FREUD

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in what is now the Czech Republic. Freud moved to Vienna at the age of seven and lived there most of his life.

Freud’s father was businessman. He was work oriented. He was mean to his son and was 22 years older than his mother.

Freud’s mother was intelligent, lively, and sexy. She doted on her son referring to him as “my golden Siggy”. When Freud complained that his sister’s piano practice bothered him, mom sold the piano. Freud was very bright and his mother thought he was destined for great things.

Freud went to medical school for seven years. He was interested in research. He discovered that cocaine is the worlds’ best anesthetic for the eye. He also abused cocaine for eight years.

Freud had an 11-year engagement to his fiancé. Freud had a homosexual affair with Wilhelm Fliess.

Sigmund Freud and his fiancé were cocaine users. Why give back round like this? Example, Sir Isaac Newton was a liar, conman, thief and a generally mean nasty person who hated people. Does this invalidate his scientific theories? No. The background of a person just helps to define the theory they developed.

Freud came of age in the 1870’s during the Victorian Era. This was an era of public repression of sexuality. For example, people’s arms and legs could not be shown and kids wore mittens so they could not masturbate. Society was ridged and hypocritical. There were more prostitutes than married women in London.

Main Influences
1. Charles Darwin – origins of the species published in 1858. Evolution Theory
2. Herman Von Helmholtz – Applied physics and chemistry to biological science physiology. The transformation of energy.

Topographical Model – Most of what happens in the mind goes on in the UNCONCIOUS. The PRECONSCIOUS is what goes on just below the surface for instance when we are remembering a phone number.

What can babies do? Babies are born with some sensory capacity. They have reflexes. They have the capacity to remember and associate. They have flexibility and the capacity to learn. This is what makes us different from the other species. We are born- Polymorph Perverse – Literally meaning many body/ free of moral and social constraint. We begin with the capacity to be satisfied by many things.

Libido – Mental Energy we build up.

Cathexis – The process of associating certain needs and satisfaction of pleasure with certain objects. We cathect things. This is the capacity to invest emotionally in things that give us pleasure.

Polymorph Perversity – The capacity to have physiological needs met in many ways without moral or social constraints.

This is because of evolution. The human species is unique. We live virtually everywhere. We evolved this capacity in order to have flexibility. Our flexibility comes from our large brain. Our brain is very big for our small bodies. The brain consumes 30% of our chemical energy. This is a huge biological investment. Our big brain gives us the flexibility to learn to be very different depending on our circumstances. It gives us lots of mental energy. We have excess chemical energy that we must do something with.

Functional Model-of Basic Human Nature.

ID – We have an uncomfortable amount of chemical energy and we relieve it by getting things that satisfy our physiological needs. It tries to get pleasure and pleasure comes from the discharge of energy. When we are born we have energy, reflex actions and the capacity to learn. We are constantly trying to reduce the energy of the brain to maximize pleasure. The function of the Id is called the

Pleasure Principle – we get pleasure from the release of tension. The ID is always trying to reduce its tension. Pleasure can be positive or negative to increase or decrease tension. We have the capacity to tell what feels good and the capacity to remember.

Cathexis – The process of identifying a particular object with a particular desire.
For example, we cathect mom because she takes care of us. We can cathect anything that meets our needs like blankets and stuffed animals. Because of our flexibility we also cathect associated things like things that remind us of mom or things that smell like mom.
As we grow these changes of association can get very far removed from their original source. We make both positive and negative associations.

Little babies are not very good at getting what they want. They are always in somebody else’s control so what do they do? They begin to try and figure things out. Kids train their parents to give them what they want by 6 months. This leads to the birth of the-

EGO – (Me or I). The self trying to figure out how to get stuff. The Ego is constructed purely out of the frustrated energy of the Id. The Ego is the intermediary between the Id and the external world. It is the executive of the personality, the decision maker. The ego works on the-

Reality Principle – The Ego tries to get as much as it can within the constraints of the world as it finds it. It tries to maximize pleasure by satisfying the desires of the Id. The Ego uses rational thought. The Id is like Cookie Monster, it continually wants stuff. The Ego figures out how to get it what it wants.
The ego restrains the Id and its impulses. It allows you to make longer range plans and to carry them out. This maximizes pleasure. The rational thought of the Ego is always in service to the Id.

