Who is freudian psychology

The efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy. Am Psychol. Bogousslavsky J, Dieguez S. Sigmund Freud and hysteria: The etiology of psychoanalysis. In: Bogousslavsky J, ed. Frontiers of Neurology and Neuroscience. S Karger Eds. Grubin D. Young Dr. Public Broadcasting Service. Published Gay, P. Published March 29, Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute and Society. Newsweek: Freud in Our Midst. Published March 27, Yale University CampusPress.

In Memory of Sigmund Freud. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for VerywellMind. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page.

These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data. We and our partners process data to: Actively scan device characteristics for identification. I Accept Show Purposes. Table of Contents View All. Table of Contents. Freud's Life. Key Theories. Freud was recruited to the anti-utopian politics of the nineteen-fifties. Popular magazines equated Freud with Copernicus and Darwin.

Claims were large. Professors in English departments naturally wondered how they might get in on the action. They did not have much trouble finding a way. For it is not a stretch to treat literary texts in the same way that an analyst treats what a patient is saying.

Academic critics are therefore always in the market for a theoretical apparatus that can give coherence and consistency to this enterprise, and Freudianism was ideally suited for the task. Decoding and exposing are what psychoanalysis is all about. One professor excited about the possibilities was Frederick Crews. Crews received his Ph. The dissertation explained what Forster thought by looking at what Forster wrote. It was plain-vanilla history-of-ideas criticism, and Crews found it boring.

As an undergraduate, at Yale, he had fallen in love with Nietzsche, and Nietzsche had led him to Freud. Crews began teaching a popular graduate seminar on the subject. He also got involved in the antiwar movement on campus, serving as a co-chair of the Faculty Peace Committee. Like many people at Berkeley in those days, he became radicalized, and he considered his interest in Freud to be part of his radicalism. Students would propose contradictory psychoanalytic readings, and they all sounded good, but it was just an ingenuity contest.

There was no way to prove that one interpretation was truer than another. Psychoanalysis was beginning to look like a circular and self-justifying methodology. The article was a review of several books by revisionists. Psychoanalysis had already been discredited as a medical science, Crews wrote; what researchers were now revealing was that Freud himself was possibly a charlatan—an opportunistic self-dramatizer who deliberately misrepresented the scientific bona fides of his theories.

People who send aggrieved letters to the Review often seem to have missed the fact that the Review always gives its writers the last word, and Crews availed himself of the privilege with relish and at length. He gave, on balance, better than he got. Crews had retired from teaching in , and is now an emeritus professor at Berkeley.

Part of the decline had to do with social change. Psychoanalysis was also taking a hit within the medical community. Studies suggesting that psychoanalysis had a low cure rate had been around for a while. But the realization that depression and anxiety can be regulated by medication made a mode of therapy whose treatment times reached into the hundreds of billable hours seem, at a minimum, inefficient, and, at worst, a scam.

Managed-care companies and the insurance industry certainly drew that conclusion, and the third edition of the DSM , in , scrubbed out almost every trace of Freudianism. Meanwhile, the image of Freud as a lonely pioneer began to erode as well. He had flown to Vienna after the Nazis arrived to urge Freud to flee. But the image originated with, and was cultivated by, Freud himself. One corner of Anglo-American intellectual life where Freudianism had always been regarded with suspicion was the philosophy department.

A few philosophers, like Stanley Cavell, who had an interest in literature and Continental thinkers took Freud up. But to philosophers of science the knowledge claims of psychoanalysis were always dubious. Swales and other researchers were also able to show that Freud consistently misrepresented the outcomes of the treatments he based his theories on.

In the case of one of the only patients whose treatment notes Freud did not destroy, Ernst Lanzer—the Rat Man—it is clear that he misrepresented the facts as well. In a study of the forty-three treatments about which some information survives, it turned out that Freud had broken his own rules for how to conduct an analysis, usually egregiously, in all forty-three. In , a British researcher, E.

Thornton suggested that Freud was often high on cocaine when he wrote his early scientific articles, which accounts for their sloppiness with the data and the recklessness of their claims. That year, in an interview with a Canadian philosophy professor, Todd Dufresne, Crews was asked whether he was ready to call it a day with Freud. Crews seems to have grown worried that although Freud and Freudianism may look dead, we cannot be completely, utterly, a hundred per cent sure.

The new book synthesizes fifty years of revisionist scholarship, repeating and amplifying the findings of other researchers fully acknowledged , and tacking on a few additional charges. Crews is an attractively uncluttered stylist, and he has an amazing story to tell, but his criticism of Freud is relentless to the point of monomania.

Though he here attempts to link specific neuronal mechanisms to his psychodynamic concepts, Freud later considered his first neuropsychoanalytic endeavor a failure and consequently never did publish the manuscript during his life time Freud, Most recently, his Project writing has been taken as evidence to support the idea that psychoanalysis can indeed be linked to neuroscience which has led to the birth of a novel discipline, neuropsychoanalysis see Weinstein and Kahn, ; Kandel, ; Solms et al.

Neuropsychoanalysis, most broadly defined, aims to link psychodynamic concepts and neuroscientific mechanisms and thus to integrate psyche and brain. However, as with any peculiar birth, the rather long pregnancy and consecutively painful delivery of the discipline of neuropsychoanalysis after its initial conception in has stirred much controversy; this concerns especially how the novel infant shall be properly taken care of with proponents and opponent being very much divided about the kind of remedy for the gestational complications.

One focus has been on the unconscious and its relation to memories see Kandel, ; Mancia, , a , b while others searched for neuronal mechanisms underlying drives Solms, ; Panksepp, ; Fonagy, , dreams Solms, , ; Solms and Turnbull, ; Mancia, ; Hobson, ; Northoff, , the ego Northoff, ; Carhart-Harris and Friston, , primary and secondary processes Carhart-Harris and Friston, , and defense mechanisms Fonagy, ; Northoff and Boeker, ; Northoff et al.

What would have Freud said to neuropsychoanalysis? Would he have embraced the newborn with the name neuropsychoanalysis? Or would he have left the novel infant alone in the very same way he rejected and abandoned his writing that, following him, was supposed to die a silent death in the graveyard of unpublished writings?

We do not know and if at all we can only speculate. What we know though at least partially is why Freud abandoned his initial neuropsychoanalytic attempts. He considered the knowledge of the brain and thus the neuroscience at his time to be not as sufficiently mature as to allow for linking neuronal mechanisms and psychodynamic concepts.

How about the situation now? Let us turn finally to the brain itself and see whether neuropsychoanalysis can indeed overcome the deficits in the knowledge of the brain Freud diagnosed at his time.

Why did Freud abandon the brain and neuroscience completely after ? Besides the lack of knowledge, there may though be a more basic and principle reason namely how to approach the brain.

However, he could not find such a dynamic and active approach to the brain at this time and subsequently abandoned neuroscience. Instead, he dedicated himself completely to the psychic apparatus which he asked as active and dynamic when for instance developing his psychical topography, i. Current neuropsychoanalysis heavily relies and draws on recent developments in Cognitive, Affective, or Social Neuroscience see Panksepp, ; Gazzaniga et al.

For instance, different cognitive functions like attention, working memory, episodic memory, are taken as initial starting points and are then related to supposedly corresponding concepts like memory or dreams within the psychodynamic context see for instance, Carhart-Harris and Friston, , and Mancia, a , b for such an approach.

While others like Panksepp and Solms pursue a more affective-based approach to neuropsychoanalysis that relies on the intrinsic affective functions and their corresponding subcortical neural substrates Panksepp, ; Solms and Turnbull, This has lead to the discussion of the neuronal mechanisms underlying psychodynamic concepts like introjections, narcissism, self-objects, drives see Solms, ; Northoff et al.

How can such function-based approach be related to the brain? Broadly speaking, Cognitive, Affective, or Social Neuroscience aim to link cognitive, affective, or social psychological functions to the brain and more specifically to the neural activity in specific regions of the brain.

For instance, cognitive functions like working memory, attention, have been associated with the neural activity in specific cortical regions like the lateral prefrontal cortex and the parietal cortex Gazzaniga et al. While affective and basic social functions are more associated with neural activity in subcortical regions like the tectum, the periaqueductal gray PAG , the dorsomedial thalamus, the colliculi see Damasio, , ; Panksepp, ; Panksepp and Northoff, Following the roadmaps of its guiding disciplines, Neuropsychoanalysis aims to link specific psychodynamic mechanisms to the neuronal activity in particular regions of the brain.

One of the main frontrunners of such approach was Mark Solms. He observed particular psychodynamic changes in his neurosurgical patients who suffered from specific lesions in their brains.

Inferring from the pathological to the healthy, this allowed him to link psychodynamic mechanisms to specific brain regions Solms and Solms-Kaplan, ; Solms and Turnbull, and to consecutively establish the discipline of neuropsychoanalysis. Relying on his observations in neurosurgical patients, he for instance argues that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex VMPFC may be crucial in constituting the ego or self; see chapter three in part three for detailed discussion while the parietal cortex may be central in constituting the own body as first self-object see Solms, Does neuropsychoanalysis in this sense, as characterized by the two hallmark features of a function- and localization-based approach, can account for what had eluded Freud in his early writing?

Can the function- and localization-based approach to the brain in current neuropsychoanalysis make up for the deficits in our knowledge of the brain that Freud diagnosed at his time? Would such a function- and localization-based approach have led Freud to reverse his decision to abandon and abort his writing? To decide these questions, we have to turn back to Freud himself and see how he would have approached the brain if he only could. How did Freud approach psychological functions?

The psychological functions in turn were assumed to mirror a specific psychodynamic mechanism. What does Freud presuppose here? He starts with observations of mental contents as for instance sexual desire and attributes a specific meaning to them in that they are supposed to express something specific about the person itself.

Now the crucial step comes. He infers from the mental content and its personal relevance a specific psychological function, repression. What does he presuppose here? He presupposes that the mental content and its specific meaning are possible only on the basis of the specific psychological function of repression.

In contrast to Freud, Cognitive, Affective and Social Neuroscience do not start with specific individually meaningful contents that are subjective. Instead, they start with certain objective behaviors as for instance social interaction, cognitions, or emotions. Despite such difference in the starting point, the inference to psychological functions is the same. In the same way that Cognitive, Social, and Affective Neuroscience infer specific psychological functions to account for the observed behavior, Freud infers his psychological functions from the mental contents he observed.

There is even further convergence. Many of the cognitive, affective, and social functions investigated in Cognitive, Affective, and Social Neuroscience are related these days to the psychological functions Freud described. Does convergence of both function-based approaches provide a common platform to make the second step, the one to the brain? If the cognitive, affective, and social functions can be localized in specific regions of the brain, the respectively associated psychological functions as described by Freud must be related to exactly these brain regions.

This is, as indicated above, the way Mark Solms and Jaak Panksepp see it. However, Freud did not go this way. He did not extend and complement his function-based approach by a localization-based approach. The same fate would await any theory that attempted to recognize the anatomical position of the system consciousness — as being in the cortex, and to localize the unconscious processes in the subcortical parts of the brain.

There is a hiatus which at present cannot be filled, nor is it one of the tasks of psychology to fill it. Our psychical topography has for the present nothing to do with anatomy. Why was Freud so skeptical about the localization of his psychological functions? Is it only because he lacked the psychological inventory of Cognitive, Affective, and Social Neuroscience we are fortunate to have these days? But let us go back to Freud himself and see how his focus shifted especially after his writing.

After his writing, Freud abandoned the reference to the brain completely and focused exclusively on psychological functions. He however went one step further beyond mere psychological functions. He aimed to put the assumed psychological functions into a larger psychological context. This context refers to psychological structure and organization rather than to specific psychological contents as yielded by particular psychological contents.

For instance, he introduced the tripartite structure of the psychic apparatus with its division between Id, Ego, and Superego. His focus thus goes beyond mere psychological functions to their underlying psychological structure and organization.

Unlike Cognitive, Affective, and Social Neuroscience, he does not complement his function-based approach by a localization-based approach. Instead, he here departs taking another direction, the one of psychological structure and organization. How are psychological structure and organization related to psychological functions? Psychological structure and organization enable and predispose specific psychological functions as for instance the ego makes possible the repression of sexual desire.

Psychological functions are assumed to correlate with the mental contents or the behavior in question; the former is thus a sufficient condition of the latter. This is different in the case of psychological structure and organization. The ego is not assumed to correlate with specific mental contents and can therefore not be regarded a sufficient condition. However, it is assumed to make first and foremost possible all kinds of mental contents. Without ego, there can be no mental contents at all.

The ego is thus a necessary but non-sufficient condition of possible mental contents. Where does this leave us? Freud and current Cognitive, Affective, and Social Neuroscience seem to share the function-based approach. While sharing the first step, they though depart in the subsequent step. Cognitive, Affective, and Social Neuroscience go forward toward the brain when assuming a localization-based approach. Freud though decided to go into another direction, the direction of psychological structure and organization thereby presupposing a structure-based approach.

