Psychoanalytic Theory

C6436 Individual Counseling

Theory and Practice
James J. Messina, Ph.D
Dr Sigmund Freud 1856-
1939
 Oldest of eight children
 Married with 3 girls and 3 boys
 Physician-Biologist – Scientific oriented
and Pathology oriented theory
 Jewish-anti-religion-All religion an illusion
used to cope with feelings of infantile
helplessness
 In Vienna Austria 78 years till 1938
 Based theory on personal experiences
 Died of cancer of jaw & mouth lifelong
cigar chain-smoker
Freud’s Psychoanalytic
Approach:
 Model of personality development
 Philosophy of Human Nature
 Method of Psychotherapy
 Identified dynamic factors that motivate
behavior
 Focused on role of unconscious
 Developed first therapeutic procedures for
understanding & modifying structure of
one’s basic character
Determinism
 Freud’s perspective
 Behavior is determined by
 Irrational forces

 Unconscious motivations

 Biological and instinctual drives as they

evolve through the six psychosexual stages

of life
Instincts
 Libido – sexual energy – survival of the
individual and human race-oriented towards
growth, development & creativity – Pleasure
principle – goal of life gain pleasure and avoid
pain
 Death instinct – accounts for aggressive drive –
to die or to hurt themselves or others
 Sex and aggressive drives-powerful
determinants of peoples actions
The Structure of Personality
 THE ID — The Demanding Child
 Ruled by the pleasure principle
 THE EGO — The Traffic Cop
 Ruled by the reality principle
 THE SUPEREGO — The Judge
 Ruled by the moral principle
Id
 Basic psychic energy
and motivations
 Operates to demands
of Pleasure Principle
- strive to satisfy
desires and reduce
inner tension
 Sea around an Island
Ego
 Deals with real world
 Operates to demands
of Reality Principle
solves problems by
planning & acting
 City Hall on island
roots and foundation
in sea - id
Superego
 Internalized social
norm & moral forces
pressing on and
constraining
individual action
 The “over-I” over ego
 Church on island
roots and foundation
in sea - id
Psychosexual Theory of
Development
 Five Stages of Development
 Oral Stage

 Anal Stage

 Phallic Stage

 Latency Period

 Genital Stage
The Development of Personality
 ORAL STAGE (First year)
 Related to later mistrust and rejection issues

 ANAL STAGE (Ages 2-4)

 Related to later personal power issues

 PHALLIC STAGE (Ages 4-6)

 Related to later sexual attitudes

 LATENCY STAGE (Ages 5-11)

 A time of socialization

 GENITAL STAGE (Ages 12-60)

 Sexual energies are invested in life
Oral Stage: Birth to 2 year
 Satisfy drive of hunger and thirst by breast
or bottle
 If fixated after weaned:
 Over Dependency
 Over Attachment
 “Intake” of interesting substances/ideas
Anal Stage: 2- 4 years
 Id wants pleasure of reducing tension by
defecating & urinating
 Toilet training – get superego to impose
societal norms
 Self-control
 Holding back
 Freedom of action no control
Fixated at Anal Stage
 Enjoy bathroom humor-making messes-
even of other people’s lives
 Neatness, order & organization and
Obstinacy & Stinginess – Anal retentive-
passive aggressive
Phallic Stage: 4 – 6 years
 Sexual energy focused on genitals
 Masturbation
 Differences between boys and girls
 Emerging sexual gender identity
 Personality fixed by end of this stage
Oedipus Complex

 A boy’s sexual feeling for his mother and

rivalries with his father
 Psychological defenses against these
threatening thoughts and feelings
 Form reaction pattern used throughout life
 Form personality through identification with
father
 Diminish fear of castration-vicariously
obtain mother through father
Castration Anxiety
 Unconscious fear of loss of penis and
becoming like a female
 Fear of powerful people overcoming them
 Fear of revenge of the powerful people
Penis Envy
 A girl’s feelings of inferiority and jealousy
 Turns affections from mother to father
since blame mom for no penis
 Although can’t have penis can have baby
 Wants to find a good man like her father
and produce a baby
Latency Period 5-11 years of age
 Time between resolution of Oedipus
complex and puberty
 Usually not possible for sexual urges to be
directly expressed
 Sexual energies are channeled into school
and friends
Genital Stage Adolescence -
Adulthood
 Normal sexual relations
 Marriage
 Child-rearing
Ego-Defense Mechanisms
 Ego-defense mechanisms:
 Are normal behaviors which operate on an