If the Ego is unable to satisfy the Id, it does not develop properly. Neglected kids do not behave rationally because it does not work or make any difference. They just grab whatever they can whenever they can. If they are severely neglected they die.
What if the opposite situation occurs? Our ego does not develop as well because we need an appropriate amount of frustration for self-development.

Its fun to imagine getting what we want like, imagining that we won the lottery. This imagining the object of our desire is pleasurable in itself, but only a little satisfying. This releases some tension but only a little. The Ego must test reality. It has to try things out. Little kids try stuff just to see how you will react and to figure out how it works. That in itself is rewarding. We even cathect the things we do to get what we want. We end up liking these too.

We are always a little frustrated because we never get everything we want.
The ego develops an integrated picture of the world and how we work in the world.
What if something bad happens, real trauma? For example, you get forcibly locked in a closet. What if we get nothing we want? The Id can break people down by withdrawing energy. The Id stops sending energy to the Ego. The Ego is unable to function. For example in combat people loose the capacity to be rational. For example, an injured soldier returned from Iraq and was offered two years of vocational training but chose six weeks of Big Rig school instead because he did not want any stress. Is this a rational decision? No.

The Ego is like a Ferengi. It will do anything to satisfy the Id, but we also have rules that we get from our parents.
Super Ego- or higher self- we end up getting more of what we want when we follow our parent’s rules. This is an abstract way of getting what we want. Morality works to get us more of what we want and this is the reason we adopt morality. The superego wants moralistic goals.

Morality Principle- Super ego inhibits the impulses of the Id. The super ego constructs the Ego Ideal – the way we should be as to particular acts or behaviors.
We get these ideas in symbolic form from our parents. They are not realistic. We only take them in when they work for us in some way.

Freud is building a model-like a physiological model of mind based upon the control of and outcome of energy.

Cephalocaudal Principle – we develop from top to bottom. Cephalo means head or brain. Caudal means tail. The head develops first and gradually there is a progression down the body with legs and back (nervous system) last.

Newborn babies are legally blind. They cannot hear, smell or taste well. They cannot control their bodies except for the reflex action involved in eating, blinking and head turning. What gives pleasure to little babies? Sucking. When a baby is trying to learn something the only part of their nervous system that functions well is their sensory feelings around their mouth. The lips and tongue are more accurate than their vision and touch.

In adults this is the opposite. For example, straight bar that is distorted to look curved under a lens actually feels curved. The human brain adjusts what we feel to what we are seeing. For instance in one experiment, speakers and stuffed owls were placed separately around a room. Owl sounds were played out of the speakers yet the participant’s vision adjusted the sound location to the owls. We make up a coherent picture of the world and all of our sensory information fit into it whether it actually fits of not. Babies do this with their lips and tongue.

Oral Stage – First Stage of Growth

Sexuality in the first part of life is mainly oral. This stage lasts from about birth to one year but is variable. The focal source of pleasure for newborns is in the mouth. This is a psychosexual stage. It is a stage in the development of mind, pleasure and sexuality so oral is our first form of sexuality. They like other pleasures but clearly oral is the focus, sucking and swallowing. Babies get frustrated so in the oral stage we begin to see the birth of the EGO. It is in this stage that babies figure out they can get adults to do what they want. They begin to have the capacity to act differently in order to get what they want from the environment. While the ego is not very strong or developed, it comes into being.

If people do not respond to the baby acting in various ways, having a sense of self and trying different things, this does not satisfy needs and the EGO doesn’t develop. Kids who are neglected like that often die. If they don’t die they are usually different than most people.

Anal Stage –Second Stage 1-2 till 3 years old.

