The Story of Psychology (37 page)

Freud was unimpressed by these indications of his fame, but when he was awarded the Goethe Prize in 1930, he called it “the climax of my life as a citizen.”
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In 1923, at sixty-seven, Freud developed cancer of the upper jaw from his lifelong heavy cigar smoking and underwent the first of what would be thirty operations over the next sixteen years to remove recurrent pre-cancerous or cancerous tissue. He had to wear a prosthesis—a kind of large denture—to separate his mouth from his nasal cavity; it made talking and eating difficult, and had to be removed regularly, a painful procedure, so that the affected area could be cleaned.

His final years were darkened by the rise of the Nazis in Germany, who began burning his books in 1933. As the danger grew that the movement would overwhelm Austria, friends and family tried to get him to leave, but he adamantly refused. Only when Germany took over Austria in March 1938 and the Nazis confiscated his passport did the fragile, aged Freud, nearing eighty-two, recognize his peril and agree to leave if he could. Partly through the intervention of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his ambassador to France, William C. Bullitt, the Nazis were induced to let him go, and late that year he and the faithful Martha moved to London. Although his cancer had become inoperable, he was still of perfect mind and continued to write and to see a few patients. At last, in intolerable pain, he asked his physician to end his suffering by an overdose of morphine; he died on September 23, 1939, three weeks after the outbreak of World War II.

Between 1900 and 1923 Freud expanded and altered his theories of psychology but thereafter, he said, he made “no further decisive contributions to psychoanalysis.”
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He did produce three major works between 1923 and 1939, but they deal with issues reaching beyond the bounds of psychology and are not our concern.
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He also further elaborated his ideas about psychoanalytic technique in a number of papers, but the fundamentals remained unchanged. In truth, Freud was not much interested in therapeutic technique except as a means to two ends—earning a living and, more important, exploring human nature and adding to the science of the mind.
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“Psychoanalysis,” he said late in life, “which was originally no more than an attempt at explaining pathological mental phenomena… [has] developed into a psychology of normal mental life.”
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As a method of investigating mental life, psychoanalytic therapy sees the world in a grain of sand. Freud derived some of his largest and most daring theoretical ideas from tiny details—an image or name in a patient’s dream, a slip of the tongue, a joke, an odd symptom, a remembered scene of childhood, a facial expression. In a lecture on the “parapraxes” (little slips and mistakes), Freud told his listeners he knew they might regard these as too trivial to merit study, but, he explained in his inimitably charming manner, they are clues to hidden psychological realities:

It was from patient attention to endless trivia that Freud pieced together the main elements of his psychology. The chief extensions and revisions of his early discoveries are as follows:

Infantile sexuality:
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Although Freud had early recognized sexuality as a powerful force in childhood, not until 1905, in
Three Essays
, did he state the far more radical conclusion that the sexual drive is present even in infancy. What convinced Freud was his own accumulating clinical evidence plus confirming observations reported in the medical literature. His conclusion: “A child has its sexual instincts and activities from the first; it comes into the world with them.”
⁷⁴

But what he meant by sexuality in infancy and childhood is a broader and more pervasive impulse than the sexuality of adulthood; although Freud called it sexuality or libido, he was speaking of the general desire for
sensuous
pleasure of any kind. Gentle stimulation of any part of the infant’s body yields such pleasure; the infant is, in Freud’s term,
polymorphous perverse.
At first, the mouth is the major site of sensuous pleasure, obtained initially by sucking, then by mouthing and eating; when the child is between one and a half and three, the anal region becomes a chief source of sensuous pleasure as he or she begins to control and be aware of the expulsion or the willful retention of feces; and between the ages of three and six the child derives pleasure from self-stimulation of the genitals.

Parents, however, exert a powerful restraining influence on these elemental gratifications, mostly through toilet training and the disapproval or punishment of masturbation. The originally polymorphous sexual instinct becomes narrowed and channeled so that in adulthood it will be focused on genital sexuality with a partner.

Faulty child rearing—undue emphasis on eating or toilet training, or the failure to inhibit taboo impulses—can block the child’s development toward genital sexuality. The child remains fixated at an early level of development; the fixation can appear in adult life as a preference for exclusively oral sex or anal sex, but more commonly takes the form of traits of character. The child overindulged at the oral stage may in adulthood be obsessed with eating, drinking, and smoking; the child deprived or insufficiently gratified in the oral stage may grow up passively dependent on others for feelings of self-esteem. Similarly, difficulties
of adjustment during the anal stage may result, in adult life, in compulsive neatness, stinginess (retentiveness), and stubbornness.

The later stages of sexual development:
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The most crucial psychological event of the child’s life takes place at the “phallic” stage of development (Freud applied that term to both sexes), in the age range of three to six. The child’s sexuality, though chiefly autoerotic, is potentially responsive to persons of either sex, but by the phallic stage the child has divined from many clues the sort of person who might appropriately provide gratification of his or her sexual urges. The ideal model—and the closest at hand—is the parent of the opposite sex.

