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Sigmund Freud's Teaching about the unconscious
Sigmund Freud's Teaching about the unconscious
Content:
Sigmund Freud The concept of the unconscious Three periods of the development of Freud's teaching about the unconscious Conclusion References
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939) was a Viennese professor of psychiatry, a famous scientist, the author of a new psychological doctrine about the unconscious (psychoanalysis).
Among the psychologists of the XX century, Dr. Sigmund Freud has a special place.
Freud's psychological and sociological views had a significant impact on art, sociology, ethnography, psychology and psychiatry of the first half of the twentieth century.
Freud first started talking about psychoanalysis in 1896, and in 1897 he began to conduct systematic self observations, which he recorded in diaries until the end of his life.
In 1900, his book “Interpretation of Dreams " appeared, in which he first published the most important provisions of his concept, supplemented in his subsequent books “Psychopathology of Everyday Life” (1901), “I and It” (1923), “Totem and Taboo” (1913), “Psychology of the Masses and analysis of the human "I" (1921).
Gradually, his ideas gained recognition, and in 1910 he was invited to lecture in America, where his theory became particularly popular.
A circle of his admirers and followers is gradually forming around Freud, which includes K.Jung, A. Adler, S. Ferenci, O. Rank, K. Abraham.
After the organization of the psychoanalytic society in Vienna, its branches are opening all over the world, the psychoanalytic movement is expanding, gaining an increasing number of supporters.
At the same time, Freud is becoming more and more orthodox and dogmatic in his views, he does not tolerate the slightest deviations from his concept, suppressing all attempts to independently develop and analyze certain provisions of psychotherapy or the structure of personality, its relationship with others, undertaken by his students.
This leads to a distance, and then to a break with Freud, the most talented of his followers Adler, Jung, Rank.
As Freud's fame grew, so did the number of critical works directed against his views.
In 1933, the Nazis burned his books in Berlin.
After the capture of Austria by the Germans, Freud's position becomes dangerous, he is persecuted.
Foreign psychoanalytic societies collect a significant amount of money and actually buy Freud from the Germans, who give him permission to leave for England.
However, his illness progresses, no operations and medications help, and in 1939 he dies, leaving behind the world he created, already completely open to interpretation and criticism.
Freud's teaching, which deduces the most complex and valuable forms of psychic life from unconscious instincts, mainly from sexual ones, was a great success in the circles of young scientists, but it caused a storm of indignation among the guardians of generally accepted bourgeois morality, who considered it obscene to bring the sexual instinct to the fore and hastened to declare Freudism a teaching "ugly in aesthetic terms and despicable and dangerous in moral terms".
The concept of the unconscious
The deepest and most significant area of the human mind is the unconscious.
The unconscious is a repository of primitive instinctual impulses plus emotions and memories that threaten consciousness so much that they have been suppressed and pushed into the unconscious.
The unconscious material largely determines our daily functioning.
The study of the phenomenon of the unconscious goes back to ancient times, it was recognized in its practice by the healers of the earliest civilizations.
For Plato, the recognition of the existence of the unconscious served as the basis for the creation of a theory of knowledge based on the reproduction of what is in the depths of the human psyche.
Being familiar with Plato's philosophical ideas, Freud undoubtedly drew from there some ideas about the unconscious.
So, it is unlikely that those reflections of Plato that were associated with the problem of unconscious knowledge of man did not fall into his field of vision.
The problem of the unconscious, clothed in the form of considering the possibility of the existence of unconscious representations, is also reflected in the philosophy of Kant (1724-1804).
Freud repeatedly refers to Kant in his works.
Textual analysis shows that the founder of psychoanalysis was familiar not only with Kant's " Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view”, but also with other works of the German philosopher.
In many cases, Freud not only shares Kant's philosophical ideas, but also appeals to his authority when it comes to justifying his psychoanalytic concepts.
This is especially true of the problem of the unconscious.
Reflections on the problem of the unconscious occupied an important place in many philosophical works of the XIX century.
during this period, a turn is planned and carried out from the rationalism of the Enlightenment era and German classical philosophy to an irrationalist understanding of human existence in the world.
The formation of Freud's psychoanalytic teaching was influenced by the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
Many of the ideas of these philosophers largely predetermined various psychoanalytic concepts, including Freud's ideas about the unconscious.
Of course, there is no absolute identity between the psychoanalytic teachings of Freud and the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
In Schopenhauer, the unconscious is initially ontological: - " the world will” is the root cause of everything that exists.
Nietzsche shares this point of view to a certain extent, but focuses more attention on the consideration of the unconscious, how it functions in the depths of the human being.