The nervous system matures sufficiently so that we can tell when we need to defecate and we begin to have the capacity to control our bowels. This process takes a lot of practice. In this stage we are focused on the anus. Defecation is a great pleasure to children because it is both satisfying physiological needs and is physically pleasurable. First there is tension, then sensation as it comes out, and then there is a sense of relief. Pleasure, and all pleasure is sexual, is now focused on the anus.

Parents want the child to control their bowel movements. They want the child to wait. Children resent this; they do not like their pleasure interfered with. They are being asked to restrain the impulse to enjoy themselves.
The impulse is the ID and to restrain it needs a strong EGO. Now we see a strengthening of the EGO. It is born in the oral stage but it is weak. Now it grows strong. Now children need to constrain themselves to follow rules so in this stage we see the birth of the SUPER EGO. The basis of our morality has to do with feces. We have a strange connection in our minds of bad to dirty, but dirt is not bad. We associate words like dirty, shity and fecal as bad moralistic terms. Our minds have this connection despite the fact that logically they have no connection.

Phallic Stage For Boys- Third Stage 2-3 up to 5-6

Both boys and girls have fun playing with their genitals. Boys at two to three begin to like playing with their penis because their nervous system is sufficiently developed to make it pleasurable. Little boys love their mother. A boy wants to share his new toy with his mother to play. Mom is not interested and does not take him seriously. She laughs at him. This hurts and angers the child. Since the child is possessive and jealous of mom, he thinks that the reason this is happening is that there has to be someone else. Mom favors dad. Now dad becomes their rival in love. The boy now compares himself to dad but this is not a favorable comparison. Dad is a giant. The boy wants to kill dad. Since we believe relationships are reciprocal, if we want to kill or castrate dad, he must want to kill or castrate us. This is terrifying to the boy. This is all too much. The ego is unable to deal with it so it pushes the whole thing into unconsciousness at the age of 5-6, which heralds in the latency stage.

Latency Stage For Boys – Fourth stage 5-6 till puberty.

Sexuality is pushed into unconsciousness. Where does this energy go? It goes into becoming a man. Boys don’t like girls. The little boys EGO forms a long-term plan. He is going to become the ideal man. He internalizes at this point what the ideal man is like and puts all of his energy into being that. His long-range strategy is to grow up and marry a girl just like the girl who “married dear old dad” in order to get what he cannot get now. This involves giving a tremendous amount of energy to the SUPER EGO. The little boy internalized the male role out of his frustration because it was the only way he could think of to deal with it, but he then puts most of his energy into being whatever it is that he thinks will get him what he wants in the long range. He keeps it unconscious because it is too destructive to him. He has to keep those impulses under control. Six to nine year old boys don’t like girls. Boys then create blank spot in their memory. This is called childhood amnesia.

Childhood Amnesia – Repression of everything before latency because of the inability to handle thinking about it. It is pushed into sub consciousness. This is how we go from a polymorph perverse state in our sexuality to have a particular object choice. This also explains how we acquire morality. At this stage we begin to put a tremendous amount of energy into being the person we think we should. Morality is sexual in its origin.
Phallic Stage for Girls

What do little girls like? Two to three-year old girls love MOM. Around the age of three, girls discover their new toy, the clitoris. The clitoris is analogous to the penis. This is why Freud continued to refer to this as the Phallic Stage for girls as well. Little girls want to share their new toy with mom but mom is not interested. She thinks there must be someone else. Who else is there? It must be dad. The little girl now compares herself to dad. What does dad have that she doesn’t? Dad has a penis but she doesn’t. This is unfair. She cannot possibly compete!
Penis Envy-Little girls want a penis because this is what mom wants. Having a penis will
get them the power they need to get mom’s love.

Little girls think there must be something wrong with them because they do not have a penis. They think that maybe dad cut their penis off. Mom should have protected them from castration but she didn’t. Girls now feel betrayed by their mothers and injured by their fathers. Little girls begin to lack self-worth, feel inferior and bad about their bodies. This is all too much to handle so the little girls represses it.

