FREUD, SIGMUND (Social Science)

1856-1939

The founder of the intellectual discipline and psychotherapeutic method known as psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud aimed to "throw light upon the unusual, abnormal, or pathological manifestations of the mind" by tracing them to the psychological forces that produced them (1936, p. 447). The odd manifestations he sought to illuminate ranged from the blatantly strange, such as neurotic symptoms, to deviations from strict rationality found in all people, such as those that occur in dreaming, mental lapses of waking life, such as slips of the tongue, or other special experiences, such as the feeling of "uncanniness." His inquiries also included ordinary experiences that defied straightforward explanation, such as the capacity of jokes to evoke laughter, and cultural trends that Freud believed exhibited properties of mental life he had identified in individual psychology, such as humans’ susceptibility to religion.

The psychological forces to which Freud traced these phenomena led inevitably, in his view, to childhood. Childhood has the influence it does, Freud maintained, because it affords a unique mode of experience that, on account of its distinctness from later developments of the mind, both produces lasting impressions on people and renders these impressions inaccessible to later consciousness. The most dramatic and best-known consequence of this dynamic is the operation after infancy of unconscious mentation, or ideas and impulses of which people remain unaware that nonetheless influence their behavior. Since the publication in 1900 of The Interpretation of Dreams,


Freud’s first major treatise on psychoanalysis, Freud’s ideas have indelibly altered both popular thought and a wide array of professional disciplines.

THE BIRTH OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

Freud was born in Frieberg, Moravia (now the Czech Republic) on May 6, 1856, and his family moved to Vienna three years later. During the 1890s, as a young doctor collaborating with Viennese physician Josef Breuer, he began treating nervous disorders through the use of a "talking cure," as he and Breuer called it. The method initially consisted of patients under hypnosis recalling memories associated with their symptoms. This recall, accompanied by the affect connected with the memories, resulted in the elimination of symptoms. An early patient treated in this way, one Anna O., for example, who presented with paralyses and an inability to drink that lacked any organic base, regained her ability to drink when she recalled with disgust a scene from her childhood in which she had discovered her governess’s dog drinking from a (human) cup.

On the basis of observations of this kind—reported with Breuer in Studies on Hysteria (1895)—Freud came to believe people are moved in part by mental forces unknown to them. The unconscious, as it came to be known, is composed mostly of thoughts and impressions people pushed from consciousness (or "repressed") when they were very young. The thoughts and impressions linger in the mind and, unable to discharge, remain on alert for opportunities for expression. When they reach expression, they usually appear in disguise, so as not to elicit fresh repressions. The resulting manifestations include psychopathological symptoms, dreams, lapses of (conscious) speech or action (which Freud called "para-praxes") such as slips of the tongue, and aspects of character, as well as a variety of ordinary individual and cultural experiences.

BASIC ASSUMPTIONS

Freud’s is a general psychological theory that attempts to explain why people think, feel, see, and do as they do. A systematic theory, it contains an integrated body of concepts and propositions from which other concepts and propositions follow. It builds from a small group of first principles, described by Freud as essential constituents of human thought and action that admit of no further reduction and yet account for all conceivable instances of human behavior. Based upon observation and reflection over the course of the forty-plus years spanned by his psychoanalytic writings, Freud eventually changed his ideas about these principles.

Initially, Freud believed all human behavior conforms to what he called the pleasure (or pleasure-unpleasure) principle. According to the pleasure principle, people always strive to avoid pain and, where possible, attain pleasure. Even behavior that appears inconsistent with this principle, such as the nightmare, must in some way conform to it. Freud theorized in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), for example, that nightmares serve to divert the dreamer from dangerous wishes whose fulfillment would produce frightening consequences. The fearsome content of the nightmare both embodies the dreamer’s perception of danger—such that, on occasion, the dreamer might awaken and thereby terminate the dream—and serves to disguise the wish.

Freud originally conceived the state of pleasure as a reduction in excitation, or tension, on the model of the reflex. Our reflexes, such as the eye-blink or knee-jerk reflex, function to rid the body of stimuli. Thus, at bottom, according to this initial conception, the function of the nervous system is to keep the level of stimulation in the body as low as possible, and pleasure is the consequence of the reduction. As happened with the governing principle itself, Freud changed his view of the nature of pleasure over the course of his writings.

