Ethics: Conscience - Freud

Question 1

What is the Id?

Answer 1

• Unconscious
• Primitive - basic desires and needs
• Seeks immediate gratification in the Pleasure principle: left to its own devices we would seek to gratify all of our desires immediately such as eating, sleeping, having sex, taking drugs.

Question 2

What is the Ego?

Answer 2

• Conscious, rational, makes decisions
• Must balance both the id and Superego

Question 3

What analogy does Freud give to explain the Ego and Id?

Answer 3

the horse and its rider to explain the relationship between the id and the ego. The rider (the ego) manages and guides the horse (the id)

Question 4

What is the superego?

Answer 4

• Unconscious internalised standards of right and wrong
• Works with the ego to police the Id
• Internalised voice of authority

Question 5

What factors influence the Superego - what forms the superego?

Answer 5

Parents praise their children when they fulfil rules and this leads to a sense of pride, affirmation and approval. They also punish and rebuke when the children fail to live up to the rules which leads to guilt and shame for bad actions.

Question 6

What is the cultural Superego?

Answer 6

The superego dominated by society

Question 7

How does the superego affect a person?

Answer 7

The more a person is dominated by the superego the more they will not wish to break rules and the more they will want to please external authorities. If they do act on their wishes and desires they will feel guilty and develop neurosis.

Question 8

What causes shame and neurosis?

Answer 8

When someone has an internalisation of an externally imposed authority from society and parents. and they break these rules they have internalised, they will experience shame and neurosis.

Question 9

What is conscience a term used to describe?

Answer 9

Conscience is not a term used for discerning the moral thing to do but is a term used for guilty feelings caused by the superego

Question 10

Explain what happened with Paul Gascoigne and how it links to the superego

Answer 10

Child killed in his care when Paul was about 12 years old. After that he developed neurotic symptoms because of repressed guilt- ( superego at work) so could support Freud’s idea that we repress guilt and the superego is internalised guilt

Question 11

Example of how religion imposes authoritative rules on people, who feel shame when breaking them

Answer 11

The Catholic church - if a woman wants a divorce, yet will feel guilty about this, as it is not allowed

Question 12

Explain the background to the Oedipus complex

Answer 12

• Oedipus rex accidentally kills his father and then marries his mother
• In order to alleviate this guilt, Oedipus worships a totem or godly father figure - completes religious rituals for the father, and needs to obey the rules of the father figure / God

Question 13

Why does Freud believe the story of Oedipus rex is popular?

Answer 13

Because it bears witness to an experience that all humans have in early childhood.

Question 14

Why does Freud believe religion is popular?

Answer 14

it helped to alleviate the feelings of guilt left over from the Oedipus complex e.g confession in the Catholic church helps to alleviate guilt

Question 15

Why do people behave morally?

Answer 15

try to overcome the guilt left over from the Oedipus complex. This is connected to the superego because we feel guilt which is repressed in the same way as Oedipus and all of us feel guilt due to erotic attachment to one parent and pushing away the other.

Question 16

Explain Freud’s theory of erotic attachment.

Answer 16

From three to five years old, the child experiences erotic attachment to one parent and hostility toward the other. They want to push the other away. The desire has to be repressed. This leaves the child feeling guilty and angry. This is all subconscious. The child would not be aware of it. However, Freud believed that most mental disorders find their roots in this stage of development.

Question 17

Where does the Electra complex come from?

Answer 17

Greek Myth. Electra, the daughter of the king Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, sought to avenge her father’s murder by persuading her brother Orestes to help her kill her mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus

Question 18

What does the Electra complex explain?

Answer 18

Why girls have an attraction to their fathers

Yet, in 1931, Freud went further in denying that the Electra complex exists at all,

Question 19

Explain the Oral stage

Answer 19

Birth - 1.5 years old
Babies breastfeed, and explore the world by putting things in their mouth.
Failure to develop properly during this stage can lead to smoking or overeating.

Question 20

Explain the Anal stage

Answer 20

1.5 - 3 years old
The ego develops at this time and pleasure is gained through exercising self-control over going to the toilet.
Those who overly-control become a control freak, those who do not learn to control enough become messy.

Question 21

Explain the Phallic stage

Answer 21

3 - 6 years old
Children become aware of their genitals and their gender.
Oedipus and Electra complex develops – jealousy of the parent of the same sex for the time and attention they take from the parent of opposite same sex.
Problems moving through this stage cause intimacy issues later in life.

Question 22

Explain the Latency stage

Answer 22

6 - puberty
Sexual desire develops and is repressed. Gender roles are learned.

Question 23

How do Mackie and Sumner support Freud?

Answer 23

We feel guilt over different moral ideas because our upbringings are different and we live in different societies where we are punished by society if we break the rules.