Latency Stage for Girls

This stage begins around 5-6 years of age. Little girls redirect their energy into creating an idealized version of themselves to be like mom so that they can eventually attain mom’s love. They want to grow up and marry a man so that they can get the power (penis) to attain mother’s love. They will eventually have a child and in some sense become mother. Who do women want around when they have a baby? Mom! Why? Because this is the ultimate bonding; this is the fulfillment. The relationship with mom is what is important as well as the relationship with other women in general. This is all unconscious.

The difference between girls and boys is that girls are not afraid of being killed or injured by dad. They are already injured. Anxiety is much less for little girls than it is for boys and as a result they are not as completely repressed. For example, little girls can do boy things but little boys cannot do girls things. Boys can only enjoy things that fit very closely within the confines of their sex role understanding. Girls are much more flexible in their pleasure. Women can enjoy all kinds of sensory stimulation like bubble baths, flowers and sunsets but because men are so much more repressed, and so more narrowly able to appreciate things, they are much more constrained. This means they have more energy they have to direct into other things. They usually direct their energy into work or an activity that fits into their ideal of what being a man is. Women are less repressed and more able to experience many kinds of pleasures.

Note: Society is the reflection of our inner organization.

Note: No two people are the same and despite defining and describing this usual process, everyone goes through it in their own way. We each have our own internalizations, our own set of associations which nobody else does. If you look at the variations within people you will see how different things turn on different people. Any sexual relationship is extremely complex and unique to the individual. We can distinguish a general pattern but we should not believe that this is only thing. We are all unique.
Always remember that we start out polymorph perverse. We are all born with the capacity to be turned on by anything that feels good. What happens is that in this stage the idealized version people get is always a little off. We are always somewhat narrow and channeled often by random circumstances of our childhood. It doesn’t depend on the circumstances entirely, it’s on the way that the child internalizes an ideal of circumstances.

Latency lasts until puberty. The norm is the repression of overt sexuality and the pursuit of idealized sex roles with the ultimate goal of being someone worthy of marriage or relationship within the society.

Puberty

Genital maturity that comes with puberty brings increased energy and the ego can no longer keep sexual energy repressed. We now must incorporate adult sexuality into our ideal of sex roles that we formed in an unrealistic and immature way at the age of five or six. We must now reform and include actual sexuality in them. It is not just the role playing anymore, it is the real thing. It is extremely threatening to the person. One feels self-conscious and discombobulated in general; the ego does not know what to do with it and gradually has to work it out so the conscious self can include sexuality in the idealized version of self. This is a unique process; everybody does it a little differently. Although people usually end up heterosexual, it is infinitely variable. This is essentially the end point of personality development. The inclusion of sex in the idealized self in puberty is the end of most people’s development. After that it is acting out of these already organized things unless something really traumatic happens and those are understood in terms of previous organizations. Personality is mostly formed by about the age of five or six and undergoes moderate change in puberty, but after that, most people do not change in their basic formation of personality.


Genital Stage-This is the last stage. It is called the genital stage as opposed to the phallic stage because of full genital maturity the focus moves from the clitoris to the vagina. Little girls are not capable of full orgasms but mature women are. As adults we are focused on our genitals as the main source of sexual pleasure although Freud thinks that all the other sources are still lots of fun.

DEFENSE MECHANISMS

Defense mechanisms are the part of Freudian psychology that is in the most current use in clinical psychology. Many people who are not psychoanalytical oriented will describe mental processes in terms of these defense mechanisms.

This version of Freud’s defense mechanisms is based in his daughter Anna Freud’s description of them from her book, “The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense”.

Defense mechanisms imply both that there is something that is being defended against and that there is something doing the defending. It is the EGO that is defending its plans for the satisfaction of needs. The EGO is finding ways of dealing with the impulses that arise from the ID. It is restraining and finding something to do with the energy that arises from the desire. So when an impulse arises from the ID the energy has to go somewhere and almost all of psychoanalysis is a description of where that energy goes.