For Freud, the unconscious is primarily and mainly something psychic, subject to comprehension only in connection with a person.
Unlike others, Freud made the anatomy of the conscious and unconscious mental a scientific fact.
But he explained this fact on the basis of only a "negative" concept - an unconscious psyche, understood only by denying the attribute of consciousness behind it
It is known that the main regulator of human behavior is consciousness.
Freud discovered that behind the veil of consciousness there is a deep," boiling " layer of powerful aspirations, drives, and desires that are not realized by the individual.
As an attending physician, he was faced with the fact that these unconscious experiences and motives can seriously burden life and even cause neuropsychiatric diseases.
This led him to search for ways to rid his patients of conflicts between what their consciousness says and hidden, blind, unconscious motives.
Thus was born Freud's method of healing the soul, called psychoanalysis.
The doctrine of the unconscious is the foundation on which the entire theory of psychoanalysis is based.
Psychoanalysis (from the Greek psyche soul and analysis solution) - part of psychotherapy, a medical research method developed by Z. Freud for the diagnosis and cure of hysteria.
Then it was reworked by Freud into a psychological doctrine aimed at studying the hidden connections and foundations of human mental life
The unconscious should not be understood as something abstract or some hypothesis created for a philosophical system.
The unconscious is those forms of mental life that, while possessing all the properties of the psychic, at the same time are not the property of consciousness.
The area of the unconscious includes mental phenomena that occur in a dream (dreams); responses that are caused by imperceptible, but really affecting stimuli ("subsensory” or "perceptual" reactions); movements that were conscious in the past, but were automated due to repetition and therefore more unconscious; some impulses to activity in which there is no consciousness of the goal, and others.
Unconscious phenomena also include some pathological phenomena that occur in the psyche of a sick person: delusions, hallucinations, etc.
Being conscious is primarily a purely descriptive term that relies on the most direct and reliable perception.
A psychic element, for example, a representation, usually does not remain conscious for a long time.
On the contrary, it is characteristic of him that the consciousness of awareness passes quickly; the idea, at the moment conscious, ceases to be so in the next moment, but can again become conscious under certain, easily achievable conditions.
A representation – or any other psychic element, may be present in a person's consciousness at a certain moment, and may disappear from there at a subsequent moment; after a certain period of time, it may reappear in memory completely unchanged, without any previous new sensory perceptions.
Considering this phenomenon, we can conclude that the idea was preserved in the human soul during this period of time, although it was hidden from consciousness.
But it is not known in what form it was preserved in the spiritual life and remained hidden from consciousness regarding this.
The unconscious forms the lowest level of the psyche.
The unconscious is a set of mental processes, acts and states caused by influences, in the influence of which a person does not give himself an account.
Being psychic (since the concept of the psyche is broader than the concept of "consciousness”," conscious”), the unconscious is a form of reflection of reality in which the completeness of orientation in time and place of action is lost, the speech regulation of behavior is violated.
In the unconscious, unlike consciousness, it is impossible to purposefully control the actions performed, and it is impossible to evaluate their result.
Freud proceeds from the fact that the assumption of the unconscious is necessary because of the existence of such acts, for the explanation of which it is necessary to recognize the presence of other acts that are not conscious, because there are many gaps in the data of consciousness.
Only in this case, as he believes, the mental continuity is not disturbed and the essence of the cognitive process with its conscious acts becomes clear.
Pre Freudian psychology as an object of research had a normal, physically and mentally healthy person and investigated the phenomenon of consciousness, while Freud, as a psychopathologist, investigating the nature and causes of neuroses, came across that area of the human psyche that remained outside the field of view of previous psychology.
He was faced with the need to study the nature of the mental, inner world of the " I " and those structures that did not fit into the "conscious" in a person, and came to the conclusion that the human psyche is a kind of conglomerate consisting of various components that are not only conscious, but also unconscious and preconscious in nature.
In general, the human psyche seems to Freud to be split into two opposing spheres of the conscious and unconscious, which are essential characteristics of the individual.
Freud calls conscious “the representation that exists in our consciousness, and which we perceive as such, and we assert that this is the only meaning of the term “conscious”.
But in the Freudian structure of personality, both of these spheres are not represented equally: he considered the unconscious to be the central component that makes up the essence of the human psyche, and the conscious is only a special instance that builds on the unconscious.
According to Freud, the conscious owes its origin to the unconscious and "crystallizes" from it in the process of developing the psyche.
Therefore, according to Freud, the conscious is not the essence of the psyche, but only such a quality of it that may or may not join its other qualities.