Freud believed that early in their development, in order to survive, humans would have to have formed a reality principle subordinate to the pleasure principle. Although the hallucinated satisfaction of one’s needs, which would constitute the shortest path to their fulfillment, might produce pleasure in the short term, for example, it would lead to ultimate disappointment. Thus, Freud says in his "Formulations Regarding Two Principles in Mental Functioning" (1911), the mind had to "decide" to form a conception of circumstances in the real outer world, so as to be able to alter them and bring about real satisfaction.

Whereas the pleasure principle operates reflexively from birth, the reality principle develops over time in the individual, according to Freud, and likewise developed in the evolution of the species. The reality principle, in turn, would have prompted further developments of the mind, beyond reflexive, or direct wish-fulfilling, functioning. Attention would have given individuals the ability to search their environment for the results of their actions; memory would have given them a means of notating and storing the results; thought would have arisen as a kind of experimental action, allowing individuals to test the (real) consequences of their behavior.

Within the compass of the pleasure/reality principles, Freud distinguished instinct as the driving force of all action. Instinct, as he details in "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes" (1915), is a stimulus to the mind originating within the body that exerts a constant pressure, or "impetus" toward relief. Because instincts originate within the person and operate at a constant force, rather than originating externally and acting in a single impact, simple reflexive action, such as the withdrawal of the impacted portion of the body, has no effect against the impact. One needs instead to satisfy the instinct. When one’s stomach grinds with hunger, for example, one cannot eliminate the pain by withdrawing one’s stomach from any impinging force. One must eat or be fed. Because instincts require machinations more complicated than reflexive action to be discharged, Freud viewed them as important to the development of the nervous system beyond the primitive reflex.

Freud originally distinguished two classes of instincts, which he believed admit of no further reduction: the sexual instincts and the ego, or self-preservative, instincts. He defined sexual broadly, so that it includes, with respect to its physical quality, excitation to any portion of the body, including the skin, for example, as well as the oral, anal, and genital areas.

Psychologically, the sexual instincts subsume the entire field of erotic relations, including those relations "inhibited" in aim, such as friendships and parent-child relations, which entail positive and even excitatory feelings, but not, in the usual course of conscious life, an aim of genital satisfaction. In their most developed manifestation, the sexual instincts serve reproduction. The ego instincts, meanwhile, serve only the individual and have the individual’s safety as their object. In claiming that all human behavior emanates from one or the other of these two classes of instincts, Freud meant that all human impulses and actions remain compatible with one or both fields, not that all human impulses and actions can be reduced to a sex or survival drive. One’s labors on a mathematics problem reduce to a sex or survival drive no more than a sheet of paper reduces to the tree from which the paper was milled. Rather, according to Freud, all of our aspirations and behavior must be traceable in some way to the reflexive bundle from which we arose. The reflexive bundle, in turn, seeks, at bottom, to eliminate the tensions created by its needs, and thus to gain pleasure.

Approximately twenty years after he articulated the pleasure principle, Freud identified an apparent exception to the principle and suggested that a still more basic force operates in the mind. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) he argued that, in contrast with numerous other negative experiences that only appear to contradict the pleasure principle, the traumatic, and more specifically war, neuroses genuinely do so. These neuroses manifest in, among other symptoms, recurrent dreams in which dreamers return to the scene of previous near-death experiences and then awake in a terrible fright. For instance, soldiers returning from war relive attacks in the trenches, and survivors of train wrecks return to the wreck. Each then awakens in terror that no amount of repetition of the dream lessens.

Although Freud could detect no long- or short-term gain in the pattern, he conceded it could embody an attempt at a purpose. Extrapolating from his observation that traumatic neuroses tend to afflict those victims of trauma who did not incur a major injury, Freud surmised that, whereas direct physical insult tends to divert masses of energy to the site of the insult, victims who have escaped injury are left with rampant masses of energy released by the shock of the event. Wholly breached, the psychical system attempts to master the onslaught in retrospect, by generating anxiety that, had it been present during the traumatic event, would have reduced the shock of the event. But after the fact, the attempt serves no purpose. The system neither heals nor learns.