REPRESSION - This is the first part of ALL DEFENSE MECHANISMS. Repression is a pushing into the unconscious an impulse and the object of an impulse. We have a desire, having gone through our history of cathecting things, an image or an object that we want. When this is in some way disruptive to the plans of the ego, it pushes the energy into the unconscious and there it resides. It makes us uncomfortable. We often experience that discomfort as anxiety or tension. Suppose that energy is repressed. Where does it go? The other defense mechanisms are a description of how that energy is diverted and made to come out in different ways.

MAJOR DEFENSE MECHANISMS

Reaction formation – The energy is directed into behaving in exactly the opposite way from what you want. From Freud’s point of view it was frequently either sexual or hostile impulses.

Projection – You repress something, usually something morally objectionable, and put the energy into blaming somebody else for having that thought. This comes out frequently in the political arena.

Displacement – You repress the object and you redirect the desire towards something that you find acceptable. You switch to something that is less threatening to you.
The desire us there but you switch the object. For instance, you kick the dog instead of your boss.

Sublimation – You repress both the object and the impulse and the energy is directed towards something that bears no obvious resemblance to either the original impulse or the original object but it is associated in your mind with it. The energy is sublimated, displaced or removed in this way. This is the most important defense mechanism after repression. Most of creative work comes from a sublimating energy. Example: Michelangelo redirecting his homosexual energy into art.

Defense mechanisms are necessary and good things to occur because we would not have much of a society if everyone acted directly on their impulses: we would spend all of our time having sex. The creation of an organized society, which is capable of science in particular and also heart, are the highest of human goals. It is not only true of everyone that we engage in all of these defense mechanisms, but that it is a very good thing that we do. Otherwise society or civilization would not exist. In fact if you don’t sublimate enough, the culture does not progress. Freud said, “a healthy person is someone who can work and love”. So, there is nothing wrong with defense mechanisms as long as they enable you to work and love.

All scientific theories are ultimately wrong. There is no limit to the different way we can conceptualize things and everyway we conceptualize has both strengths and weaknesses. One should not think of things necessarily in terms of right or wrong, but in terms of how helpful it is in the situations in which we find ourselves, or how useful is it to understand things.

Einstein said that electricity is just an explanatory fiction. It is a story we made up to explain things. Theories let us predict things in useful ways, but they are not real, and no story works completely.

Einstein said, “Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and they are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.” He is saying that we just make these things up. They are just stories that we tell. They are science because they are stories that work. They let us predict things, usually in a quantifiable way, but no theory works completely. But, they work well enough.

Defense mechanisms are just a useful explanation of why people are acting in particular ways, but people are doing what they are doing and we are just trying to understand that. People have a compulsion to understand things that are important to them.


Minor Defense Mechanisms - These are considered defense mechanisms by some and not by others, but they are clearly mental things that occur, and are ways of dealing with stress and energy.

Identification – The identification or association of self with a person or thing that has what is wanted. There is a pleasure in that. We all want to have a sense of identity that connects with things or people who have what we want. It is a sense of connectedness. There is a vicarious satisfaction in believing you are connected with, or associating yourself as being, connected with things that have what you want. This is particularly true if you very much lack something. Sadly, some people more closely connect themselves with their abuser.

Regression- When the Ego is unable to satisfy the desires of the Id, often people return to previous satisfactions. It is returning to an earlier stage of functioning when the Ego is not capable of dealing with current situations. For example, when your boyfriend dumps you and you start smoking you are regressing to the oral stage. It is a coping with a current situation in an attempt to get pleasure from something we used to do, but it is substituting that kind of pleasure (oral) for the pleasure that we want (boyfriend) and believe that we are unable to get now. For some people regression lasts their whole life and for some it doesn’t. It depends on the strength, capacity, and flexibility of the Ego.