Three periods of the development of Freud's teaching about the unconscious
According to Freud, the human psyche is divided into three areas: consciousness, the unconscious and the preconscious.
These three areas or systems of the mental are in a state of continuous interaction, and the first two are in a state of intense struggle with each other.
The psychic life of a person is reduced to this interaction and this struggle.
Every mental act and every human act should be considered as the result of the competition and struggle of consciousness with the unconscious, as an indicator of the balance of forces achieved at a given moment in life by these continuously struggling parties.
This concept of the unconscious was formed and defined by Freud not immediately and subsequently underwent significant changes.
In the first period, Freud's concept of the unconscious was close to the teachings of the famous French psychiators and psychologists – Charcot, Liebo, Janet, from whom it was also in direct genetic dependence.
In the second longest and most important period of the development of psychoanalysis, all the main and characteristic features of Freud's teaching about the unconscious are determined.
Now it becomes quite original.
The development of all issues takes place during this period exclusively in the plane of theoretical and applied psychology.
In the third period, the concept of the unconscious undergoes a significant change and begins to approach the metaphysical teaching of Schopenhauer and Hartmann.
General questions of the worldview begin to prevail over particular, special problems.
The unconscious becomes the embodiment of all that is lower and all that is higher in man.
Back in 1889, Freud was struck by the experience of the famous expert in hypnosis Bernheim: a hypnotized patient was instructed to open an umbrella standing in the corner of the room some time after waking up.
Waking up from a hypnotic dream, the lady did exactly what she was ordered at the appointed time – she went to the corner and opened her umbrella.
When asked about the motives of her action, she replied that she wanted to make sure if it was her umbrella.
This motive did not correspond at all to the actual reason for the act and, obviously, was invented, but it completely satisfied the patient's consciousness: she was sincerely convinced that she had opened the umbrella of her own free will.
Further, Bernheim, by persistent questioning and prompting her thoughts, finally forced the patient to remember the real reason for the act, i.e., the order received by her during hypnosis.
From this experiment, Freud drew three general conclusions that determined the foundations of his early concept of the unconscious:
The motivation of consciousness, for all its subjective sincerity, does not always correspond to the actual reasons for the act;
An act can sometimes be determined by forces acting in the psyche, but not reaching consciousness;
These psychic forces can be brought to consciousness with the help of well known techniques.
On the basis of these three propositions, tested in his own psychiatric practice, Freud developed together with his colleague Breuer, the so called cathartic method of treating hysteria.
The essence of this method is as follows: at the heart of hysteria and some other psychogenic nervous diseases are mental formations that do not reach the patient's consciousness: these are some mental shocks, feelings or desires that the patient once experienced, but deliberately forgotten by him, because his consciousness, for some reason, is either afraid or ashamed of the very memory of them.
Without penetrating into consciousness, these forgotten experiences cannot be normally lived out and reacted (discharged); they cause painful symptoms of hysteria.
These forgotten experiences, which cause symptoms of hysteria, are the "unconscious", as Freud understood it in the first period of the development of his teaching. “
The unconscious” can be defined as a kind of alien body that has penetrated into the psyche.
It is not connected by strong associative threads with other moments of consciousness and therefore breaks its unity.
In normal life, dreaming is close to it, which is also more free than the experiences of real life, from the close associative connections that permeate the human psyche.
This is the first Freudian concept of the unconscious.
It is characterized by two features.
First, Freud does not give any physiological theory of the unconscious and does not even try to do it.
Secondly, the products of the unconscious can be obtained only in translation into the language of consciousness; there is no other, direct approach to the unconscious besides the consciousness of the patient himself.
In the second, classical period of psychoanalysis, the concept of the unconscious is enriched by a number of new, highly significant moments.
In the second period, the unconscious becomes a necessary and extremely important component of the mental apparatus of every person.
The struggle of consciousness and the unconscious is declared a constant and regular form of mental life.
The unconscious becomes a productive source of psychic forces and energy for all areas of cultural creativity, especially for art.
At the same time, if the struggle with consciousness fails, the unconscious can become the source of all nervous diseases.
The process of formation of the unconscious, according to these new views of Freud, has a natural character and takes place throughout a person's life from the very moment of his birth.
This process is called "displacement".
Repression is one of the most important concepts of the entire psychoanalytic teaching.
Then the content of the unconscious is typed: these are no longer random isolated experiences, but some typical, mostly common to all people, coherent groups of experiences (complexes) of a certain nature, mainly sexual.
These complexes are pushed into the unconscious during strictly defined periods that are repeated in the life history of each person.
To understand the content of the unconscious, it is necessary to get acquainted with the theory of drives of Sigmund Freud.
