Sigmund Freud, the great and terrible

Reading Freud today, you run the risk of disappointment. In his texts one finds neither Jung’s depth and erudition, nor Frankl’s aphorism, nor Maslow’s visionary enthusiasm, nor Fromm’s stereoscopicity… Freud is an old-fashioned academicism, but also a beautiful literary style. However, it is not because of style that for 80 years the world psychology has been looking back at this particular person. First of all, the authors of new ideas and approaches cross spears with it. His name is put on a par with the names of Copernicus and Darwin, Moses and Einstein.

Freud also became a hero of the mass consciousness – thanks to his theory of sexuality as the driving force of behavior and personal development, which, however, did not stand the test of time. Above all for him was science. And he developed his psychoanalysis in an effort to find the objective laws of mental life, to penetrate words and false conceit, to learn about a person what he does not know about himself. He discovered the unconscious and believed it more than consciousness. And on the other side of consciousness their own laws were revealed. Since that time, psychology has become a science. And he never ceases to doubt whether psychoanalysis is scientific.

Five keys to understanding

There’s so much more to us than we realize

In addition to everything that we can observe in ourselves, unconscious processes are going on in us and layers of experience are stored that are inaccessible to our consciousness. An experienced psychoanalyst can partly reconstruct them from fragments of dreams, behavioral disorders in everyday life: reservations, erroneous actions, forgotten intentions, products of creativity.

Three in one…

Mental life, according to Freud, is a constant struggle and conflict. Three “mental instances” converge on this ring: “It” is a set of desires and drives that energize all our actions; “Super-I” – a set of learned social prohibitions and restrictions, which does not allow many desires and inclinations to manifest themselves directly; “I” – a rational mediator, allowing you to find roundabout ways to satisfy drives.

Sexual attraction is the main motive for our actions

Ultimately, the forces that impel a person derive from a single root – libido, or sexual desire, and most of the actions can be explained by its transformations. If the libido does not manifest itself directly due to social and moral inhibitions, it finds its way out in a roundabout way, manifesting itself in the content of dreams, neurotic symptoms, creativity, and so on. In addition to the libido, Freud also singled out the drive for self-preservation, and in later works he postulated the drive for death.

Understand to Heal

“Where there was “It”, there should be “I”. Analytical work to identify the true causes of psychological disorders helps to understand what was not previously realized. As a result, healing or a significant improvement in the condition. In recent decades, the “correct” psychoanalytic therapy, which complies with all the canons, has been rather critically treated – because of the prohibitive duration, high cost and dubious philosophical premises. Other types of psychotherapy are as effective as classical psychoanalysis. Many do not distinguish between them, calling any psychotherapy “psychoanalysis”. The truth is that almost all of them came from the house that Freud built and from the principle of awareness of the unconscious.

Self-deception as a way of self-defense

Freud introduced the concept of “psychological defense” – a system of self-deception mechanisms that allow us not to be aware of what we do not want, for example, our own desires that are incompatible with our self-image. These mechanisms are described in detail by Freud himself and his students. These include, in particular, projection (attributing to others what one does not want to recognize in oneself) and sublimation (realization of libidinal desires in a symbolic form, for example, through humor and in art). The entire culture of mankind, including art and religion, are, according to Freud, products of sublimation.