unconscious level and tend to deny or distort

reality
 Help the individual cope with anxiety and

prevent the ego from being overwhelmed

 Have adaptive value if they do not become a

style of life to avoid facing reality

Defense Mechanisms
 To protect the ego against the painful and
threatening impulses arising from the id
we distort the reality
 The processes that distort the reality for
the ego are called defense mechanisms
Types of Defense
Mechanisms
 Repression
 Reaction Formation
 Denial
 Projection
 Displacement
 Sublimation
 Regression
 Rationalization
Repression
 Pushes threatening thoughts back into the
unconscious
 Posttraumatic Stress Disorder- PTSD –
Common with veterans and victims of
sexual abuse
 False memories – suggested through
psychotherapist intentionally or
unintentionally
Reaction Formation
 Process of pushing away threatening
impulses by overemphasizing the opposite
in one’s thoughts and actions
 Examples: Jim Bakker & Jimmy Swaggart
Denial
 Refusing to acknowledge anxiety-
provoking stimuli
 Mind’s means of keeping its own
sensations out of conscious awareness
 Or
 That fabulous river which runs down the
middle of Egypt which many of us sail on
Projection
 Anxiety-arousing impulses are
externalized by placing them, or projecting
them, onto others.
 A person’s inner threats are attributed to
those around them
 Newt Gingrich: public diatribe against
infidelity of president while engaged in
own long term infidelity out of public eye
Displacement
 The shifting of the targets of one’s
unconscious fears or desires
 Hydraulic Replacement Model
 Some release valve must be found for the
bottled-up aggressive impulses triggered by
frustration and humiliation
 Example: Man angry at boss kicks dog, kids
 Tools for Anger Workout-www.coping.org
Sublimation
 Transforming of dangerous urges into
positive, socially acceptable motivation
 Turns sexual energy away fro sexual ends
and towards societal goals
 Is is possible that as society becomes
more sexually liberated, art, creativity and
even civilization will suffer?
Regression
 Returning to earlier, safer stages of our
lives
 There may be regression to the stage
where there was previous fixation
Rationalization
 A mechanism involving post hoc logical
explanations for behaviors that were
actually driven by internal unconscious
motives
 Explanation for behavior not even
remotely related to the true causes
What is the Unconscious
 That portion of the mind inaccessible to
usual, conscious thought
 Get to unconscious through Free
Association: spontaneous free flowing
associations of ideas and feelings
The Unconscious
 Clinical evidence for postulating the unconscious:
 Dreams

 Slips of the tongue

 Posthypnotic suggestions

 Material derived from free-association

 Material derived from projective techniques

 Symbolic content of psychotic symptoms

 NOTE: consciousness is only a thin slice of

the total mind

Dream Interpretation
 Manifest Content: what a person remembers
and consciously considers-only a partial
representation
 Latent Content: underlying hidden meaning-
vast underlying
 Unconscious can manifest itself symbolically
in a dream
Dream Interpretation
 “Royal road to the unconscious”
 What is important in dreams is the infantile
wish fulfillment represented in them
 Freud assumed every dream has a
meaning that can be interpreted by
decoding representations of the
unconscious material
 Dream symbol = represents some person,
thing, or activity involved in the
unconscious process
Dream Interpretations
 Knife, umbrella, snake = Penis
 Box, oven, ship = Uterus
 Room, table with food = Women
 Staircase, ladder = Sexual intercourse
 Water = Birth, mother
 Baldness, tooth removal = castration
 Left (direction) = crime, sexual deviation
 Children playing = masturbation
 Fire = bedwetting
 Robber = father
 Falling = anxiety
Freudian Slip
 Psychological error in speaking or writing
 Evidence of some unconscious urge,
desire, or conflict & struggle
 When ego or superego are not doing their
job properly elements of id slip out or are
seen
Memory
 Fact: every person experiences every event from
a unique, individual perspective that depends on
a person’s needs, goals, assumptions and other
experiences
 Fact: individualized memory is a complex,
multifaceted, constantly changing representation
-What is reported about the event varies
tremendously with the circumstances under
which the memory is probed
Hypermnesia
 “Excessive memory” situation in which a
later attempt to remember something
yields information that was not reportable
on an earlier attempt to remember.
 Memory flooding
Infantile Amnesia
 Most adults cannot remember much of
what happened to them before age three
or four
 Adults cannot remember any things be
they traumatic or not
 Still not clear why
Subliminal Perception
 Very weak stimuli could be perceived and
processed without conscious awareness
of such stimulus having occurred.
 Not consciously aware of stimuli that are
nevertheless being processed by some
parts of our brain
Explicit vs Implicit Memory
 Explicit memory: can recall or recognize
something
 Implicit memory: change how think or
behave as a result of some experience
that do not consciously recall
Procedural Memory vs
Declarative Memory
 Representation of the skill itself can be
present in memory even in the absence of
conscious memory for the event during
which the skill was acquired.
 Procedural: Memory for how to do the
task
 Declarative: Memory for facts about a task
or event
Psychoanalytic Techniques
 Free Association
 Client reports immediately without censoring any

feelings or thoughts
 Interpretation
 Therapist points out, explains, and teaches the

meanings of whatever is revealed

 Dream Analysis
 Therapist uses the “royal road to the

unconscious” to bring unconscious material to

light
Transference and
Countertransference
 Transference
 The client reacts to the therapist as he did to an
earlier significant other
 This allows the client to experience feelings
that would otherwise be inaccessible
 ANALYSIS OF TRANSFERENCE — allows the
client to achieve insight into the influence of the
past
 Countertransference
 The reaction of the therapist toward the client that
may interfere with objectivity
Resistance
 Resistance
 Anything that works against the progress of

therapy and prevents the production of

unconscious material
 Analysis of Resistance
 Helps the client to see that canceling

appointments, fleeing from therapy prematurely,

etc., are ways of defending against anxiety
 These acts interfere with the ability to accept

changes which could lead to a more satisfying

life
Contributions of Freud
 First personality & psychotherapy theory
 Emphasis on sexuality as influence
 Importance of early childhood experience
 Concept of unconscious
 Emphasis on Helper Role in therapeutic
relationship
 Scientific approach to mental health on
continuum from physical health
 Limitations of Freud’s Work
 Pessimistic and deterministic approach to
personality
 Pathology based theory
 Hydraulic model of psychic energy exaggerated
 No controlled studies-poor research
 Overemphasis on differences between men and
women
 Unconcerned with interpersonal relations,
individual identity and adaptation over one’s
lifetime