...Psychotherapy Volume 32/Winter 1995/Number 4 DOES THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX EXIST? JOEL KUPFERSMID PSI, Twinsburg, Ohio The Oedipus complex is considered to be the nucleus of neurosis for Freud and many psychoanalysts. Examination of the nature and origins of the Oedipus complex presented by psychoanalysts and critics suggests, that as a hypothetical construct, there is little evidence to support its existence. sity students taking courses in psychology. Thus, it appears that an examination of the historical roots and current status of the Oedipus complex might aid psychotherapists as well as others who have been introduced to the concept. The primary focus of this article will be on the validity of the Oedipus complex and the reasonableness of believing that it is a viable hypothetical construct in the analysis of human psychopathology and, thus, that it should be placed at the core of clinical procedures. What Is the Oedipus Complex? The Oedipus complex has two forms, one for the male and one for the female. Freud's writings on both forms spans several decades. There is no single publication in which he fully described all aspects of the Oedipus complex for both males and females. A researcher must piece together the nature of both forms from his many writings on the topic. The essence of the Oedipus complex is a desire on the part of the child to have a sexual relationship with the opposite sex parent and feelings of hostility toward the same sex parent. These desire/feelings...
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...Psychoanalysis was founded by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Freud believed that people could be cured by making conscious their unconscious thoughts and motivations, thus gaining “insight”. The aim of psychoanalysis therapy is to release repressed emotions and experiences, i.e. make the unconscious conscious. Psychoanalysis is commonly used to treat depression and anxiety disorders. It is only having a cathartic (i.e. healing) experience can the person be helped and "cured". Psychoanalysis Assumptions · Psychoanalytic psychologists see psychological problems as rooted in the unconscious mind. · Manifest symptoms are caused by latent (hidden) disturbances. · Typical causes include unresolved issues during development or repressed trauma. · Treatment focuses on bringing the repressed conflict to consciousness, where the client can deal with it. How can we understand the unconscious mind? freud's couch Remember, psychoanalysis is a therapy as well as a Freudian theory. In psychoanalysis (therapy) Freud would have a patient lie on a couch to relax, and he would sit behind them taking notes while they told him about their dreams and childhood memories. Psychoanalysis would be a lengthy process, involving many sessions with the psychoanalyst. Due to the nature of defense mechanisms and the inaccessibility of the deterministic forces operating in the unconscious, psychoanalysis in its classic form is a lengthy process often involving 2 to 5 sessions...
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...Running Head: ANNA FREUD Anna Freud Anna Freud Selecting a woman that made significant contributions to the field of psychology between the years 1850 and 1950 is not an easy task as there is more than one woman who made significant contributions to the field of Psychology. Out of those talented women Anna Freud, overshadows her colleagues. Anna can be considered to have a fascinating background, which influenced her later development of unique theoretical perspectives. Her father, Sigmund Freud famous for his multiple theories about the mind he is regarded as the founder of psychology probably influenced her following his footsteps and being interested in psychoanalysis, in particular, in child psychoanalysis. However, her recognition as the founder of child psychoanalysis was not just given to her for being her father's daughter. Anna Freud earned it by contributing to the field of Psychology with the many roles she played in her career as teacher, theorist, healer, leader, idealist and writer (Coles, 1992). Anna's contributions to psychology not only help to contribute to the development of psychology but helped improve many lives. Anna Freud was born in Vienna December 3, 1895 her parents Sigmund and Martha Freud. Her father considered her a blessing; conversely, she did not develop a close relationship with her mother it appears that she considered her nanny a genuine figure in her childhood. Anna considered she was boring and did not get along with her siblings;...
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...“Evaluate the extent to which Freud's theory of psychosexual development can help us to understand a client's presenting issue.” The main aim of this essay is to demonstrate an understanding of Freud’s theory of psychosexual development and how this theory may help us to explain and identify adult neurotic behaviour. I shall be evaluating the pros and cons of psychosexual theory and the extent to which it helps us to understand a client’s presenting issue. I shall also define and consider the relationship between the Id, Ego and Superego and the way in which these constructs of our psyche are in many ways representative of earlier experiences and of those early situations and conflicts we had faced. Lastly, I will examine some of the criticisms that have been leveled at Freudian theory in order to evaluate it. In Freudian psychology, psychosexual development is a central element of the psychoanalytic sexual drive theory; that human beings, from birth, possess an instinctual libido (sexual energy), that develops in five stages. Each stage – the oral, the anal, the phallic, the latent, and the genital – is characterized by the erogenous zone that is the source of the libidinal drive. Sigmund Freud proposed that if the child experienced sexual frustration in relation to any psychosexual developmental stage, s/he would experience anxiety that would persist into adulthood as a neurosis, a functional mental disorder Freud (1905) stressed that the first five years of life are...