Rationalization – We recategorize something to make it acceptable, usually to our Super Ego. For example saying to yourself, “it’s not really stealing, they owe it to me”. We categorize something differently so that it is in some way acceptable to us.

Denial – Refusing to consciously recognize some portion of reality so you can act as if it isn’t true. You don’t know something is true, but on some unconscious level, you do know that it is true.

Mental Undoing – You imagine that things had taken a different course. That instead of what actually happened something different happened. Then you act as if that something different were actually true. For example, when someone dies and you imagine that they were still alive.

Frequently these are ways of avoiding depression but not necessarily. They are always ways of escaping anxiety.

Dreams - Freud said that his discoveries regarding dreams were the most important of his career. Freud called dreams the “the royal road to the unconscious”. The function of dreams is to protect sleep. Dreams are actually disguised wish fulfillments. We are imagining the object of our desire and the tension released in doing that is sufficient to keep us asleep at least if the dream work is successful. When we are asleep, the Ego and the Super Ego are less active and vigilant than usual and so things that we usually keep buried very deep in the unconscious come close to the surface. However the Ego is still there and what it does is disguises things. We only disguise dreams that the Ego cannot handle or things that interfere with the Ego’s functioning. We only engage in defense mechanisms when we need to. Even when horrible things happen in nightmares they are still wish fulfillments. They are ways of discharging energy. This is only a partial discharge of energy. We also engage in a very effective way of dreaming. Like all things dreams are over determined.

Over determination – Dreams have multiple causes.

Dreams seem unreal sometimes because the emotions are not right. Emotions almost always do not occur in dreams, but when we actually do experience an emotion in a dream, that emotion is “invariably a scream for its opposite”, or a disguise for the opposite emotion. There is no randomness in dreams. They are always serving a purpose.

__________________
Sarfraz Mayo

yar u have made a very good effort really....
excellent.keep it up.
wud u plz share some other material on psychology plz......?

__________________
Recite a Darood Shareef at least once and now.
(RAFIQUE AHMED KHOKHAR)

What type of material do u need? May be i can help???

__________________
The tragedy in life doesn't lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach.

yes madam i need help.i hv opted psychology.i m struggling in part 2.
i hv Adeela Hafeez's( 7th position holder last year) notes.so i wud also share u these.this wud be a mutual help if u r in islamabad as well.plz reply...

__________________
Recite a Darood Shareef at least once and now.
(RAFIQUE AHMED KHOKHAR)

@ from QAU,,,,,......So, u r doing Masters?? from Quiad-e-Azam university? I am sorry i may not help u.... because i m not as much experienced as u... i have just did my Bechelors..!! Sorry.... But these notes?? hmm thats great can u gve me a copy?? these are for Masters or for CSS prepration??

__________________
The tragedy in life doesn't lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach.

these r adeela's notes prepared for css.yes they r gud.but some topics hv bn confusing to me. y not dear i already said that i can share with u these notes.how may i gv u a copy of it?

__________________
Recite a Darood Shareef at least once and now.
(RAFIQUE AHMED KHOKHAR)

hey...i am appearing for CSS 2010 exam and psychology is one of my optionals...At the moment I am out of country but I'll be in Pakistan by the end of this year. I have a question I am preparing for psychology and I want to know where can I find the syllabus(there is a syllabus given on this forum but im not sure if its updated). This is my first attempt so I have no idea where to go ...so kindly, can you help me. Not only for psychology but for other subjects as well. I know what books I need but what topics do I have to prepare I have no idea. Please help me...and reply me as soon as you can.
Thanks

yes i can help u in psychology.u may meet me in islamabad.
feel free to meet me i wud love to help any1 serious and needy.
bus duaa karna yar zara muje k men b apke 7 kamyab ho jaon ache numbers men.

__________________
Recite a Darood Shareef at least once and now.
(RAFIQUE AHMED KHOKHAR)

Ok then.. so kind of u....U tell me the place u can hand over these notes to my Brother? He can pick them from u..
Thanks

__________________
The tragedy in life doesn't lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach.