Freud’s Psychology-A Critical Analysis

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Se. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

“He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”

~Sigmund Freud

The theory of personality developed by Freud that focuses on repression and unconscious forces and includes the concepts of infantile sexuality, resistance, transference, and division of the psyche into the id, ego, and superego, and psychoanalysis is a method of psychological therapy originated by Sigmund Freud in which free association, dream interpretation, and analysis of resistance and transference are used to explore repressed or unconscious impulses, anxieties, and internal conflicts, in order to free psychic energy for mature love and work.

The principal feature and the principal virtue of Freud psychology was the discarding of a sensationistic and mechanistic (or quasi-mechanistic) psychology and the putting of his psychology on a hormic foundation. That is to say, Freud aligned himself with the tradition in psychology, known as voluntarism, which comes down from Aristotle and of which Schopenhauer has been the most influential modern exponent; the tradition which sees the most fundamental characteristic of men and animals in their purposive striving towards ends or goals. Like other exponents of this view, Freud regards this hormic urge to activity and to self-development and expression, given in the native constitution, not as entirely undirected and unspecialized in each species in disposition or impulses to strive towards goals of certain types; and he calls such specialized tendencies “ instincts “. An instinct so conceived is something very different from the instinct of the mechanistic behaviorist or the “tendency “of Jenet; for them an instinct is merely an “action pattern “ a system of reflex arcs in the nervous system which on being appropriately stimulated, leads the nervous excitation through a fixed system of  channels to a certain group of muscles and glands. In contrast to this, the instinctive disposition of the hormic psychology generates an impulse towards a goal of a certain type; and this impulse may express itself in a striving that may take a multitude of forms and bring into play a variety of muscular and other executive processes according to the circumstances; this variety being greater, the greater the creature’s power of intelligent appreciation of the circumstances and of intelligent adaptation of his action to those circumstances.

Freud recognizes that human species is endowed with many such instincts. But he assigns predominant importance to one of these , the sex instinct , his view of which has been developed in great detail,. Freud has postulated other instincts of man, writing vaguely of various lower instincts of cruelty, brutality, and destructiveness, and of a group of Ego instincts; but all these he has left entirely undefined. Once he wrote:” No knowledge would have been as important for the establishment of a sound psychology as some approximate understanding of the common nature and possible differences of the instincts. But he has neglected to seek such knowledge; and the neglect has been a principal source of defects in the Freudian psychology. It has led Freud to attribute to the sex instinct a number of tendencies of human nature which in reality are independent of it, and in this way greatly to magnify or exaggerate the role of sex in human life, or, as Janet has said, to construct “ an enormous system of medical philosophy, “ the theory of Pansexuality.

Freud’s development of his hormic psychology has suffered, not only from this neglect to define, by the aid of comparative studies, the nature of the human instincts other than the sexual , but also from his taking over a fallacy which has long been current in popular psychology and in the traditional associationist psychology of the utilitarian philosophy, namely the fallacy known as psychological hedonism, the assumption that all human striving is fundamentally a striving for pleasure. Freud calls this fallacious assumption “the pleasure principle” and has made it one of the foundations-stones of his psychology, much to its detriment. But in his recent work, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” he has revoked this error and recognized the hormic principle; thus showing once more his remarkable power of continually developing and rectifying his views.

While, then, instinctive striving is the fundamental conception of his psychology, Freud make great use of several other principles which, though not entirely novel, are used by him in a more far-reaching manner than by any of his predecessors; notably, unconscious or subconscious mental activity, conflict, and repression. All these principles may be said to have been used by Herbart; and the first of them has, of course, figured largely in the writings of Schopenhauer and of Ed. Von Hartmann. In the system of Herbart, which was an intellectualist rather than a voluntarist psychology, the strivings, the conflicts, and repressions (going on partly consciously, partly sub-consciously) were represented as functions of “ideas” and of “systems of ideas.” Over, and relative independence of , the “ideas,” the intellectual cognitive functions.

The fact of moral conflict within the human soul has, of course, been familiar through long ages;  and it has often been recognized that the man who is the seat of such a conflict may have but little understanding of the nature of the conflict and of the conflicting forces; that is to say it has long been justly recognized that such conflicts often are , in part at least, subconscious. Freud gave  a vast extension to this subconscious activity. He showed that such conflicts are not always, or commonly, fought out to a decisive issue; but that rather one of the contending forces, some specialized instinctive urge towards some special goal, is apt to be suppressed or repressed, but not thereby deprived of its power. He taught that a tendency thus repressed is apt to live on subterraneous, seeking expression in indirect ways. From the earliest months of life such repressions are effected; and each new repression adds to the sum of submerged tendencies or “ Complexes “which some  he calls“ THE Unconscious “ becomes a mass of rebellious tendencies, most or all of which are regarded by Freud as specializations of or derivatives from, the sex instinct. The energy with which they strive to gain expression is the energy of the sex instinct, which energy he calls the Libido.

Freud’s psychology consists largely in more detailed attempts to show how these repressed tendencies, constituting “the Unconscious,” gain partial expression in devious ways; in the normal man, in his dreams, in his phantasy, in the making of his choices and decisions, in various slips of the tongue, pen, and hand; and in neurotic patients, in their various symptoms.

Although his ideas met with antagonism and resistance, Freud believed deeply in the value of his discoveries and rarely simplified or exaggerated them for the sake of popular acceptance. He saw that those who sought to change themselves or others must face realistic difficulties. But he also showed us that, while the dark and blind forces in human nature sometimes seem overwhelming, psychological understanding, by enlarging the realm of reason and responsibility can make a substantial difference to troubled individuals and even to civilization as a whole. Prof. Freud has gained many ardent disciples who accept his teachings in the main and whom some have actively contributed to the development of the whole complicated system.  In addition to these professional followers, a host of laymen, educators, artists, and dilettanti, have been fascinated by the Freud-ian speculations and given them an immense popular vogue, so that some of the technical terms used by Freud have become embodied in the popular slang of both U. S. A .and U.K. Like Freud, they believe that psychoanalysis is the strongest and most sophisticated tool for obtaining further knowledge of the mind, and that by using this knowledge for greater self-awareness, patients free themselves from incapacitating suffering, and improve and deepen human relationships.

 

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