This, Freud had said earlier, leads directly to the Oedipus complex, which he had portrayed as a critical stage. Now, going further, he envisioned its resolution as central to character development. Freud theorized that the boy’s rivalry with his father causes him to fear that the powerful father will conquer him by castrating him (rather than killing him), and he reacts to that fear not only by totally repressing his sexual feelings toward his mother and replacing them with feelings of affection but by transforming his hostility and rivalry toward his father into identification with him and his role in life.

Things take a somewhat different course with the girl, who, in Freud’s later view of female development, imagines she has already been castrated. She suffers “penis envy”; her love of her mother turns into hostility (she fantasizes that her mother allowed her to be born without a penis or to be castrated); she dreams of making up for the loss by having a child by her father. But the dream proves impossible; eventually she gives it up and rids herself of her anxiety-producing hostility toward her mother by identifying with her. Since, however, she has no penis, her fear of harm is less powerful than the boy’s. Throughout life her feeling of having been deprived of a penis negatively influences her personality, her goals in life, her moral sense, and her self-esteem. As Gay puts it, “By the early 1920s, Freud seemed to have adopted the position that the little girl is a failed boy, the grown woman a kind of castrated man.”
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Both boys and girls, at about the age of five, having undergone repression of their sexuality, enter the “latency” stage of life, during which they are largely freed of the concerns and anxieties caused by the sexual instinct and turn their attention and energy toward schooling and growing up. But the repressed sexual impulses have been only locked away, not eliminated, and they continually try to break through. They find indirect and disguised outlet in the form of dreams and, in those children who have not adequately resolved the Oedipal complex, pathological symptoms.

Finally, when the child is around twelve, the hormonal changes of puberty awaken the sleeping sexual impulse, and the repressed feelings begin to be directed outward, in socially approved fashion, toward people of the opposite sex outside the family. In this final “genital” phase of development, the sexual urge is transformed into “object love”—acceptable fulfillment of sexual and emotional desires through the love of another person, often one who is in some way similar to the forbidden object of sexual love, the opposite-sex parent.

Thus Freud’s theory of psychosexual development, often narrowly misconstrued as concerned only with sexual desire and behavior, actually deals with far larger issues: the basic, inevitable conflicts between childishness and maturity, instinctive desires and societal norms, and wishes and reality, the resolutions of which are crucial to character development and social life.

The structure of the psyche:
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Freud had at first pictured the psychic apparatus as made up of the unconscious, the preconscious, and the conscious, but as he worked out his theory of psychosexual development he found this a too-simple formulation. He depicted instead a tripartite psyche comprising id, ego, and superego; these are not entities in any physical or metaphysical sense but merely names of groups or clusters of mental processes that serve different functions.

In the newborn, all mental processes are id processes, unconscious and primary. There is nothing akin to logical reasoning in the id; it is a cauldron of instinctual demands for the satisfaction of primitive desires having to do with self-preservation (hunger, thirst, and the like), sexuality, and aggression. The demands of the id operate in accordance with the pleasure principle; they seek the relief of tension without any consideration of social rules or the practical consequences of relief-seeking acts.

Since social life would be impossible if the id directed behavior, child
rearing and socialization are aimed at controlling the forces of the id and directing them into acceptable activities. In part this is achieved through training and education of the conscious mind, which understands, reasons, and functions according to secondary-process thinking; this is the ego, or self, which develops and becomes differentiated from the id as the child grows. The ego is not sharply separated from the id but somewhat overlaps and merges with it. However, ideas and emotions in the id that enter the ego and create anxiety, such as the Oedipal impulse, are thrust back by repression and walled off so that they cannot re-enter consciousness.

Many other impulses, in contrast, are consciously controlled by the ego. The child learns, among other things, that one does not take another’s property, strike another without just cause, or masturbate in public; we teach our children that such actions are not acceptable and will have dire consequences. Although in part we train them, as we do animals, by simple reward and punishment, in larger part we rear them by telling them how they should behave and why. The ego, absorbing these lessons, becomes capable of self-criticism and self-control.

Much of the ego, however, is not conscious. Many of its processes are preconscious—not repressed but not in the spotlight of attention. We do a good deal of our problem solving, for example, outside of consciousness, continuing to consider information we have gathered and ways of achieving our goal without consciously thinking about the matter. When a solution pops into mind seemingly from nowhere, it is because we were working on it all along. Similarly, the preconscious operates many of our well-learned skills, freeing the conscious mind to use its limited attention elsewhere. The trained musician’s fingers automatically strike the right notes as he reads music; he does not have to think about them.

In contrast, the superego, which monitors and censors the ego, is unconscious and critically important to the governing of social behavior. It develops within the ego as a result of the Oedipus complex, at which time the child, coming to identify with the same-sex parent, absorbs the parent’s injunctions and beliefs and makes them part of himself or herself. Perceived commands like “you must not” or “you should” are transformed by identification into “I must not” and “I should.” This mechanism turns all sorts of moral values into internalized and self-imposed rules; collectively, they form the “ego ideal” or superego, what we usually call conscience. Moral issues are consciously weighed by the ego; the superego evokes a compelling sense of
ought
or
ought not.
The ego of a person adrift in a life raft might reason that to give food and water to a dying companion would be wasteful and result in the death of both of them; the superego might override the ego and insist on sharing what remained.