses are similar in that they are both camouflages of repressed desires or urges, which the ego rejects and tries to drive out of consciousness. But psychotherapists and psychologists find that there is secondary gain in neurosis: it allows escape to the person from the danger or unpleasant situation, or gives the person some power over others, such as when the afflicted person is sick. For example, sick people are excused from work or responsibility.

A neurosis and a psychosis are similar in that both consist of irrational behavior that others cannot understand. The difference is that, in neurosis, the ego is still functional, because only a part of the person's behavior is irrational: it is just compromising with the repressed desire or urge even if it must lose some conscious control over some actions. But in psychosis, there is substantial loss of contact with the external world and the ego has been disabled by having too much repressing to do, or it is too burdened to deal with reality, or there is too little gratification for its desires. The ego has given up the fight.

Psychoanalysis is the method developed by Freud to cure neuroses. Because a neurosis consists of a behavioral pattern that expresses repressed urges or desires in symbols, psychotherapy aims at interpreting these symbols with the end-view of bringing them to the awareness of the person. Doing this informs the person that he or she need not continue performing the irrational behavior because the urge or desire is no longer repressed or hidden from conscious view. This should set the person free to decide on what he or she should do about his or her situation. The interpretation is done by the psychoanalyst, using what is called free association, and then tries to gradually convince the person to accept and admit this repressed desire or urge into his or her consciousness when she or he is ready to do so. But because this revealed desire is something that the ego represses, the patient is likely to oppose the work of the analyst, although the patient wants to be cured. This is called resistance.

In tackling resistance, the psychoanalyst will try to convince the patient to change the hard demands of his or her superego so that it can tolerate the acceptance of the reality of the repressed urge or desire.