Psychoanalysis began with Sigmund Freud but it increased in popularity through the work of Alfred Adler and Carl Jung. Both were originally close to Freud but later distanced by him for their adaptations to his theory. What was once a single theory became an expansive dynamic array of ideas and approaches.fff
After the big three (Freud, Adler & Jung), psychoanalysis was popularized and changed by a group of new thinkers. They were followers of Freud, initially, but modified his approach quite dramatically. Here are some of the prominent neo-Freudians.
Anna Freud (1895-1982)
Anna Freud was the youngest of Sigmund’s six children, and the only one to show an interest in his work. She began reading his books when she was 15 but didn’t decide to become an analyst until later. In her early twenties, Anna wanted to be analyzed but who could you go to when there’s no one better than your Dad? So, when she was 23, Sigmund (then in his early sixties) psychoanalyzed Anna.
After Sigmund’s death, Anna was the defender of the faith. She continued to promote his ideas but tended to emphasize ego more than her father had. Anna believed that repression was the main defense mechanism because acting on impulse can hurt you. But more than defending and modifying her father’s work, Anna Freud extended psychoanalytic ideas to children. She maintained that play time was normal, and showed children’s ability to adapt to reality. Children aren’t simply bundled of unconscious conflicts. They are adaptive and creative beings.
In a study she coauthored with Dorothy Burlingham, Anna showed that children look to their parents for cues on how to reaction to situations. During WWII bombing raids, British families were observed in air raid shelters. The children didn’t have instinctive reactions but looked to their mothers to see how she was reacting.
Anna Freud created a classification system to organize evaluations of children’s symptoms. Development was seen as a series of id-ego interactions, where children gain increased control of themselves. Her “diagnostic profile” was a formal assessment procedure that tracked developmental progress on six dimensions of change:
1. dependency to emotional self-reliance
2. sucking to rational eating
3. wetting and soiling to bladder and bowel control
4. irresponsibility to responsibility
5. play to work
6. egocentricity to companionship
Erik Erikson (1902-1994)
Although born in Frankfurt, Germany, Erikson’s parents were Danish. His father was Protestant and his mother Jewish. When Erik was in his 30s, he moved to the United States, becoming a citizen in 1936.
Erikson emphasized the impact of society on the ego, the continuity of the present and the past, and the importance of personal identity (an inner sense of uniqueness) and identity confusion. Erikson saw ego as a creative problem solver. The ego helps organize one’s personality, and synthesizes the conscious and unconscious experiences. It works toward effective performance, as well as avoiding anxiety.
The ego also develops strengths at each stage of development. According to Erikson, there are eight stages in all. The first 5 stages are comparable to Freud’s, including infancy (oral), muscular (anal), locomotor (genital), latency, and adolescence. In Erikson’s sixth stage, the young adult struggles with intimacy and the development of love. As an adult, the seventh stage which extends from the mid-twenties to age 65, people focus on caring for their children and being productive in their careers. Maturity, the eighth stage, included the development of wisdom and a struggle to turn the fear of death into integrated self.
These stages show how children try to understand and relate to the world. According to Erikson, development stages are epigenetic (upon emergence), sequential (occur only in one order) and hierarchical (personality becomes more complex). The behaviors from one stage don’t disappear when the next one starts but each stage has its own characteristic crisis and virtue. A crisis is a battle between opposites (trust vs. distrust). A virtue is what you acquire when you have mastered that stage (hope).
Here are the crises and virtues for Erikson’s stages:
1. Trust vs distrust: Hope
2. Autonomy vs shame-doubt: Will
3. Initiative vs guilt: Purpose
4. Industry vs inferiority: Competence
5. Ego identity vs role confusion: Fidelity
6. Intimacy vs isolation: Love
7. Generativity vs stagnation: Care
8. Ego integrity vs despair: Wisdom
In his later years, Erikson studied the Sioux Indians (S Dakota) and the Yurok salmon fishermen of northern California. He found the Sioux to be trusting and generous, while the Yurok were miserly and suspicious. According to Erikson, the difference in behavior was the result of their cultures.
Karen Horney (1885-1952)
Born in Hamburg, Germany on September 18, 1885, Horney did not study directly with Freud but was greatly influenced by his work. She received her MD from the University of Berlin in 1913, and moved to the US in 1932.
Horney’s writings do not form a systematic theory of psychology but show how Freud’s concepts were manipulated and expanded by his followers. Horney’s concept of basic anxiety embraces Freudian thought but extends its interpretive usefulness. For Horney, basic anxiety is feeling helpless and is a product of culturalization. Basic anxiety produces a drive for safety (security).
Horney emphasized needs, including the need for affection, approval, power, ambition and perfection. She divided these needs into 3 types of personality: toward people, against people, and away from people.
Erich Fromm (1900-1980)
Fromm’s loosely constructed theory of personality emphasized social influences and trends. Born in Frankfurt, Germany on March 23, 1900, Fromm received his Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg in 1922.
Fromm maintained that people are lonely, and seeking social contact. Basically a social animal, the greater independence one achieves, the greater loneliness is experienced. To counteract loneliness, people use myths, religions, and totalitarianism to bind themselves to each other. For Fromm, there are only two solutions to the problem: join with others in a spirit of love, or conform to society.
Fromm proposed five basic needs: relatedness (creating relationships), transcendence, rootedness (putting down roots), identity (uniqueness), and orientation (a consistent frame of reference).
According to Fromm, personality is composed of temperament (inherited. unchangeable characteristics) and character (which is learned). Individual character is developed within one’s environment and social character is a result of reaction to society.
Melatne Klein (1892-1960)
Klein was one of the founders of object relations theory. Although she believed aggression is an important and common force in children, Klein modified Freud’s drive theory. She maintained that drives are psychological forces (not biological) that seek people as their objects. That is, we are driven to interact with people, and to use those interactions to fulfill our needs.
According to this view, children construct an internal representation of people. These representations are rough estimates of reality. A young child doesn’t have to capacity to understand complex relationships, so they create simple images of the people in their world. Then, they apply these rules to real people (she’s like Mom; he’s like Uncle Fred).
This approach works well when you’re young but these early stereotypes make it hard to relate to people as they actually are. Because of these images, children are slow development realistic relationships with the world. They find it difficult to give up their unconscious fantasies; they prefer the fantasy that Mom is all good and Dad is a superhero. The truth is more difficult to accept. It’s harder to understand that Mom is good and sometimes mean, or that Dad can be dependable and strong yet not able to jump over tall buildings in a single bound.
Klein also believed that the superego developed before the Oedipal complex. Consequently, even young children can experience guilt, shame and complex emotions. To avoid the anxiety over mixed feelings (or aggressive impulses), children learn to separate their emotions from the target person (object). Objects tend to be good and feelings bad. This disconnect causes problems in later life.
In addition to traditional techniques (free association, analysis of defenses, etc.), she introduced innovative therapeutic interventions that are now considered standard practices. For example, Klein was the first to use play therapy. She had children play with toys, and used those sessions to get a better understanding of their drives and emotions.
Klein was strongly opinionated and a forceful advocate for her point of view. She was part of an on-going battle of words that threatened to destroy the British Psychoanalytical Society. Some of the conflict was over how to discover and interpret a child’s ego defenses. But much of the drama was not about the use of fantasy, projection and regression. It was a battle of personalities. It was the battle of giants: Melanie Klein vs. Anna Freud.
In this corner, was Melanie Klein: the first to apply psychoanalysis to children (beating out Anna Freud by four years). Klein was a radical, daring to challenge the ideas of Sigmund Freud. And in this corner, there was Anna Freud: youngest daughter of Sigmund Freud and heir to the Freud legacy and upholder of classical psychoanalysis. Joining Anna Freud group was Melitta Schmideberg, Melanie Klein’s daughter (with whom she never reconciled).
Each camp offered a training program, and held that their approach alone should be the official training program of the organization. More than that, each wanted the other expelled from the society.
The winner? Actually, the winner was a third group: the independents, whose primary concern was compromise. In the end, the Society did what all organization do: they solved the issue politically. Each side was asked to make formal presentations of their theories. A panel listened to all concerned and decided the Society would offer both training programs. A simple solution that only took 5 years to reach.
Mind Map
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Notes
Anna Freud (1895-1982)
Emphasized repression as main defense mechanism (acting on impulse can hurt you)
Emphasized ego
Defend your ego by separating ideas and feelings,
Projection (putting your feelings onto someone else),
Self aggressive behavior (suicide is an extreme example).
