Welcome

Welcome to Freud: History and Concepts. The goal of this site is to give you an introduction into the world of Sigmund Freud. It covers the history of Freud, his ideas, and how it relates to real life. I hope you find this site useful, and it helps you in all your endeavors.

Psychosexual Stages

Freud theorized that the base for personality develops by the age of 5.  He created a stage theory of development.  He focused on how young children deal with their powerful, sexual urges.  According to Freud, as children develop they do so through stages.  They are specific developmental periods with a characteristic sexual focus that leaver their make on adult personality.  It is crucial that people develop through these stages to determine personality.  If someone fails to move forward from one stage to another as expected, they develop something called a fixation.  Fixations are caused by excessive gratifiaction of needs at a particular stage or by excessive frustration of those needs.  If someone fails to develop through the stages their personality as an adult is affected.  Usually fixation leads to an overemphasis on the psychosexual needs that were necessary during the fixated stage.  These stages are.

The Oral Stage:  This stage usually occurs during the first year of life.  Of particular emphasis   is the mouth.  This includes biting, sucking, etc..  How children are fed is supposed to be crucial to proper development.  Freud put considerable importance to the manner in which the child is weaned from the bottle or breast.  According to Freud, fixation in the oral stage can lead to excessive eating or smoking later in life.

The Anal Stage:  This stage occurs in the second year of life.  Children supposedly get their   erotic pleasure from their bowel movements, through either the expulsion or the retention of the feces.  Obviously potty training is crucial in this stage of development, which is society's first systematic effort to regulate the child's biological urges.  If a child is severely punished during training, there are a variety of outcomes.  Excessive punishment might lead to hostility toward the trainer, who is usually the mother.  This might lead to hostility toward women in general.  Another possibility is that heavy reliance on punishment might lead to an association between genital concerns and the anxiety that the punishment arouses.  This could lead to anxiety about sexual stages later in life.  

The Phallic Stage:  This stage occurs around age 4.  The genital become the focus for the        child's erotic energy, mainly through self-stimulation.  During this stage the Oedipal complex emerges.  Young boys develop an erotically tinged preference for their mother.  They also feel hostility toward their father who they view as the competition.  Little girls develop the same thing towards their fathers.  Around this time they also learn that their genitals are very different from those of little boys, and they develop penis envy. According to Freud, girls feel hostility toward their mother because they blame her for their different anatomy.  It is very important for the children to overcome the Oedipal complex.  The child has to solve the problem by by giving up the sexual longings for the opposite sex parent, and the hostility toward the same sex parent.  If the hostility toward the parent is not fixed, that might prevent the child from identifying with that parent.  This can lead to slowed progress throughout the child's development.  

The Latency and genital stages:  These stages usually occurred after 6 years of life.  He believed that from age 6 through puberty, the child's sexuality is latent.  Important events during this period during this stage center around expanding social contacts beyond the family.  When puberty strikes, the child evolves into the genital stage.  All the sexual urges reappear and focus on the genitals again.  During this stage sexual energy is geared towards members of the opposite sex, rather than towards oneself.  

Useful Links

FreudFile

Freud Encyclopedia

Wikipedia

Personality theories

Time Magazine

PBS Summary

Defense Mechanisms

Anxiety is a key concept in Freud's personality profile. He believed that people will try to ward of anxiety in any way possible, whether it is conscious or unconsciously. In an effort to ward off anxiety people use methods called defense mechanisms. I will discuss a variety of defense mechanisms and provide an example of each.

Repression: This is the main defense mechanism. What happens is the ego presses unacceptable thoughts, impulses, feelings, and memories out of our awareness and into our unconscious.

Example: As a young child Matt witnessed his dad being mugged and then killed as he stood by watching helplessly. Now 35 years old, he cannot remember a single thing about this experience.

Rationalization: This is also a popular defense mechanism. The ego replaces an unacceptable motive with a false but somewhat realistic explanation.

Example: Jack does not get into the school that he wanted to. He tells himself that he didn't work hard enough in high school and if he had, he definitely would have gotten in.

Displacement: The ego shifts feelings toward something that is
considered unacceptable to something that is more acceptable.

Example: James is driving down the street and gets cut off by
another car. The car speeds away so James hits the seat next to
him in frustration.

Sublimation: The ego replaces an unacceptable impulse
with an acceptable one.

Example: Tim who is extremely aggressive decides to
enroll in aboxing tournament.

Projection: The ego attributes personal shortcomings,
faults, problems, and feelings to others.

Example: Charlie, with a strong desire to have an
affair accuses his wife of flirting with other men.

Reaction Formation: The ego takes an unacceptable
motive and changes it into its opposite.

Example: Mark, who is afraid of his aggressive urges,
decides to become a monk.

Denial: The ego refuses to acknowledge stress
causing realities.

Example: Gary has been diagnosed with lung
cancer, but refuses to stop smoking or take his medication.

Regression: The ego seeks the security that it
previously had in an earlier developmental period while in the
face of stress.

Example: Every time that Brian has trouble at work,
he goes to his favorite childhood spot on the beach.

Identification: When someone tries to increase
their self-esteem by forming an imaginary or real
alliance with some person or group.

