freud Flashcards
Infantile Seduction
premature introduction of sexuality into the experience of the child is root cause of all neurosis.
memories must conceal an actual instance of seduction by the father.
theory abandoned in 1897
Infantile Sexuality
The impulses, fantasies, and conflicts that Freud uncovered beneath the neurotic symptoms of his patients derived not from external contamination, he now believed, but from the mind of the child itself.
Instinctual Drive
The mind an apparatus for discharging stimuli (external and internal) that impinge upon it.
The mind becomes structured so as to contain, control, and, if possible, discharge internal stimuli, which appear as a broad array of tensions arising from different body parts demanding activity to effect their discharge, Freud believed.
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Example: oral libido arises in the oral cavity (its source), creates a need for sucking activity (its aim), and becomes targeted toward and attached to something (generally external to the person) such as the breast (its object), which is required for satisfaction.
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Psychosexual stages
stages through which one or another body part and its accompanying libidinal activity assumes prominence: oral, anal, phallic, and genital.
The impulses of childhood sexuality in adulthood
Survive in adulthood disguised (neurotic symptoms) and undisguised (sexual perversions), Freud believed.
Under the best of circumstances they are channeled into sublimated, aim-inhibited forms of gratification. Many of the drive impulses are too objectionable to be allowed any gratification
great deal of adult functioning is constructed either to provide disguised forms of gratification or effective DEFENSES or, most often, complex combinations of gratification and defense.
Oedipus Complex
various elements of sexuality converge around the age of five or six in a genital organization, in which the component pregenital instincts (such as orality and anality) are subsumed under a genital hegemony. The aim of all the child’s desires becomes genital intercourse with the parent of the opposite sex. The parent of the same sex becomes a dangerous, feared rival.
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The coloration of the Oedipus complex for each child depends considerably on the course of the earlier, pregenital organizations.
EXAMPLE
For the child with a strong oral fixation, genitality will take on oral themes (sexuality becomes infused with dependency issues). For the child with a strong anal fixation, genitality will take on anal themes (sexuality is pervaded with images of domination and control).
Resolution of Oedipus Complex
resolved through through the threat of castration anxiety.
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EXAMPLE : A boy wants to remove the threat posed by his rival by castrating him, and assumes that his father will punish him in like fashion. It is only because of the threat of castration that the child’s oedipal ambitions are renounced.
Superego
a key component of which is the ego-ideal, as “the heir of the Oedipus complex” to account for the internalization of parental values that accompanies the resolution of the oedipal struggle and holds infantile sexuality in check.
What distinguishes ego psych from other lines of thought?
Freuds drive theory .
neurosis in structural model
result of a compromise-formation worked out unconsciously among these fundamentally antagonistic parties: the id, pressing to gratify infantile wishes; the superego, striving to prevent this morally forbidden gratification; and the ego, mediating among the claims of the id, the superego, and the outside world.
reaction formation
ego obscures unacceptable hostile impulses by transforming them into their opposite.
EXAMPLE: The angry person becomes overly nice, often insistently helpful, even suffocatingly kind; he may be regarded by many (including himself) as a pillar of the community.
obstacles to free association
As much as the patient tries to be cooperative in choosing to suspend ego attitudes and conscious objections for some period of time, unconscious defensive patterns and corresponding unconscious superego attitudes are always operating, outside the patient’s awareness and control.
isolation of affect (defense)
conflictual ideas are allowed into consciousness in an intellectualized form; the disturbing feelings associated with them are blocked. The ego may permit a flow of ideas that looks like “free” associations, but the ideas are separated from their corresponding feelings.
EXAMPLE: A patient might speak of intense sexual encounters, for example, but in a detached, dispassionate manner.
projection
thoughts, motivations, desires, and feelings that cannot be accepted as one’s own are dealt with by being placed in the outside world and attributed to someone else.
EXAMPLE: a patient might deny feelings of anger but be very sensitive to and preoccupied with angry feelings in others around her.
The patient might seem to be talking “freely,” but it is the impact of the unconscious defense as much as it is the impact of the instinctual pressure that shapes the verbalizations.
clinical goal before ego psychology
release of trapped, unconscious energies.