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...something but he or she does not understand why the fear is occurring. The fear disrupts the well-being of the individual by causing the intense fear he or she will be harmed or endangered. Sigmund Freud who often provided details to understand the anxieties of the mind by his analysis of his cases studies (Cervone & Pervin, 2010). One such case is the analysis of Little Hans who was young child who suffered from an extreme fear of horses biting him and the fear of leaving his home (Cervone & Pervin, 2010). Freud suggested the case of little Hans produced the most compelling evidence for the positive Oedipus complex and suggested the Oedipus complex is a universal phenomenon (Lachmann, 2010). Freud did not analyze Little Hans personality but uniquely corresponded with Hans’s father about the young child’s phobias and conducted therapy through Hans’s father (Garber, 2001). Freud and Hans’s father would discuss the difficulties Little Hans experienced and Freud would instruct Hans’s father to understand Little Hans experiences and suggested techniques to handle the case therapeutically (Garber, 2001). The case of Little Hans is accepted by most psychologists as the first psychoanalytic therapy of children to support Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality. Freud suggested the unconscious mind can create unresolved issues that affect how an individual thinks, feels, and...
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...extent to which Freud's theory of psychosexual development can help us to understand a client's presenting issue.” The main aim of this essay is to demonstrate an understanding of Freud’s theory of psychosexual development and how this theory may help us to explain and identify adult neurotic behaviour. I shall be evaluating the pros and cons of psychosexual theory and the extent to which it helps us to understand a client’s presenting issue. I shall also define and consider the relationship between the Id, Ego and Superego and the way in which these constructs of our psyche are in many ways representative of earlier experiences and of those early situations and conflicts we had faced. Freud’s approach to understanding human behaviour – psychoanalysis – has had a profound effect on psychology. His approach is one of many that share some common assumptions, while differing fundamentally in others. Contemporaries of Freud, such as Jung and Adler were inspired by Freudian theory, but emphasised different issues in human development and experience. Collectively these theories are described as “psychodynamic” because they emphasise the factors that motivate behaviour (i.e. the dynamics of behaviour). They challenged the biomedical view that mental disorders had physical origins. The psychodynamic approach views abnormal behaviour as caused by unconscious, underlying psychological forces. Key features of the psychodynamic approach Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was a Viennese physician, trained...
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...Introduction This paper attempts to trace the evolution of Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex within psychoanalysis. One case will be considered in detail to illustrate relevant theoretical formulations focussing mainly on the work of Freud, Klein, Britton and Bion. The wider implications of the Oedipus complex will also be considered before I conclude. History of the Oedipus complex and Freud’s theoretic evolution Freud used the term Oedipus complex to describe a boy's feelings of desire for his mother and hostility towards his father which he regarded as a universal event of early childhood. The term is derived from the Greek myth of Oedipus who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother. In a letter to Fliess dating back to 1897, Freud (1954) attributes these ideas to his self analysis and indirectly to the Greek myth as presented in the popular Sophocles’ play ‘Oedipus Rex’. During the late 1890s Freud, theorised that fantasies built around the Oedipus complex were the primary cause of hysteria and other neurotic symptoms. The idea is explored in Studies on Hysteria, where Freud (1895), traced his patients’ symptoms of hysteria to sexual seductions by their fathers. The concept was introduced in ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ (1900), and is central to Freud’s (1905) analysis of Dora. He further elaborated his ideas in the case study of Little Hans (1909), but the term ‘Oedipus complex’ itself first...
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...Freud was born to Jewish Galician parents in the Moravian town of Příbor (German: Freiberg in Mähren), Austrian Empire, now part of the Czech Republic, the first of their eight children.[10] His father, Jakob Freud (1815–1896), a wool merchant, had two sons, Emanuel (1833–1914) and Philipp (1836–1911), from his first marriage. Jakob's family were Hasidic Jews, and though Jakob himself had moved away from the tradition, he came to be known for his Torah study. He and Freud's mother, Amalia (née Nathansohn), 20 years her husband's junior and his third wife, were married by Rabbi Isaac Noah Mannheimer on 29 July 1855. They were struggling financially and living in a rented room, in a locksmith's house at Schlossergasse 117 when their son Sigmund was born.[11] He was born with a caul, which his mother saw as a positive omen for the boy's future.[12] In 1859 the Freud family left Freiberg. Freud’s half brothers immigrated to Manchester, England, parting him from the “inseparable” playmate of his early childhood, Emanuel’s son, John.[13] Jacob Freud took his wife and two children (Freud's sister, Anna, was born in 1858; a brother, Julius, had died in infancy) firstly to Leipzig and then in 1860 to Vienna where four sisters (Rosa, Marie, Adolfine and Paula) and a brother (Alexander) were born. In 1865, the nine-year-old Freud entered the Leopoldstädter Kommunal-Realgymnasium, a prominent high school. He proved an outstanding pupil and graduated from the Matura in 1873 with honors...
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...AHMADU BELLO UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY DIPLOMA IN SOCIAL WORK AND DEVELOLPMENT STUDIES NAME: HEZEKIAH KELLY .O. COURSE CODE: SWD114 DATE: MAY 25TH 2013 SIGMUND FREUD’S STAGES OF PSYCHO-SEXUAL DEVELOPMENT Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) observed that during the predictable stages of early childhood development, the child's behavior is oriented towards certain parts of his or her body, e.g. the mouth during breast-feeding, the anus during toilet-training. He proposed that adult neurosis (functional mental disorder) often is rooted in childhood sexuality; therefore, said neurotic adult behaviors were manifestations of childhood sexual fantasy and desire. That is because human beings are born "polymorphous", infants can derive sexual pleasure from any part of their bodies, and that socialization directs the instinctual libidinal drives into adult heterosexuality.[3] Given the predictable timeline of childhood behavior, he proposed "libido development" as a model of normal childhood sexual development, wherein the child progresses through five psychosexual stages – the oral; the anal; the phallic; the latent; and the genital – in which the source pleasure is in a different erogenous zone. Freudian psychosexual development Sexual infantilism: in pursuing and satisfying his or her libido (sexual drive), the child might experience failure (parental and societal disapproval) and thus might associate anxiety with the given erogenous zone. To avoid anxiety, the child...
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...Sigmund Freud explored the human mind more thoroughly than any other who became before him. Words he introduced through his theories are now used by everyday people, such as anal (personality), libido, denial, repression, cathartic, Freudian slip, and neurotic. Freud was the founding father of psychoanalysis, a method for treating mental illness and also a theory which explains human behavior. Psychoanalysis is often known as the talking cure. Freud would encourage his patients to talk freely regarding their symptoms and to describe exactly what was on their mind. The case of Anna O marked a turning point in the career of Sigmund Freud. It even went on to influence the future direction of psychology as a whole. Anna suffered from hysteria, a condition in which the patient exhibits physical symptoms (e.g. paralysis, convulsions, hallucinations, loss of speech) without an apparent physical cause. Her doctor Josef Breuer succeeded in treating Anna by helping her to recall forgotten memories of traumatic events. Breuer discussed the case with his friend Freud. Out of these discussions came the germ of an idea that Freud was to pursue for the rest of his life. In Studies in Hysteria (1895) Freud proposed that physical symptoms are often the surface manifestations of deeply repressed conflicts. However Freud was not just advancing an explanation of a particular illness. He was proposing a revolutionary new theory of the human psyche itself. This theory emerged slowly as...
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...INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY (McLeod, 2015) Psychodynamic approach includes human functioning that drives within the unconscious and between different structures of personality. The understanding of human behaviour is called ‘psychoanalysis’. (Freud, 1939), the father of psychology, assumed that mental illnesses wasn’t something to be treated medically but by what has come to be known as psychodynamic therapy. He advocated that the unconscious mind could influence the mental illness whilst recovering (Cardwell, 1996). This approach to psychoanalysis is demonstrated in his treatment of Anna O. Freud assumed that mental illnesses wasn’t something to be treated medically but by therapy. He implicated that unconscious mind could influence the mental illness whilst recovering (Cardwell, 1996). He diagnosed her illness as hysteria and developed a form of therapy to treat her symptoms (Webster, 2015). (Cardwell, 2004) Freud compared the mind to an iceberg with the water above being the conscious and the water beneath the unconscious part of the mind. The id - the primary part of personality follows pleasure and gratification, and dominates the unconscious part of the mind. Ego - driven by reality principles and penalties of an action dominates the conscious mind. Superego contains conscience and guilt, and also dwells mostly in the conscious mind. The superego develops as we become aware of societal rules. (Cardwell, 1996) According to Freud we have two drives which are sex and...
