Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Sigmund Freud

« his career, regarded neurotic symptoms as the result of the repression of sexual impulses during child¬hood, andsaw neurotic characters as fixated at an early stage of their development.Freud attached great importance to the onset of the phallic stage.

At that time, he believed, a boy was sexuallyattracted to his mother, and began to resent his father's possession of her.

But his hostility to his father leads tofear that his father will retaliate by castrating him.

So the boy abandons his sexual designs on his mother, andgradually identifies with his father.

This was the Oedipus complex, a central stage in the emotional development inevery boy, and also, in a modified and never fully worked out version, of every girl.

The recovery of Oedipal wishes,and the history of their repression, became an important part of every analysis.Towards the end of his life, Freud replaced the earlier dichotomy of conscious and unconscious with a threefoldscheme of the mind.

‘The mental apparatus,' he wrote, ‘is composed of an id which is the repository of theinstinctual impulses, of an ego which is the most superficial portion of the id and one which has been modified bythe influence of the external world, and of a superego which develops out of the id, dominates the ego, andrepresents the inhibitions of instinct that are characteristic of man.'Freud claimed that the modification of his earlier theory had been forced on him by the observation of his patientson the couch.

Yet the mind, in this later theory, closely resembles the tripartite soul of Plato's Republic.

The idcorres¬ponds to the appetite, the source of the desires for food and sex.

Freud's id is ruled by the pleasureprinciple and knows no moral code; similarly, Plato tells us that if appetite is in control, pleasure and pain reign inone's soul instead of law.

Both the id and the appetite contain contrary impulses perpetually at war.

Some of thedesires of the appetite, and all those of the id, are unconscious and surface only in dreams.

Plato goes so far as totell us that some of appetite's dreams are Oedipal: ‘In phantasy it will not shrink from intercourse with a mother oranyone else, man, god, or brute, or from forbidden food or any deed of blood.'Freud's ego has much in common with Plato's reasoning power.

Reason is the part of the soul most in touch withwhat is real, just as the ego is devoted to the reality principle.

Like reason, the ego has the task of controllinginstinctual desires, providing for their harmless release.

Using one of Plato's metaphors, Freud compares the ego toa rider and the id to a horse.

‘The horse supplies the locomotive energy, while the rider has the privilege of decidingon the goal and guiding the powerful animal's movement.' Both Plato and Freud use hydraulic metaphors to describethe mechanism of control, seeing id and appetite as a flow of energy which can find normal discharge or bechannelled into alternative outlets.

But Freud departs from Plato in regarding the damming up of such energy assomething which is likely to lead to disastrous results.There remain Freud's superego and the part of the Platonic soul called ‘tem¬per'.

These are alike in being non-rational, punitive forces in the service of morality, the source of shame and self-directed anger.

For Freud, thesuperego is an agency which observes, judges, and punishes the behaviour of the ego, partly identical with theconscience, and concerned for the maintenance of ideals.

It upbraids and abuses the ego, just as Plato's temperdoes.

Superego and temper are alike the source of ambition.

However, the superego's aggression is directedexclusively at the ego, whereas the temper in a Platonic soul is directed at others no less than oneself.Both Freud and Plato regard mental health as harmony between the parts of the soul, and mental illness asunresolved conflict between them.

But only Freud has a worked out theory of the relation between psychic conflictand mental disorder.

The ego's whole endeavour, Freud says, is ‘a reconciliation between its various dependentrelationships'.

In the absence of such reconciliation, particular disorders develop: the psychoses are the result ofconflicts between the ego and the world, depressive neuroses are the result of conflicts between the id and thesuperego, and other neuroses are the result of conflicts between the ego and the id.While Freud's general tripartite anatomy of the soul bears a close resemblance to Plato's, his particular treatment ofthe superego reminds the historian rather more of Newman's description of the conscience.

Freud believed that thesupergo had its origin in the injunctions and prohibitions of the child's parents, of which it was the internalizedresidue.The long period of childhood, during which the growing human being lives in dependence on his parents, leavesbehind it as a precipitate the formation in his ego of a special agency in which this parental influence is prolonged.It has received the name of superego.Newman's portrayal of conscience as echoing the reproaches of a mother and the approval of a father seems morelike a description of the formation of the super-ego than a proof of the existence of a supernatural judge.Freud would be indignant at figuring in a history of philosophy, since he regarded himself above all as a scientist,dedicated to discovering the rigid deter¬minisms which underlay human illusions of freedom.

In fact, most of hisdetailed theories, when they have been made precise enough to admit of experimental test¬ing, have been provedto lack foundation.

Among medical professionals, opinions differ whether the techniques which took their rise fromhis practice of psycho¬analysis are, in any strict sense, effective forms of therapy.

When they achieve success, itis not by uncovering unalterable deterministic mechanisms, but by expanding the freedom of choice of the individual.Despite the non-scientific nature of his work, Freud's influence on modern society has been pervasive: in relation tosexual mores, to mental illness, to art and literature, and to interpersonal relationships of many kinds.The permissive attitude to sex of many societies in the late twentieth century is undoubtedly due not only to theincreased availability of efficient contracep¬tion, but also to the ideas of Freud.

He was not the first thinker toassign the sexual impulse a place of fundamental importance in the human psyche: so did all those theologians whoregarded the sin of Adam, which shaped our actual human condition, as being sexual in origin, transmission, andeffect.

If, as some people believe, nineteenth-century prudery succeeded in concealing the importance of sex, theveil of concealment was even then easily torn away.

As Schopenhauer wrote, in a passage Freud loved to quote, itis the joke of life that sex, the chief concern of man, should be pursued in secret.

‘In fact', he said, ‘we see it everymoment seat itself, as the true hereditary lord of the world, out of the fullness of its own strength, upon theancestral throne, and looking down from there with scornful glances, laugh at the preparations which have beenmade to bind it.'Freud's emphasis on infantile sexuality was one of the elements of his teaching which contemporaries found most. »