Freud extrapolated from these observations to the existence of a tendency more primordial than the pleasure principle and inherent in all organic life: the compulsion to repeat. The tendency can be witnessed, he believed, in behavior as primitive as the thumb sucking of human babies or the return of schools of fish to the site of previous spawning. In the psyche compromised by the war neuroses, the tendency manifests in a mechanical and almost diabolical repetition of a behavior, in total disregard of its impact upon the person.

From his extrapolation to the repetition compulsion, Freud made the admittedly speculative and far-fetched leap to the idea that all living things seek to return not only to previous states, but ultimately to their original state. Given that all living matter began as inorganic substance, all living things seek to return to an inorganic state; they seek to die.

Freud thus arrived at a new category of instinct, the death instinct, or "Thanatos," which he conceived as functioning in opposition to the life instincts, or "Eros." After equivocating briefly on the point, Freud subsumed under the life instincts the two classes of instinct he had originally delineated, the sexual and ego (self-preservative) instincts. Whereas the life instincts, especially as represented by the sexual instincts, seek to unify living matter and create more of it, the death instinct aims to dissolve it.

As Freud originally conceived it, the death instinct denotes the tendency of every living thing to drift toward a state of minimal, and ideally no, excitation. The death instinct of this formulation thus verges on the pleasure principle, according to which pleasure arises with a reduction in stimulation. Freud soon modified his view of the nature of pleasure, however, in a way that lessened this overlap. Although he continued to believe the nervous system functions, at bottom, to rid the organism of tension, and pleasure arises by this means, he acknowledged people’s potential to derive pleasure from an increase in stimulation, as occurs in sexual foreplay, for example. Thenceforth, he distinguished between the Nirvana principle, which expresses organisms’ tendency toward quiescence (and hence the death instinct), and the pleasure principle, which expresses the drive toward pleasure in all its forms, including excitatory ones, and which Freud attributed to the influence of the life instincts.

In the course of Freud’s later works, the death instinct assumes an increasingly active aspect and becomes almost synonymous with aggression. As early as his discussion in The Ego and the Id, published three years after Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud reasoned that individual organisms live long enough to combine with one another, rather than die off, because the death instinct must be neutralized in some way by the life instincts. It is diverted outward over the musculature, he proposed, in the form of aggression, which is eventually directed against others. However, in the wanton destruction he observed in two world wars, Freud perceived an aggressiveness totally divorced from erotic aims, and hence a sign of the ascendance of something close to a culture of pure death instinct. He concluded the 1931 edition of Civilization and Its Discontents with the question of whether Eros would rise again and prevail over humanity.

CONSEQUENCES OF THE ASSUMPTIONS

Many of the remaining portions of Freud’s theory follow from the foregoing primitives of mental life and particularly from the pleasure and reality principles, which Freud continued to believe dominate mental life even after he developed the scheme that incorporates the death instinct.

Meaning and Determinism One such result is the idea that all behavior, including the most apparently nonsensical, has a reason, or, as Freud says in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1917) with respect to psy-chopathological symptoms in particular, symptoms have a sense. Anna O.’s refusal to drink resulted from her (unconscious) disgust at her governess’s dog, according to Breuer and Freud. Given that people who feel revolted by something normally find it difficult to eat or drink, Anna O.’s behavior followed coherently from its source. Unlike healthy people who refuse food or drink because they feel revolted, however, Anna O. was unaware of both her disgust and its source. Therein lay her pathology. In conceiving dreams as wish fulfillments and parapraxes as products of concealed motives, Freud again followed the assumption that all behavior has a source and a sense. He believed it possible, moreover, for unconsciously motivated behavior, such as dreams, to have not just one source or one meaning, but to be "overdetermined," having multiple sources and meanings. Thus, for instance, the leering monster in a nightmare might embody both a child’s anger at a parent and the child’s fear of recriminations from the parent.