According to Freud, attraction does not mean a special movement, but an internal self impression, in which it is impossible to escape from oneself, and insofar as this self impression is effective, a state of gravity and load on our inner world is inevitably created.
Mental activity is set in motion by external and internal stimuli of the body.
Internal irritations have a somatic (bodily) source, i.e. they are born in the body.
And so Freud calls the psychic representations of these internal somatic stimuli drives.
Freud divides all drives according to their purpose and according to their somatic source into two groups:
sexual drives, the purpose of which is procreation;
personal drives, or " I " drives, their goal is the self preservation of the individual.
Sexual desire, or, as Freud calls it, libido, is inherent in the child from the very beginning of his life, it is born together with his body and leads a continuous, only sometimes weakening, but never fading away at all life in the body and psyche.
The content of the unconscious can be expressed in the following summarizing formula: the world of the unconscious includes everything that an organism could do if it were left to the pure principle of pleasure, if it were not bound by the principle of reality and culture.
This includes everything that he openly desired and vividly imagined in the early infantile period of his life, when the pressure of reality and culture was still weak and when man was more free in the manifestation of his primordial, organic self sufficiency.
In the third period, the theory of drives underwent significant changes.
Instead of the previous division of the instincts into sexual and ego instincts, a new division has appeared:
1) sexual attraction, or eros;
2) the attraction to death.
The second group – the death instincts is the basis of all manifestations of aggression, cruelty, murder and suicide.
However, there is an opinion that Freud created a theory about these instincts under the influence of the death of his daughter and fear for his two sons, who were at the front at that time.
This is probably why this is the most and least considered question in modern psychology.
The " I " drive and, above all, the instinct of self preservation have moved away to the sexual drives, the concepts of which have thus expanded enormously, covering both members of the former division.
The instinct of self preservation includes the following sub instincts: nutrition, growth, breathing, movement, that is, those necessary vital functions that make any organism alive.
Initially, these factors were very important, but in connection with the development of the human mind (I), these factors as vital have lost their former significance.
This happened because man had devices for obtaining food, he began to use food not only to satisfy hunger, but also to satisfy the greed peculiar only to man.
Over time, food began to get easier and easier for him, and he began to spend less and less time on its extraction.
A person began to build dwellings and other devices for himself and secured his life to the maximum.
Thus, the instinct of self preservation has lost its significance, and the instinct of reproduction, or, as Freud calls it, libido, has come to the fore.
By eros, Freud understands the attraction to organic life, to the preservation and development of it at all costs whether in the form of procreation or the preservation of the individual.
The task of the death drive is to return all living organisms to a lifeless state of inorganic, dead matter, striving away from the anxiety of life and eros.
The second feature of the third period is the expansion of the composition of the unconscious, enriching it with qualitatively new and peculiar moments.
The second period was characterized by a dynamic understanding of the unconscious as repressed.
The repressed, consisting mainly of sexual drives, is hostile to the conscious "I".
In his book “Freud suggests calling this whole area of the psyche, which does not coincide with the “I”, “It”.
"It" is a deep layer of unconscious drives, a psychic "self", the basis of an active individual, which is guided only by the" pleasure principle " regardless of social reality, and sometimes in spite of it.
"It” is that inner dark element of desires and drives, which a person sometimes feels so acutely and which opposes his reasonable arguments and good will.
The" I "(Ego) is the sphere of the conscious, an intermediary between the" It "and the external world, including natural and social institutions, which measures the activity of the" It "with the" principle of reality", expediency and external necessity.
"It” is passion," I " is reason and prudence.
In the” It", the principle of pleasure reigns inseparably;
The " I” is the carrier of the reality principle.
Finally “ " It” is unconscious.
Until now, when talking about the unconscious, Freud had dealt only with the “It”: after all, the repressed drives belonged to him.
Therefore, all the unconscious seemed to be something lower, dark, immoral.
Yet the higher, the moral, the rational coincided with consciousness.
This view is incorrect.
The unconscious is not only "It".
And in the " I”, and moreover in its higher sphere, there is an area of the unconscious.
The process of repression proceeding from the “I” is unconscious, the work of repression carried out in the interests of the “I” is unconscious.
Thus, a significant part of the " I " also turns out to be unconscious.
This is the area on which Freud focuses his attention in the last period.
It turns out to be much wider, deeper and more substantial than it seemed at first.
Freud calls the highest unconscious area in the "I”the " Ideal – I".
The "Ideal I" (Super Ego) is an intrapersonal conscience, a kind of censorship, a critical instance that arises as an intermediary between the "It" and the "I" due to the insolubility of the conflict between them, the inability of the "I" to curb unconscious impulses and subordinate them to the requirements of the "reality principle".