Moral relativism supports the cultural superego

Question 24

Who else supports the idea that guilt is subjective to peoples experiences?

Answer 24

Protagoras - ‘a man is a sum of his experiences’ this shows that people are unique to their circumstances, so the fact that different people feel guilt over different things makes sense.

Question 25

What evidence is there for Freud’s ‘internalised voice of reason’?

Answer 25

• Role of our parents in our upbringing + modern psychology
  —>transactional psychology looks at parent/child relationships acknowledges the role of parents in our moral guilt.
• Idea of attachment theory between parents and children –> explains to some extent why children internalise the standards of their parents - they cannot form a separate standard of morality for themselves because they have attachment to their parents when young.

Question 26

What does John Bowlby say?

Answer 26

Supports idea of attachment theory - he is a modern psychologist who works with it.

Question 27

How does Darwin support Freud?

Answer 27

Primal hordes explains the beginning of a guilt conscience:
This was a group of people centred around a male figure who has a claim over the females. Over time the younger men resent this and gather to kill the father. They have mixed feelings-hatred and veneration, this leads to religious worship which alleviates the guilt they feel after killing him.

Question 28

What is the Wolf Man case study and how does it support Freud?

Answer 28

A young man who had a fear of animals. This was from his a time when he witnessed a sexual act between his parents at a young age. The repressed trauma from this led to fear of wolves and God. Hence people obey God’s rules and feel guilty if they displease God - the superego at work

Question 29

Who was Little Hans and how did this support Freud?

Answer 29

Little Hans was focused on the genitals of the horse and his fear of these was really a symbolic representation of the fear of his father . The horse also had black around its eyes and blinkers on and the black represented his father’s dark eyes and the blinkers his glasses. This suggests that for Freud the boy was attached to his mother and jealous of his father’s love for his mother
–> Oedipus complex

Question 30

Explain Moral awareness

Answer 30

The process of moral awareness (the formation and interaction of the ego, superego and id) and how we know our morals. He took this seriously and it has subsequently led many psychologists such as Erich Fromm and Piaget to develop this area.

Question 31

What example is given to support the idea that people follow authority figures out of fear?

Answer 31

the Third Reich whereby Jews were shot if they disobeyed orders. This was an immature Conscience at work. He concluded that it is possible to develop a Humanistic conscience whereby we move away from this sort of obedience and think for ourselves because we have free will and a drive for self actualisation. We have the ability to judge and evaluate our own behaviour making us the judge of morality.

Question 32

How does Freud show that guilt is universal and a result of sexual childhood trauma?

Answer 32

Sons are sexually attracted to their mothers and jealous of their fathers. In Oedipus he killed his father and then suffered from repressed guilt because of the rivalry that he feels for the father. Freud claimed that this guilt was alleviated through the worship of a totem/godly father figure and religious rituals such as penance before the Father. Also, a need to obey the religious rules of the father/God. This was the guilty conscience at work.

Question 33

Criticism of Freud: Case study groups

Answer 33

• very limited number of case studies.
• His theories were based on limited observations from primarily upper-class Austrian women living in a strict era of the 1900s.
• This may not be representative of the majority of humans.

Question 34

How does Palmer criticise Freud?

Answer 34

He states that almost all his evidence has been discredited in one way or another
—> e.g. Primal hordes

Question 35

How does Malinowski criticise Freud?

Answer 35

In his book “Sex and repression in Savage Society” tribes such as the Trobriand tribe did not have a strong father figure, rather the father plays the role of a weak nurse. Their religion came from elsewhere and therefore the conscience also cannot be explained by the Oedipus Complex.

Question 36

How does the rules of the animal world criticise Freud?

Answer 36

The mother and father are supportive. They do not do anything to encourage rivalry and hatred. This would mean that males have not felt rivalry feelings to their fathers and then alleviated the feelings of guilt through the rituals of religion. This cannot therefore explain the conscience-superego.

Question 37

Criticism of Freud: Other origins of guilt

Answer 37

He cannot prove that the superego does come from society and authority figures. It may come from elsewhere. Conscience may well have an objective source of morality, a God who directs our moral awareness
e.g. Aquinas / Augustine

Question 38

Who was Piaget?

Answer 38

A contemporary psychologist who developed better empirical methods of experiment than Freud but came to similar conclusions, so can thus be seen to defend Freud to some degree from the accusation of being unscientific.

Question 39

How does Piaget support Freud?

Answer 39

He studied the development of children and argued that there occurs a fundamental shift in the nature of ‘conscience’. Before the age of 11 children have what he called heteronomous morality. This means they merely associate actions as bad because of the influence of their authority figures like parents.
—> e.g. 8yo runs into road, is told off and doesn’t do it again - not because they know they could be injured, but because they were told not to.