Freud admitted that some apparently odd behavior arises without apparent motivation. However, he found the occurrence of such behavior improbable. Freud noted in Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1909) that although some aberrations, such as slips of the tongue, might occur when people operate under fatigue or other stresses, the mistakes cannot be caused by these limitations, because other similar mistakes occur when people are fully attentive (p. 29). Further, precisely because numerous associative pathways lie open and can cause a person accidentally to utter one word instead of another (in the case of slips of the tongue), one needs to explain why a given pathway is chosen on a given occasion.

Conscious and Unconscious The separation between conscious and unconscious mental processes arises, according to Freud, primarily through the operation of repression, a reflexive and hence infantile response driven by the pleasure principle, in which individuals withdraw consciousness from painful or frightening impulses in the manner in which one might withdraw one’s hand from a hot stove. The pain can be caused either by the clash between impulse in itself and other motives the person may have, or by the individual’s anticipation of the external consequences of acting upon the impulse. The repressed impulse, or idea, remains in unconscious memory, sustained by its struggle for expression and at the same time denied that end by the forces that originally led to its repression. In the final chapter of Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud postulates a second, smaller category of inherited unconscious ideas. This category includes the most primitive embodiments of the instincts and impulses that, based upon an analysis of modern emotion, he concluded must have been passed along by earlier generations. The latter impulses include guilt for the killing of the primal father and a portion of the hostility that led to the presumed deed.

Freud reserved the term unconscious for these two groups of ideas, repressed unconscious ideas created by individual experience and inherited unconscious ideas, both of which are unavailable to consciousness at the moment and inaccessible to consciousness in general (except with extraordinary effort of the sort embodied by psychoanalysis). As detailed in his 1915 essay "The Unconscious," Freud distinguished as "preconscious" a separate category of ideas not apprehended by consciousness that, like one’s knowledge of one’s street address, one can access easily if prompted. Consciousness, within this scheme, is but a characteristic that can attach to mental processes. Freud likened it to a sensory organ that, in this case, illuminates ideation in progress. He attributed to language a primary role in allowing a mental process to become conscious.

Unconscious and conscious ideation exhibit different characteristics, Freud maintained, paralleling the divide between the pleasure principle, which dominates unconscious processes, and the reality principle, which operates only within conscious thought (for purposes of this discussion, preconscious thought is subsumed by conscious thought). Unconscious ideation observes primary process thought, wherein ideas are interconnected associatively one to the next, with no consideration for the whole. One idea may also replace another ("displacement") and several ideas may converge in a single embodiment ("condensation"). These methods produce dreams, symptoms, and other phenomena, such as jokes, to which Freud ascribed an unconscious contribution. Only conscious ideation incorporates secondary-process thought, which consists of the higher cognitive processes, such as judgment, reasoning, planned action, and the ordering of events in time.

It follows from the properties of the two types of thought that the unconscious admits of blatant contradiction. No feature of unconscious mentation can detect or feel troubled by incoherence. It also knows no denial. Thus, in one’s unconscious, one can both love and despise one’s mother, or both want freedom from one’s parents and want to be constrained and even punished by them. In waking life, normally, one would have difficulty tolerating these ambivalences and would probably repress one pole of the conflict.

Id, Ego, and Superego Freud eventually decided that the division of mental qualities into conscious, preconscious, and unconscious did not entirely capture the dynamics of the mind. In particular, unconsciousness appears to attach to mental formations other than those produced by repression that, nonetheless, arise on the basis of experience. In addition to finding their repressed memories elusive, patients undergoing psychoanalysis resist discovering the memories. Other forces in their mind must act to keep the repressed material from consciousness, Freud inferred, and these forces, too, lie outside awareness. Freud labeled these opposing forces as "resistances."

He developed a new scheme, which he expounds in The Ego and the Id (1923), to capture this mental dynamic. He now designated as "id" the portion of the mind containing repressed and inherited unconscious impulses. He defined as "ego" people’s efforts to avert danger, whether from internal (i.e., repressed) or external sources, and to maintain their bearings in the environment. The ego includes the resistances and thus has both a conscious and an unconscious portion. Freud designated a third entity, the "superego," which judges the ego. Although the superego resembles the ego in its judging role, it shares an unconscious and irrational element with the id, from which it derives.