Example: Lisa is very insecure in herself so she
joins a sorority to bolster her self-esteem.

Video Links

Here are some interesting videos about Freud.

This is a short picture montage of Sigmund Freud

Long but informative video of several professors discussing Freud.

Long video about Freud by the biography channel. It covers the entire life and works of Freud.

The next links are of an interesting documentary on how Freud's ideas are being used today by people in power. It is very long, each part is an hour long. It is, however, a very provoking series.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

3 Levels of awareness

According to Freud the id, ego, and superego all operate across three levels of awareness in the human mind. They are the conscious, unconscious, and preconscious.

The conscious: The conscious consists of what someone is aware of at any particular point in time. It includes what you are thinking about right now, whether it is in the front of you mind or the back. If you are aware of it then it is in the conscious mind.

Example: Right now as you are reading about Freud you could be thinking about what is being said in the text and that your eyes are tired from staring at this screen. In the back of your mind, however, you might be thinking "wow this website is really cool, if I was a psychology teacher I would give whoever made it an A". Both of these thoughts occur in the conscious mind.

The Preconscious: The preconscious contains information that is just below the surface of awareness. It can be retrieved with relative ease and usually can be thought of as memory or recollection.

Example: Right now think of your middle name. That is an example of preconscious memory. Similar example could be what is your mom's birthday, when did it last rain, and how long does it take to drive to the mall.

The Unconscious: The unconscious contains thoughts, memories, and desires that are buried deep in ourselves, well below our conscious awareness. Even though we are not aware of their existence, they exert great influence on our behavior.

Example: Things in your unconscious would be forgotten negative experiences in your past, extreme dislike for a parent, or a terrible event that you pushed out of your preconscious.

The Id, Ego, and Superego

Freud separated personality into 3 major components. The Id, the Ego, and the Superego. Freud believed that these forces worked to create a person's behavior. They interact with each other and eventually determined personality.

The Id: The id is the very immature component of personality. It operates only on the pleasure principal with no regard for anything else. One could say that it is completely instinctual. Freud referred to the id as the reservoir of psychic energy. It only consists of our basic biological needs. To eat, sleep, defecate, etc... The id is only a primary process thinker, so it is primitive, irrational, and illogical.

Example: Jack is walking down the street and he is very hungry. He only has an id so when he sees an apple pie cooling in a window, he takes it for himself.

The Superego: The superego is our morals, principals, and ethics. It considers the social standards for social behavior and guides us on what is right and wrong. The superego begins to develop between 3 and 5 years of age. It is mostly shaped by what we learn as young children from adults. Eventually we accept this training as a part of who we are. We put pressure on ourselves to live up to how we think we should behave.

Example: Jack is walking down the street and he is very hungry. He only has a superego so when he sees an apple pie cooling in a window, he does nothing. His superego tells him that it is someone's pie and that it is not acceptable to trespass on someones property and take their pie.

The Ego: The ego is the moderator between the ego and the superego. It operates on the reality principal. It makes the decisions that dictate behavior. The ego also considers social realities, norms, ediquette, rules, and customs when it makes a decision on how to behave. It seeks to delay gratification of the id's urges until appropriate outlets can be found. It uses secondary process thinking to avoid negative consequences from society.

Example: Using the examples from above, Jack's ego would tell him that he should not take the pie from the windowsill, but instead he can buy some pie right up the street at the local grocery store.

Sigmund Freud early years

Sigmund Freud was born Sigismund Schlomo Freud, May 6th 1856. His father was a wool merchant and had two children from an earlier marriage. Early on Freud showed signs of high intelligence and a ferocious work ethic. As a result, his parents favored him over his other siblings. Despite being poor, they sacrificed everything to give him a proper education. He attended a prominant highschool where he was an outstanding student and graduated with honors in 1873. Despite planning to study law, Freud joined the medical school at the University of Vienna. He was placed in charge of finding a male eels sex organs. After dissecting more than 400 male eels he was unable to find any testes. Discouraged from his lack of success he changed his course of study. In 1881 he received his MD.

After College

In 1885 Freud went to Paris to study with Europe's most renowned neurologist, Jean Martin Charcot. It was this experience that turned him to a practice of medical psychopathology. Charcot specialised in the study of hysteria and its susceptibility to hypnosis which he frequently demonstrated with patients on stage in front of an audience. Freud later turned away from hypnosis as a potential cure, favouring free association and dream analysis. In 1886 Freud married Martha Bernays, after opening his own little medical practice, specializing in neurology. After experimenting with hypnosis for a little while he found that it was not effective on all of his patients, and instead moved towards talking a patient through his or her problems. His goal was to locate and release powerful emotional energy that had been imprisoned in the unconscious mind.

Later years

As Freud continued his research he became more known, and with his books being released in 1900 and 1901 he began to spark more and more interest. Freud was critized by a lot of his peers, but he chose to disregard what anyone was saying and continue on his path. In 1930 he received the Goethe award in appreciation for his contribution to psychology and German literature. In 1939 he requested a friend of his to help him commit suicide through the use of morphine. On September 23, 1939 Freud died. Despite his death Freud has lived on in psychology and continues to be named the father of psychoanalysis.