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...Contributions to Society For each of the 5 approaches from AS you must know 2 ways in which it has contributed (been useful) to society. For Child, Criminology and Clinical you must know one contribution from each. For many of the approaches this can be therapies that are used for treating different behaviours. Social 1. Understanding Prejudice · Social approach helps us to understand why prejudice occurs. · SIT explains that prejudice occurs by simply belonging to a group– we belong to an in group and those not part of this are considered the out group. We categorise into these groups and identify with in group members by the beliefs we have and what we wear. In order to make our in group look good we display in group favouritism and show a preference for our in group and seeing their behaviours in a positive light. The behaviour of the out group we put down, and this boosts the in group self-esteem. · Realistic conflict theory suggests prejudice between groups occurs when there is competition for resources, and that it is not simply belonging to a group. This can explain why many groups can live alongside each other in harmony, which SIT cannot explain. · An example of SIT in action is football fans as they categorise themselves into teams e.g. either Man U or Chelsea and wear team colours e.g. red or blue. When these teams play they will call the fans of the rival team names to raise their own teams self-esteem. · Prejudice can account for a...
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...Sigmund Freud explored the human mind more thoroughly than any other who became before him. His contributions to psychology are vast. Freud was one of the most influential people of the twentieth century and his enduring legacy has influenced not only psychology, but art, literature and even the way people bring up their children. Freud’s lexicon has become embedded within the vocabulary of western society. Words he introduced through his theories are now used by everyday people, such as anal (personality), libido, denial, repression, cathartic, Freudian slip, and neurotic. Freud was the founding father of psychoanalysis, a method for treating a mental illness and also a theory which explains human behavior. Psychoanalysis is often known as the talking cure. Typically Freud would encourage his patient to talk freely (on his famous couch) regarding their symptoms and to describe exactly what was in their mind. The Case of Anna O The case of Anna O (real name Bertha Pappenheim) marked a turning point in the career of a young Viennese neuropathologist by the name of Sigmund Freud. It even went on to influence the future direction of psychology as a whole. Anna suffered from hysteria, a condition in which the patient exhibits physical symptoms (e.g. paralysis, convulsions, hallucinations, loss of speech) without apparent physical cause. Her doctor Josef Breuer succeeded in treating Anna by helping her to recall forgotten memories of traumatic events. Breuer discussed the...
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...Schlomo Freud BRIEF OVERVIEW Although Sigmund Freud was not the first person to formally study psychology, many consider him the most pivotal figure in the development of the field as we know it today. Freud changed the way society has come to think about and treat mental illness. Before Freud, mental illness was thought to result from deterioration or disease of the brain. Freud changed all of this by explicitly rejecting the purely organic or physical explanations of his predecessors. Instead he believed that unconscious motives and drives controlled most behavior. During a career that spanned 58 years, beginning with an earned medical degree in 1881 and continuing to his death in 1939, he developed and repeatedly revised his theory of psychoanalysis. Most of Freud’s theory was developed from contact he had with patients seen in his private practice in Vienna. This type of “clinical” work was a radical departure from the laboratory research that was practiced by most leading psychologists of the day. When Freud first presented his ideas in the 1890s, many of his contemporaries reacted with hostility. In fact, throughout his career, Freud faced enormous opposition to many of his ideas. Those especially controversial included notions about the role of the unconscious in behavior, childhood sexuality, and how the mind was governed (id, ego, and superego). But despite the opposition, Freud eventually attracted a group of followers that included well-known theorists 1856–1939 AUSTRIAN...
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...Personality: Theories Chapter: Personality Theories 429 Personality: Theories What Is "Personality"? Psychologists' Usage of Personality Elements of Personality Techniques of Study Theories of Personality Trait Theories Psychoanalytic Theory Central elements of Psychoanalysis Psychoanalytic Personality Structure Instincts in Psychoanalysis Other Psychodynamic Theorists (Social-) Learning Theories Dollard/Miller's Stimulus-Response Theory B. F. Skinner and Personality as Behavior Bandura and Social Learning Self-Growth Theories Carl Rogers and Person-Centered Theory Maslow's Holistic Theory A Modern Theory of Personality: Big Five USING PSYCHOLOGY: What Determines Your Personality -Heredity? Environment? USING PSYCHOLOGY: What Determines Your Personality -Heredity and Environment REVIEW ACTIVITIES INTERESTED IN MORE? Personality: Theories WHAT'S THE ANSWER? "I'm really jealous of my sister. Here I am about to graduate, and I only made it into the Student Association this year. Sis's a freshman -- a frosh -- and she's already been elected." "Wilma, I know what you mean. My older brother was the same way. You know what your sister and my brother have in common? They've both got a lot of personality. Your sister kind of just radiates charm -- even for a first-year student! And Kirk's the same way: Everywhere he goes, people smile with him. He gushes at the right time, gets serious when he needs to, and always has a good word for everybody. He's just got a PSYCHOLOGY: ...
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