According to Freud, the superego is the precipitate of the Oedipal complex. The Oedipal conflict, according to Freud, is a normal part of the development of every individual. All children desire more from their parents (or parent surrogates) early in life than the parents can give—at bottom, everyone wants total possession of them. Within this dynamic, children may form a preference for the parent of the opposite sex, although they yearn for both parents and experience the Oedipal conflict with respect to each. Thus, children harbor both love and hostility for each parent. Therefore, as Freud illustrates in Totem and Taboo (1913), ambivalence exists at the core of our emotional life. Eventually, children’s desires are frustrated and, in the interest of survival, subjected to repression, with the conflicts embodied by them left unresolved.

The end of the Oedipal period, at around five years of age, prompts individuation from the parents, and consequently their loss. The loss, in turn, prompts children to internalize the parents, which preserves their relationship with them. The internalization is accompanied by an exaggeration of the parents’ power, which results from children’s earlier repression of their own hostile feelings toward the parents. Emanating now from the internalized parents, the hostile feelings are turned back upon the sub-ject—the child—on whom they discharge more safely than they would have done if the child had unleashed the feelings against the real parents. In exchange, the now browbeaten ego suffers. The entire dynamic, according to Freud, explains much of both psychopathology and the psychology of healthy people.

The Concept of a Person Freud’s view of the person is represented by his three schemes for describing the mind. From the perspective of the motivating forces of our action—the pleasure principle and its derivatives—people universally seek, on some level, to avoid pain. In the interest of long-term gain, they may modify their claim to comfort and pleasure in the short term, as Freud discusses in an exegesis on happiness in Civilization and Its Discontents. From the perspective of the division of the mind into conscious (including preconscious) and unconscious, people are ruled by forces both known and unknown to them, and they are thus capable of acts and thoughts both consistent and inconsistent with the traits and values they may (consciously) consider central to their identity. From the perspective of Freud’s division of the mind into the dynamic entities of id, ego, and superego, both our behavior and our felt experience are colored by the deeply conflicting forces that confer our humanity upon us: our appetites and our drive for security and survival. In all three views, the person is a compilation of forces, defined by the interaction of dynamic parts. Freud did not distinguish more holistic entities such as the personality or the self.

The Concept of Illness The cause of (neurotic) illness, according to Freud, is unresolved and unconscious conflict, on account of which sufferers retreat into fantasy. Symptoms embody a fulfillment of the fantasies, distorted to escape recognition by the conscious mind. Healthy people struggle with the same conflicts as do neurotic people, and, like neurotic people, they form fantasies to improve upon a sometimes disappointing reality. However, whereas healthy people either find adaptive outlets for their fantasies or indulge them while otherwise going about their business, neurotics’ repressed impulses overwhelm their capacity for normal function.

Beginning with his earliest cases, Freud maintained that neurosis is caused specifically by the conflict between sexual and ego drives. Patients’ earliest sexual impulses lead to thoughts their self-protective inclinations regard as dangerous, and are thus subject to repression. Although Freud initially believed the forbidden thoughts traced back to actual experiences of seduction, he soon determined, as he noted in his 1909 "Rat Man" case history, that the impression or fantasy of such experiences can alone suffice to initiate pathogenic processes.

Therapy Psychoanalytic therapy presumes that, insofar as repressed complexes (conflicts) cause illness, the path to cure lies in the exposure of the repressed material to consciousness. Repressed complexes have the far-reaching effects they do because the cut-off ideas continue to strive for expression through an increasingly large web of associations. It follows, therefore, that one may recover the instigating ideas by undoing the web of associations. Thus, the "free association" of ideas forms the principal technique of therapy. Beginning with a symptom, dream, or passing thought, patients say whatever comes into their mind in connection with the symptom, and then whatever comes into their mind in connection with the new idea, and so on. Freud believed that all paths lead ultimately to the repressed complex or complexes, so that patients can start with any leading idea to begin to unravel the associative chain or chains.