Play is normal; shows child’s adaptation to reality; not necessarily revels unconscious conflicts
Application of psychoanalysis to new areas
Study of children (coauthor: Dorothy Burlingham)
Showed children’s reaction to combat (impact of bombing raids on British children)
Not instinctive reaction; look to mother for her reaction
Emphasis on protective, supportive and educational attitudes
Personality comes out of a developmental sequence
Produced a classification system of childhood symptoms;
Created the “diagnostic profile” (a formal assessment procedure)
Developmental lines = series of id-ego interactions; children decrease dependence on external controls
1. dependency to emotional self-reliance
2. sucking to rational eating
3. wetting and soiling to bladder and bowel control
4. irresponsibility to responsibility
5. play to work
6. egocentricity to companionship
Ego must become aware of the defenses it is using (can infer them from behavior)
Analysis of defenses permits one to understand the child’s life history
Importance of paying attention to patient’s maturation level
Developed a concept of normality for the adolescent period
Period of disharmony but the crisis is “normative” and functional
Clarified which types of acting out are normal and which aren’t
Believed there are realistic limits to psychoanalysis
Wrote on the process of identification with the aggressor
(victim reacts with gratitude and admiration)
Erik Homburger Erikson (1902-1994)
Life
No college degree; in Vienna, started a progressive, non-graded, Montessori style school
Invited by Anna Freud to be analyzed by her and become a child analyst
Coined “identity crisis”
Ego
A creative problem solver; gives coherence to experiences (conscious and unconscious)
Maintains effective performance (not just avoid anxiety); has adaptive defenses
Organizing capacity (can reconcile discontinuities and ambiguities)
Develops strengths at each stage of development
Elaborated on Feud’s stages (added a social dimension)
Psychosocial stage characteristics
Children try to understand and relate to the world
An emotional polarity or specific conflict
Epigenetic (upon emergence)
Sequential, hierarchical, personality becomes more complex
Personal timetable; not strict time periods but there are critical periods
Behaviors from 1 stage don’t disappear when the next starts
Each has its own “life crisis” and virtue
8 stages
1. Trust vs distrust: Hope
if unresolved, perceive world as indifferent or hostile
not fully resolved in 1st year of life
2. Autonomy vs shame-doubt: Will
must become self-willed and take chances with trust
negativism of 2 yr. old (No) = attempt to autonomy
3. Initiative vs guilt: Purpose
preschoolers: ask why
begin to image goals can reach; language more polished; engage in projects
Oedipus complex (called it generational complex)
4. Industry vs inferiority: Competence
focus moves to the ego
conscious of doing superior or inferior work; industriousness = make something well
5. Ego identity vs role confusion: Fidelity
faithful to an ideological point of view
question way life is; begin to reconstruct roles and skills into a mature sense of identity
role confusion = unable to conceive self as productive member of society
confusion of values (important to give kids ideals they can share enthusiastically)
identify crisis = failure to establish stable identity
negative identity = opposed to dominant values of their upbringing
6. Intimacy vs isolation: Love
overcome the fear of ego loss; form a close affiliation with another
7. Generativity vs stagnation: Care
parenthood is one way to express generativity; ability to be productive and creative
if don’t have kids, work with other people’s kids or help create a better world for them
importance of procreative desires of human beings
8. Ego integrity vs despair: Wisdom
ability to reflect on one’s life with satisfaction even if all dreams weren’t met
Emphasized life span; impact of culture, society and history on developing personality
Wrote psycho-historical studies of famous people
Karen Horney (1885-1952)
1st to challenge Freud’s ideas about women
Anxiety is the basis of human condition
created by social forces
not by human predicament
Basic Evil = all of the negative factors in the environment
domination, isolation, overprotection
Children’s fears may be objectively unrealistic but for them they are real.
Essential for healthy personality development that they feel safe and secure
Significance of early relationships in their totality
Oedipus complex: parents not responding with pride & empathy to growth of their children.
We use strategies to deal with or minimize feelings of anxiety.
Neurotic needs or trends = exaggerated or inappropriate strivings
Neurotic trends are the result of the formative experiences that create basic anxiety.
10 different neurotic needs
Exaggerated need for affection and approval
Need for dominant partner
Exaggerated need for power
Need to exploit others
Exaggerated need for social recognition or prestige
Exaggerated need for personal admiration
Exaggerated ambition for personal achievement
Need to restrict one’s life within narrow boundaries
Exaggerated need for self-sufficiency and independence
Need for perfection and unassailability
3 types of coping strategies
moving toward (compliance)
moving against (hostility)
moving away (detachment)
3 basic orientations, respectively
self-effacing solutions (appeal to be loved)
self expansive solution (attempt at mastery)
resignation solution (desire to be free of others)
2 types of self
real self = things that are true about us
idealized self = what should be
similar to Freud’s concept of the ego-ideal
a special need of the individual to keep up appearances of perfection
Neurotics are governed by the Tyranny of the Should
Feminine Psychology
Men and women develop fantasies in their efforts to copy with the Oedipal situation
Womb envy (serious or tongue-in-cheek?)