The "ideal I" is, first of all, the censor whose dictates are fulfilled by repression.
Then he finds himself in a number of other, very important phenomena of personal and cultural life.
It manifests itself in an unaccountable sense of guilt that weighs on the soul of some people.
Consciousness does not recognize this guilt, it struggles with a sense of guilt, but it cannot overcome it.
Further, the manifestations of the” Ideal – I "include the so called" sudden awakening of conscience”, cases of a person showing unusual severity towards himself, self contempt, melancholy, etc.
In all these phenomena, the conscious "I"is forced to obey a force acting from the depths of the unconscious, but at the same time moral.
Trying to penetrate into the mechanisms of the human psyche, Freud proceeds from the fact that its deep, natural layer ("It") functions according to an arbitrarily chosen program for obtaining the greatest pleasure.
But since in the satisfaction of his passions the individual encounters an external reality that opposes the "It", the "I" stands out in him, striving to curb the unconscious drives and direct them in the direction of socially approved behavior.
"It" gradually, but imperiously dictates its conditions to the "I".
As a submissive servant of the unconscious drives, the " I "tries to maintain its good agreement with the" It " and the outside world.
This is not always possible for him, so a new instance of the "Ideal - I" is formed in him, which reigns n hell " I " as a conscience or an unconscious sense of guilt.
The "ideal I" is, as it were, the highest being in a person, reflecting the commandments, social prohibitions, the power of parents and authorities.
According to its position and functions in the human psyche, the "Ideal - I" is designed to carry out the sublimation of unconscious drives and in this sense, it seems to be in solidarity with the "I".
But in its content, the "Ideal I" is closer to the "It" and even opposes the "I", as an attorney of the inner world of the" It", which can lead to a conflict situation leading to violations in the human psyche.
Thus, the Freudian " I "appears in the form of an" unfortunate creature", which, like a locator, is forced to turn first in one direction and then in the other in order to be in friendly agreement with both the" It "and the"Ideal - I".
Although Freud recognized the "heredity" and "naturalness" of the unconscious, it is hardly correct to say that he absolutizes the power and authority of the unconscious and proceeds entirely from the unbridled instincts of man.
The task of psychoanalysis, as formulated by Freud, is to translate the unconscious material of the human psyche into the field of consciousness and subordinate it to its goals.
In this sense, Freud was an optimist, since he believed in the ability of awareness of the unconscious, which was most clearly expressed by him in the formula: "Where there was an 'It', there must be an 'I'."
All his analytical activity was aimed at ensuring that, as the nature of the unconscious was revealed, a person could master his passions and consciously control them in real life.
Freud defines the unconscious as the non verbal; it turns into the preconscious (from where it can always pass into consciousness) by connecting with the corresponding verbal representations.
Freud was aware of the difficulties that stood in the way of mastering the unconscious, he struggled for a long time to solve this problem, constantly making adjustments to the understanding of the nature of the unconscious and the so called "primary drives"that make up its core.
Conclusion
Freud's teaching became famous primarily for penetrating into the recesses of the unconscious, or, as the author himself sometimes said, the "underworld" of the psyche.
The significance of the concept of the unconscious for human cognition consists in penetrating into his being to a greater depth than classical consciousness, i.e. thought, understood as objective cognition and as a representation.
Our world of representations, like each of its elements, is accessible to perception only through an instance that is irreducible to it - the sphere of motives, desires, needs, actions, labor that give it a form: this form precedes the forms of thought, and thought can perceive it only retroactively.
Therefore, the results of our reflections on affect, arousals, etc. do not lead us at all to break away from the world where people live, but on the contrary, force us to return to its roots in order to reveal the really driving force of nature, the true mind.
List of literature:
The Unconscious: the Diversity of Vision, SAGUNA Agency, Novocherkassk, 1994.
The unconscious, its discovery, its manifestation.
From Freud to Lacan, Moscow Circle Colloquium, 1992.
"Sigmund Freud, Psychoanalysis and Russian Thought”, V. M. Leibin, Moscow, "Republic", 1994
Z. Freud.
Psychology of the unconscious: a collection of works, Moscow “Enlightenment”, 1989.
Z. Freud.
Basic Principles of psychoanalysis, Kiev, 1998.
Makarevia V.
The slightly opened door to the depths of the unconscious, Daugavpils, 1997.
Richard Osborne.
Get acquainted: Freud, Kiev, 1997.
Jones Ernest.
The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud, Moscow, 1997.
Date added: 27.03.2001
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