If we want to extend Freud to the brain, we thus have to extend his structure-based approach into a neural context. For that we may leave Freud and go back to the neuroscience at his and our time.

We have to be careful though. Freud did already pursue a structure-based approach before he abandoned neuroscience and switched completely to psychology and psychoanalysis. This is well apparent in his early structural distinction between preconscious, unconscious, and conscious. One may want to read his writing on the brain thus a the attempt to find such structure in the brain itself. This may well correspond to his search and postulation of the kind of dynamic mechanisms he suggested in his writing.

Due to the limited knowledge of the brain at his time, he may have felt it to be hopeless to ever link his structural approach on the psychological level to corresponding neuronal structure within the context of the brain. That though is mere speculation. I therefore refrain from that and characterize our current knowledge about the brain and its neuronal structure.

Freud focused on the structure and organization of the psychic apparatus, i. How can we now put what he described as psychological structure and organization into the neural context of the brain? Apparently it does not seem to consist in the various psychological functions and their respectively associated regions investigated in current neuroscience.

This shifts the focus to the intrinsic activity of the brain, what is often called resting state activity, and the kind of neural structure it constitutes. At the beginning of neuroscience around the turn of the twentieth century, different views of the brain emerged.

One view favored by the British neurologist Sir Charles Sherrington — assumed the brain and more specifically the spinal cord to be primarily reflexive. Reflexive means that the brain reacts in predefined and automatic ways to stimuli from the outside world. Hence, the extrinsic stimuli do almost completely and exclusively determine the activity in the brain which is thus driven by the momentary demands of the extrinsic environment, i. Figure 1. A Extrinsic view- brain as behavioral-cognitive reflex apparatus Sherrington, cognitive neuroscience.

An alternative view though was suggested by one of his students, T. Graham Brown. This means that stimulus-induced activity can no longer be completely and exclusively be traced back to the stimulus itself.

Instead, what we as observers describe as stimulus-induced activity must then be considered to be the hybrid result of a specific interaction between the intrinsic activity and the stimulus.

The dichotomy between an intrinsic and an extrinsic view of the brain is preserved into our times and has recently, within the context of functional brain imaging, seen a resurgence see Raichle, a. Let us start with the extrinsic view first which is most predominant in especially cognitive and social neuroscience. The unconscious mind transformed her into a dog to protect him.

Secondary elaboration occurs when the unconscious mind strings together wish-fulfilling images in a logical order of events, further obscuring the latent content. According to Freud, this is why the manifest content of dreams can be in the form of believable events. Some of these were sexual in nature, including poles, guns, and swords representing the penis and horse riding and dancing representing sexual intercourse. However, Freud was cautious about symbols and stated that general symbols are more personal rather than universal.

In an amusing example of the limitations of universal symbols, one of Freud's patients, after dreaming about holding a wriggling fish, said to him 'that's a Freudian symbol - it must be a penis! Freud explored further, and it turned out that the woman's mother, who was a passionate astrologer and a Pisces, was on the patient's mind because she disapproved of her daughter being in analysis.

It seems more plausible, as Freud suggested, that the fish represented the patient's mother rather than a penis! Freud attracted many followers, who formed a famous group in called the "Psychological Wednesday Society. At the beginning of , the committee had 22 members and renamed themselves the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Is Freudian psychology supported by evidence? Freud's theory is good at explaining but not at predicting behavior which is one of the goals of science.

For this reason, Freud's theory is unfalsifiable - it can neither be proved true or refuted. For example, the unconscious mind is difficult to test and measure objectively.

Overall, Freud's theory is highly unscientific. Such empirical findings have demonstrated the role of unconscious processes in human behavior. However, most of the evidence for Freud's theories are taken from an unrepresentative sample.

He mostly studied himself, his patients and only one child e. The main problem here is that the case studies are based on studying one person in detail, and with reference to Freud, the individuals in question are most often middle-aged women from Vienna i. This makes generalizations to the wider population e. However, Freud thought this unimportant, believing in only a qualitative difference between people.

Freud may also have shown research bias in his interpretations - he may have only paid attention to information which supported his theories, and ignored information and other explanations that did not fit them.

McLeod, S. What are the most interesting ideas of Sigmund Freud? Simply Psychology. Bargh, J. The unbearable automaticity of being. American psychologist, 54 7 , Fisher, S. Freud scientifically reappraised: Testing the theories and therapy. Freud, S.