As their associations veer progressively closer to the material under repression, patients find it increasingly difficult to pursue given lines of thought. Freud believed these experiences of "resistance" form an integral part of the therapeutic process. They provide a window on the forces that are keeping the repressed material hidden and, in becoming manifest, afford patients the means for defeating the forces and allowing the repressed ideas to reach consciousness, where they can be confronted. To defeat the resistances, patients need to express all associations that occur to them and combat the temptation to block them.

Because of the importance of uncovering and disarming the resistances to the achievement of a lasting cure, Freud abandoned the use of hypnosis in psychoanalysis. Although hypnosis might allow the freeing of repressed content in susceptible patients, in Freud’s experience it led mostly to only short-term cures. Patients’ resistances, still present, rose again and repressed the forbidden thoughts anew. Hypnosis carries the additional disadvantage that not everyone is susceptible to it, whereas the conscious talking cure via free association is open, in principle, to all.

Development The development of the mind, in Freud’s conception, follows three broad pathways. The first, within sexual (or as Freud called it, libidinal) development, consists of a progression from autoeroticism, wherein individuals achieve satisfaction diversely from the stimulation of parts of their body, to narcissism, during which individuals, now having gained a unifying seat of experience in the form of the ego, take themselves as the love object, and finally to the phase of (external) object love. Having initially distinguished only autoeroticism and object love as phases in this development, Freud interpolated the phase of narcissism when he found himself otherwise unable to account for the so-called narcissistic disorders of adulthood, such as schizophrenia, in which the ego seems to lose its boundaries. Another development in sexuality encompasses changes in the focus of sexual sensitivity in people from the oral to the anal and, finally, to the genital areas, respectively.

The second trend in development progresses from impulsive toward reflective thought. It is embodied by the development of secondary-process thought, wherein impulses can be inhibited and action tested and planned, and by the gradual replacement of repression by judgment as a means of dispatching painful impressions. It is expressed by the reality principle.

A third trend proceeds from more transparent to more complexly derived, and thus more obscure, behavior. Whereas the dreams of small children often express the unfulfilled (conscious) wishes of the previous day, for example, adults’ dreams contain bizarre and inscrutable ("manifest") imagery that must be painstakingly unpacked to uncover the instigating ("latent") dream thoughts. Whereas the motives of children’s sense of humor are clear, adults, who may laugh from similar motives, do not know what they are laughing at. Trends of these kinds arise, Freud believed, from both the separation of conscious and unconscious thought, which makes repression possible, and from the natural "surmounting" (as Freud describes it in his 1919 essay "The Uncanny") of one developmental stage by another. Regarding the latter process, when one stage succeeds another in development, both the mode of experience embodied by the earlier stage and the experiences accrued in it remain in the psyche. They continue to exert an influence there, though reshaped by the superim-position of later stages.

THE SCOPE OF FREUD’S WORK

After incorporating the three previously unlinked fields of dreams, neurotic symptoms, and parapraxes, Freud’s theory came to encompass phenomena as diverse as art, creative writing, the appreciation of beauty, the comic, morality, religion, superstition, the fate of social movements such as communism, and people’s disparagement of the transience of things. In these and other manifestations of human nature, Freud not only perceived the operation of unconscious thought, the contribution for which he is most widely known, but also speculated provocatively about the nature of phenomena that otherwise elude explanation. His commentary exposes the elusiveness.

Freud’s account of the comic in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), for instance, emphasizes the need for investigation to penetrate beyond the necessary and sufficient conditions of what makes something funny to the question of why laughing is what people do when an event meets these conditions. His brief remarks on beauty in Civilization and Its Discontents show the need for theory to reach beyond the delineation of the attributes of beautiful things to an account that explains the feeling that accompanies people’s perception of beauty. In his extensive, though scattered, treatment of morality, he labors to account for the compulsiveness of morality and the feelings that accompany moral sensibility, such as moral righteousness and moral indignation, as well as the scope and nature of moral rules.

