Exploration, understanding, and relief.
Censorship, bias, and deception.
Next on Psych Reviews is Sigmund Freud's exploration of Dreams.
The
birth of psychology, like most sciences, started in necessity.
Just like today, when doctors cannot find a physical problem, they defer to counsellors,
and psychologists, to find psychological reasons for the patient's malady.
In Freud's time, the pressure was larger in that there was no profession to rely on.
Freud said in Psychical Treatment
in 1890: Even if the pain was only psychological pain, it's still pain nonetheless, and the
patient would often exhaust all avenues before seeking the help of a hypnotist, for example.
Here the results depended on the suggestibility of the patient, and their faith in the status
of the hypnotist in having a history of helping others.
The typical method of the hypnotist was to suggest that there was no mental illness at
all, and through the patient's belief system, the patient could recover.
Some patients improved enormously, but in some patients there were only temporary improvements,
leading to a repeated need for the hypnotist, and a possible addiction forming to hypnotherapy.
Freud detected early on that long-term improvements in patients, undergoing hypnotherapy, was
not completely clear.
In his work with hysterical patients, he found that they suffered from: If hypnotherapy couldn't
get into these thoughts or experiences, then the patient would need to quit treatment altogether.
Freud found that defensiveness was a key part of why these traumas and concurrent emotions
were not completely expressed.
In Neuro-Psychoses of Defence, Freud said: What Freud termed as Ego, in his early formulation,
was tension from emotionally invested neurons looking for release.
Either from achieving external goals, or achieved through dreams.
This hydraulic model put forth in an unpublished manuscript called a Project for a Scientific
Psychology, where Freud hoped he could measure a quantity of energy passing through neurons,
that were either easy to pass through, or could pass through only with difficulty.
Theoretically the former type were involved in energy discharge, and the later type were
involved in storing memories.
Another set of theoretical neurons that Freud elaborated on were responsible for perception,
and for comparing mental experiences to perceptual reality.
Of course confusion could occur when the emotional investments prioritize mental projections
over perceptual reality.
These theoretical neurons couldn't be measured quantitatively, so Freud decided to follow
a philosophical path instead.
As described in Studies in Hysteria, these difficult thoughts and emotions could then
influence the body, causing some of the symptoms of Hysteria, which included motor difficulties,
and repetitive escapes into obsessive thoughts to avoid the distressing subject matter of
the trauma.
These distressing thoughts for Freud's sample of patients usually involved some sexual seduction
before the appropriate age, or guilt over indulging in sexual thoughts and masturbation,
which in Freud's time was more stigmatizing than it is today.
With some patients these early sexual traumas did not affect the patient until they were
reaching puberty and could infuse their old memories into shame and disgust.
Sometimes these memories would be transformed into screen memories as Freud called them,
where they are reworked into pleasant narratives that were easier to accept.
Sigmund Freud, after the Studies in Hysteria, was motivated to move beyond his childhood
sexual abuse theory and look into the phantasies, or dreams of his clients.
To add another layer of understanding, for why in some cases neurosis didn't arise from
an actual sexual seduction.
Often these adult children hated their parents, and had a different reason for their neurosis.
In a letter to his confidante Wilhelm Fliess, Freud wrote in 1897: To investigate this further
Freud chose to analyze himself as well as his patients, especially analyzing sleep and
dreams.
Freud looked at sleeping similar to being in the womb.
He said: The libido instincts for Freud were at the level of what he calls "primitive narcissism",
and the ego in sleep is a reduced to a hallucinatory satisfaction of wishes.
Freud says: The libido is providing energy to the ego.
Freud goes on
to say: As
Freud explains the activity in sleep, above, he also introduces a theoretical topography
of the mind that unlocks unconscious motivations.
For Freud, there are three states of human experience.
The first is the Unconscious.
Then second, the Preconscious, and then third, our Conscious state.
In the Unconscious resides the libido, which Freud described as a mental energy.
It is also like a physical energy that circulates within a closed system.
Satisfaction is discharging this energy through the fulfillment of wishes.
During this period, where hydraulic systems were popular, Freud felt that the mind was
similar in that energy requires release somewhere.
It flows freely when unconnected with the outside world, like in dreaming.
Desire without reality could go anywhere, but desire with reality always involves a
compromise where resistances appear with waking.
It's all about controlling stress and achieving goals.
Inside our dreams were socially unacceptable desires redacted by ego censors to prevent
anxiety in the conscious mind.
Some of these dreams come from the material of childhood.
These childhood memories involve, what Freud thought at the time, actual sexual seductions
or phantasies of the child to sleep with the opposite sex parent and kill the same sex
parent to satisfy the envy to replace him or her.
This was the Oedipus complex based on the story of Oedipus Rex, where Oedipus unknowningly
kills his father and marries his mother.