Jealous over women’s ability to bear and nurse children
Shown in rituals of taboo, isolation & cleansing associated with menstruation & childbirth
Need to disparage women
Accuse them of witchcraft
Belittle their achievements
Deny them equal rights
Womb envy and penis envy are compliments
Men and women have an impulse to be creative and productive
Natural need
Women satisfy this need internally and externally
Men can satisfy their need only externally through accomplishments in the external world
“Flight from womenhood” can be observed in society
Inhibit women’s femininity; they become frigid
Women distrust men and rebuff their advances but wish they were male
Sexual unresponsiveness is not the normal attitude of women
Essence of being a women lies in motherhood
Defined feminine self in terms of women’s own self, not her relationship with a man
Women should reach freedom from inner bondage
We engage in self-analysis when we try to account for the motive behind our behaviors.
4 prerequisites for good decision making
be aware of our real feelings
create our own set of values
make a deliberate choice between 2 opposite possibilities
take responsibility for the decision we make
Emphasis on an individual’s current situation rather than on the past
Erich Fromm (1900-1980)
Combined Freud and Marx
Freedom is a basic human condition
To be human is to be isolated and lonely
one is distinct from nature and others
loneliness represent basic human condition
separates humans from animal nature
Know we going to die, so we have a feeling of despair
3 escape mechanisms
1. Authoritarianism
domination
permit other to dominate or seem to dominate and control others
2. Destructiveness
elimination of others or outside world
3. Automaton conformity
cease to be themselves
adopt the type of personality preferred by their culture
“the loss of the self”
Escape mechanisms are forces in normal people
5 Basic Needs
relatedness
transcendence
rootedness
sense of identity
frame of orientation & object of devotion
Later added “excitation and stimulation”
Our primary drive is toward the affirmation of life
In a capitalistic society, acquiring money is a means of establishing a sense of identify
In an authoritarian society, identifying with the leader or state provide a sense of identify
We create society to fulfill our needs but the society we create limits our need being met
Character is determined by culture and its objectives
authoritarian ethics have their source in a conscience that is rooted outside the individual
humanistic ethics represent true virtue in the sense of the unfolding of a person’s powers
biophilous character = seek to live life
necrophilous character = attracted to what is dead and decaying and seeks to destroy life
Malignant forms of aggression can be reduced when socioeconomic conditions changed
Productive love is an art; productive love is the true creative answer to human loneliness
symbiotic relationships are immature or pseudo forms of love
1976, added two basic modes or orientations
having mode = relies on the possessions that a person has
being mode = fact of existence
Everyone is capable of both having and being modes but society determines which prevails
Field study of a Mexican village; Michael Maccoby (coauthored it)
landowners (productive-hoarding);
poor workers (unproductive-receptive);
business group (productive-exploitative)
Object Relations
Intrapsychic experience of early relationships with others
Babies+ relate to individuals and form attachments
Relationship between intrapsychic dynamics and interpersonal relationships
Melanie Klein (1882-1960)
British, competitor of Anna Freud; modified Freud’s drive theory
Drives are psychological forces that seek people as their objects
Children
construct an internal representation of people
apply that representation to real people
project them onto real people
she’s like Mom; he’s like Uncle Fred
those early stereotypes make it hard to relate to people as they are
Split objects & feelings into good-bad aspects because anxiety over aggressive impulses
objects are good
feelings are bad
Emphasized
1. interaction of unconscious fantasies and real experiences
2. children are slow development realistic relationships with the world
Margaret Mahler (1897-1985)
psychological birth
begins with symbiotic fusion of child and mother
emerges as separate individual
unfolding process
separation = physical differentiation
individuation = psychological growth toward own identity
2 forerunner phases (move from narcissism to recognition of the external world)
1. normal autism
2. normal symbiosis
4 stages of the separation-individuation process
1. body image (5-9 months)
2. practicing (10-14 months)
perfecting motor abilities
developing physical independence
3. rapprochement (14-24 months)
increased awareness of separateness from mother
conflict: urge to separate and fear of loss
can see it when absent from mother
recognize mother has good and bad aspects
4. consolidation (2-3 years)
unification of the good and bad mother
beginnings of child’s own individuality; separate personhood
development of a self concept based on the a stable sense of “me”
Normal healthy infants have drive for and towards individuation
2 realities
1. importance of interpersonal dynamics
2. unconscious reality
Compared severely disturbed and normal children
Ego passes through stages
separation-individuation process
begins about 4th month; forms stable self concept by 3rd yr.