In his short essay "On Transience" (1916), Freud both awakens the reader to the possibility that one could appreciate things more, rather than less, on account of their transience (for instance, they could better appreciate the beauty of spring because it will disappear), and provides an explanation of the common tendency instead toward the disparagement of transience. With respect to communism, which he considers in a longer discussion of the problem of aggression in society in Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud, who reserved judgment on the economic claims of the system, suggested its psychological premises are untenable. He believed that when human aggression is deprived of one of its essential tools, namely material property, it will find other outlets. In all of these and in other areas, Freud opened lines of inquiry that remain interesting and novel. Because of its vast reach and systematic base, Freud’s theory has profoundly influenced disciplines throughout the social sciences and humanities, as well as the arts. It has shaped the way human nature is viewed by scholar, practitioner, and layperson.

CRITICISM OF FREUD’S THEORY

Freud’s theory has been challenged since its inception, initially for its stipulation of unconscious mentation altogether, and later for its claims regarding the nature and influence of unconscious thought. Many believe Freud overinterpreted behavior. Experimental psychologists such as J. Allan Hobson and Daniel Schacter, for instance, maintain that parapraxes and dreams, respectively, may arise from normal features of cognitive process and brain function, rather than from unconscious motives. Likewise, critics suggest neurotic symptoms may reflect relatively superficial adaptations to faulty wiring or chemical imbalance, rather than deep-seated conflict.

Adolf Grunbaum and other commentators have questioned Freud’s characterization of psychoanalysis as a science on the grounds that the theory is not testable. For a theory to be testable, one needs to conceive limiting cases with respect to which the theory could be proved wrong, according to these authors. However, they continue, one cannot refute the claim that neurotic symptoms express repressed complexes or that dreams fulfill wishes (the dreams of traumatic neurosis, which Freud excepted, notwithstanding), because any given symptom might express a repressed complex and any given dream might fulfill a wish. One simply may not have uncovered the hidden material. It goes without saying that Freud’s more speculative claims, such as his stipulation of a death instinct, are dismissed by critical and even supportive discourse altogether. Psychoanalysis, as a means of cure, has been variously assailed as ineffective, subject to suggestion by the analyst, and unnecessarily costly to patients. In its standard form it involves multiple sessions per week and a highly trained practitioner.

Theorists who followed Freud, including his own disciples, subsequently modified his theory and the practice of psychoanalysis. Some, such as Carl Jung, reconceived the nature of the unconscious, while others, such as Melanie Klein, replaced drives or instincts with interpersonal ("object") relations as the pivot of the psyche. Others, such as Alfred Adler, placed relatively greater emphasis than Freud did on the ego, while lessening the emphasis on the sexual drives. In Freud’s wake, many varieties of talking therapy were created, some ultimately with little connection to the tenets of psychoanalysis, save the notion that people’s ways of thinking about their lives, cultivated by their previous experience, may taint their happiness more than do the external events that befall them. Diverse therapies also share the belief that giving expression to one’s concerns may both begin to lift the burden they impose and promote self-enlightenment.

Freud died on September 23, 1939, in England, where he lived for the last year of his life. The cause was mouth cancer, which had plagued him for many years. Since then, the controversies over the credibility of his theory and the promise of psychoanalytic treatment have continued. Regarding treatment, Freud established as an ideal the absence of suggestion, as Jonathan Lear notes. Conducted appropriately, psychoanalytic therapy has met with modest success. At the same time, no other type of therapy has proved universally effective. Regarding the credibility of the theory, Freud himself addressed many of the concerns raised by both his contemporary and subsequent critics. In numerous writings, for instance, he reviewed and rejected face-value accounts of the phenomena he addressed, and he made comparative assessments of the plausibility of competing psychoanalytic interpretations of behavior. In these exercises, he extrapolated to the predictions of competing claims and assessed their plausibility, given the data, as would befit any exercise in hypothesis-testing. He also stated, with respect to some claims, that he was following out the logic of an idea, rather than asserting testable claims. He claimed this, for instance, in the often-dismissed Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), regarding his ideas about the death instinct. Although it remains to be seen whether evidence and logic require hypotheses in the direction of Freud’s tenets, it is difficult to identify alternative theories that address, let alone attempt to explain, the quintessentially human phenomena Freud took as his central object.

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