At some point, the child would need to have a resolution of this complex by seeing that
their parent wasn't a viable solution, and so then imitate the parent of their same desire
instead.
This involved a huge suppression in the mind of the child of this incident, due to its
embarrassing qualities.
Freud recounts seeing his young mother in the nude and his desire for her as an example.
These desires, according to Freud, don't disappear completely.
They remain as unfulfilled wishes called latent content in a dream.
The latent content is full of unconscious urges making efforts to have hallucinatory
fulfillment if not fulfillment in reality.
The dream itself is called manifest content, which is full of disguises to prevent anxiety
in the subject.
As the censorship deals with these energies, it cannot remove them completely, so it has
to disguise them in four methods typical of dreams.
Displacement, Condensation, Symbolization, and Dramatization.
Displacement is the transferring of the emotional investment from one mental content to another.
One idea can stand for another, as long as their is an associative link.
This explains how some content that is mundane, can have a lot of emotional affect attached
to it.
Through repression and forgetting, the subject unconsciously pushes their emotional investment,
of the socially unacceptable desire, to related content that has no embarrassment.
Condensation is the amalgamation of two or more ideational elements emotionally invested
by the same charge of instinctual energy.
Freud explains how this is done: "When there is nothing in common in the dream thoughts,
the dream work takes the trouble to create a something, in order to make a common presentation
feasible in the dream.
The simplest way to approximate two dream thoughts, which have as yet nothing in common,
consists in making such a change in the actual expression of one idea as will meet a slight
responsive recasting in the form of the other idea."
Symbolization is a disguise of the instinctual wish in a symbol.
As important as symbols are in our legends and myths, Freud looks at them more as a useful
tool for the censorship to use.
He says: Dramatization is a transformation of these emotional investments into a reenactment.
As the content gets transformed, it reaches the Preconscious, which is closer to the waking
state, but still quite unconscious.
This is a second censor that adds logic and coherence to the latent dream material that
distorts the meaning further.
This happens when a dream approaches the waking state, and thus creating the manifest content.
The misplaced emotions, the composite characters, the strange symbols, all put together in a
mysterious dramatization, leaving the patient unaware of what is bothering them, and leaving
the Psychoanalyst a puzzle to work out.
To unlock the mystery, Freud uses free association, where the client communicates to the analyst
what naturally comes up to consciousness, without any censorship.
What comes up can then be slowly pieced together by finding all the associations related to
symbols, condensed dream content, and displacements, leading eventually to the traumatic core of
a real memory.
Then the client can release the emotion related to the trauma, or if there is a missing emotional
need, they try to alter their life to get their needs met in socially acceptable ways.
Ironically, the famous Irma dream published in The Interpretation of Dreams, is a perfect
example of disguising the embarrassing content with a comfortable sounding cover-up.
The Irma dream brought up Freud's feelings of guilt over accepting Fliess's naso-genital
theory, where a link between the nose and genitals had to be severed to relieve the
patient's neurosis, in theory.
In 1895, Freud accepted a patient, Emma Eckstein, for treatment for her suspected hysteria.
Assuming that her hysteria was sexual in origin, he thought Fliess could operate on her nose.
A couple of weeks after the operation, she had a near fatal hemorrhage.
Another doctor examined her and found a half a metre of gauze left there by Fliess.
Freud called it a minimal oversight, and blamed the nose bleeds on Emma's desire for the doctor
as the main reason, covering up the malpractice.
After this knowledge, the dream becomes disturbing and can appear like a symbolic male gang rape,
with all the poking and prodding with needles in the dream, along with the real life cover-up.
This was one of the most vile periods of Psychoanalysis.
It shows that power is corrupting in that it removes accountability and it strips the
victim of their humanity.
Just like the insight by Henri Ellenberger, in The Discovery of the Unconscious, all our
mental health treatments were open to ignorance and abuse.
As mental health practices changed, with cultural changes, it followed a path of reducing the
power of the practitioner.
People who are sick always search for practitioners who were "the best", in their day and age,
and would quickly switch methods when a new method was invented, to escape these risks.
Despite these advances, there's always a dyad of practitioner and patient, requiring ethical
guidelines to maintain trust.
Unfortunately for Emma, she was permanently disfigured, but due to ignorance and the barbarity
of medicine at those times, she maintained her trust in Freud and continued being a colleague
of his as the first female psychoanalyst.
Freud's Irma dream is also another great lesson that when you abuse people, it doesn't go
away in your mind, it just gets repressed, festers and comes out, displaced, condensed,
symbolized, and dramatized; an accumulation of anxiety looking for forgiveness.
Freud's explorations and discoveries provided new avenues to pursue using dream interpretation.
This method provided more scope than relying only on past sexual trauma, but also the trauma
of frustrated wishes.
Freud says:
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