Criticism
no reciprocity (mother as separate person as well)
babies more hard-wired than Mahler thought
Heinz Kohut (1913-1981)
Extended Margaret Mahler’s observations
Importance of child-mother relationships
Self theory
Narcissism
individual fails to develop an independent sense of self
exaggerated sense of self-importance and self-involvement
behaviors hide a fragile sense of self worth
narcissism isn’t at just one stage
gradually unfolds
permeates the entire life span
leads to a distorted sense of self; from a failure in parental empathy
children need to be mirrored (talk acknowledged & accomplishments praised)
looking for an idealized parent substitute that can never be found
In ideal development, nuclear self emerges in 2nd year
bipolar self creates a tension arc, fosters development of early skills and talents
subsequent goals
The ideal autonomous self has qualities of self-esteem and self-confidence
shows lack of dependency on others
Narcissistic disorder
recurrent self-absorption
low self-esteem
unimportant physical complaints
chronic sense of emptiness
addictions
a futile attempt to repair development deficits in the self”
cult membership
Therapy
psychoanalysis can’t help unless therapist deals first with the narcissistic disorder
imagine you’re “into the clients’ skin”
cultivate feelings of being understood
use empathy and introspection (not free association and suspended attention)
when children develop normally, Oedipus complex may be a joyful experience
Otto Kernberg (1928-)
Narcissistic disorder
parents who were indifferent, cold, subtly hostile and vengeful
exaggerated self-images
insatiable need for approval from other people
the result of drives not neutralized
Borderline personality disorders
unable to engage in introspection or develop insight
strong mood swings
see significant others as all good or all bad
on the border between functioning adequately and lapsing into psychotic episodes
diagnose on causal description of early historical relationships
Splitting
introduced the concept
failing to consolidate positive and negative experiences
swing back and forth between conflicting images
you are either good or bad
Treatment
“expressive psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy”
face to face, intensive session, 3+ times per week, stress current behavior
complete transference is not permitted
don’t resolve transference by interpretation alone
directly state distortions
feelings are psychophysiological structures
evolved to assist in surviving
building blocks of drives
aggression is a major motivating force
Terms
- authoritarian ethics
- authoritarianism
- automaton conformity
- basic evil
- basic needs
- basic orientations
- being mode
- biophilous character
- body image
- borderline personality disorder
- care
- character
- competence
- conflict
- consolidation
- coping strategies
- destructiveness
- developmental lines
- epigenetic
- escape mechanisms
- fidelity
- flight from womanhood
- generativity
- having mode
- hope
- humanistic ethics
- idealized self
- identity crisis
- Individuation
- Industriousness
- internal representation
- interpersonal dynamics
- Intrapsychic
- life crisis
- loneliness
- loss of the self
- love
- moving against
- moving away
- moving toward
- narcissism
- necrophilous character
- negative identity
- neurotic needs
- neurotic trends
- normal autism
- normal symbiosis
- object relations
- practicing
- productive love
- productive-exploitative
- productive-hoarding
- psychological birth
- purpose
- rapprochement
- real self
- relatedness
- resignation solution
- role confusion
- rootedness
- self expansive solution
- self-effacing solution
- sense of identity
- separation
- separation-individuation process
- splitting
- transcendence
- tyranny of should
- unconscious reality
- unproductive-receptive
- virtue
- will
- wisdom
- womb envy
Quiz
Horney says people suffer from a(n):
- a. negative punishment
- b. tyranny of should
- c. identify crisis
- d. primal fear
2. Which emphasizes forming relationships with people, stuffed animals, food, drugs and other significant targets:
- a. operant conditining
- b. object relations
- c. productive love
- d. body image
3. Who proposed six developmental lines:
- a. Karen Horney
- b. Anna Freud
- c. Skinner
- d. May
4. Fromm suggest people use myths, religion and totalitarianism to counteract:
- a. negative reinforcement
- b. childhood trauma
- c. consolidation
- d. loneliness
5. In contrast to Freud, Erikson proposed a:
- a. non-hierarchy of stages
- b. reordering of stages
- c. virtue at each stage
- d. primordial stage
1. Horney says people suffer from a(n):
- a. negative punishment
- b. tyranny of should
- c. identify crisis
- d. primal fear
2. Which emphasizes forming relationships with people, stuffed animals, food, drugs and other significant targets:
- a. operant conditining
- b. object relations
- c. productive love
- d. body image
3. Who proposed six developmental lines:
- a. Karen Horney
- b. Anna Freud
- c. Skinner
- d. May
4. Fromm suggest people use myths, religion and totalitarianism to counteract:
- a. negative reinforcement
- b. childhood trauma
- c. consolidation
- d. loneliness
5. In contrast to Freud, Erikson proposed a:
- a. non-hierarchy of stages
- b. reordering of stages
- c. virtue at each stage
- d. primordial stage
Summary
Bonus
