The pleasure principle
The first part of the series of notes on the reality principle and the pleasure principle is based on a reading of Freud’s work “Propositions on the Two Principles of Mental Events,” published in 1911. In this work, Freud designates the pleasure principle as the highest tendency to which the primary unconscious processes of the soul are subordinated.
Thus, the path to understanding what the term pleasure principle encompasses lies through an understanding of unconscious primary processes. In the same work, the primary processes of the soul are characterized as “remnants” and “older” and it is assumed that there was a phase of development of the soul processes in which they were the only ones. The primary process and the principle of pleasure are connected by Freud with the formula: primary processes are aimed at obtaining pleasure and mental activity is removed from what can cause displeasure using the mechanism of repression. Reflections on Freud's formula above leave a number of questions unresolved, which will be resolved in Freud's subsequent works. Where are the repressed mental acts associated with displeasure placed? In the logic of submission to the principle of pleasure of the unconscious, repressed, bringing displeasure has no place in the unconscious. And the next reflection is what is the connection between the primary and the secondary process introduced by Freud, which in this case performs the function of repression. In the case of repression, is there a need to differentiate mental processes into primary and secondary?
Transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle
The reason for the introduction of the reality principle is, according to Freud, the “powerful demand of internal needs.” But when reading the text, we can conclude that the attempt to satisfy these needs through hallucination failed. And as a consequence, the desire of the mental apparatus arises to change the real conditions of the external world. Thus, a new principle of mental activity appears - the principle of reality: the ability of the mental apparatus to abandon pleasant hallucinatory ideas and, in connection with this, the transition to the representation of what is real, for subsequent change.
A number of points remain not entirely clear after this description. How can one distinguish between a “pleasant” hallucinatory image and an image of what is real? Why did the mental apparatus initially attempt hallucinatory satisfaction? What is the power demand of internal need?
PERSONALITY STRUCTURE IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 3. FREUD
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66. STRUCTURE OF PERSONALITY IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 3. FREUD
3. Freud presented personality structure in the form of a three-component model.
1. Id (It) is a source of energy for the entire personality and is of a biological nature. The contents of the id - thoughts, feelings, memories, events from life - are unconscious, since they were never realized or were rejected, being unacceptable, but they affect human behavior even without conscious control. The id is the guardian of all innate human instincts, the main of which - the instinct of life (Eros) and the instinct of death (Thanatos) - oppose each other. The id lives and is governed by the pleasure principle, seeking its satisfaction without being subject to the reality principle. The id is irrational and at the same time has unlimited power, and the demands of the id are satisfied by the authority of the Ego (I). The id is located at the unconscious level of the psyche.
2. Ego (I) is the part of the personality that is in contact with reality; it is a kind of human consciousness, localized at the conscious level of the psyche. The ego follows the principle of reality, developing a number of mechanisms that allow it to adapt to the environment and cope with its requirements. Its task is to regulate the tension between internal (drives or instincts) and external stimuli (coming from the environment), to control the demands of instincts emanating from the Id.
3. Superego (Super-I) - the source of moral and religious feelings, the figurative existence of conscience, includes traditional norms, as parents understood them, acts as a censor of actions and thoughts, uses unconscious mechanisms of limitation, condemnation and prohibition. The location of the Supereto may vary depending on the perceived contents of it.
All three components of the personality are in opposition to each other, which determines the main internal conflicts of the personality: the Id, which strives to satisfy its desires, ignoring any rules and norms, faces the Superego, which fights everything that contradicts generally accepted moral norms, and the Ego is a battlefield and confrontation between the Id and the Superego.
67. PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT IN PSYCHOANALYSIS
Freud identified 4 sources of personality development: processes of physiological growth, frustration, conflicts and threats. Because of them, tension arises, which leads to the fact that a person masters more and more new ways to reduce this tension, and this is the process of personal development. Personality development is completed by age 5, and all subsequent growth represents the development of the basic structure. The periodization of the development of a child’s personality consists of 5 stages, which are called psychosexual, since at each stage development is controlled by libido energy, which has its own characteristics, and fixation at a certain stage leads to the formation of one or another type of character.
Stages of psychosexual development
1. Oral stage (0-1 year) - to satisfy his sexual instincts, the child uses the mother as an external object, and satisfaction of desire occurs through the oral cavity. In the case of fixation at this stage, dependence and infantility predominate in a person’s character.
2. Anal stage (1-3 years) - the child learns self-control and develops a sense of ownership.
3. Vaginal stage (3-5 years) - interest in their genitals appears and boys and girls become aware of their differences from each other, sexual identity begins to form, which occurs as a result of the successful resolution of the Oedipus complex in boys and the Electra complex in girls. The essence of these complexes is the emergence of sexual attraction to a parent of the opposite sex and hatred and jealousy towards a parent of the same sex.
4. Latent (hidden) stage (6 years - before the onset of puberty) - the strength of sexual instincts weakens under the influence of social factors - education, school, active physical and intellectual development of the child.
5. Genital stage (from 10-11 to 18 years) - the external object and methods of satisfying libido are a person of the opposite sex with normal development and a person of the same sex with any deviation and problems associated with sexual identity.
68. CHARACTERISTICS AND HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 3. FREUD HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE THEORY 3. FREUD
1. On the basis of psychoanalysis, almost all theories of the unconscious were created, and also gave impetus to the development of theories antagonistic to psychoanalysis: humanistic psychology, existential psychology, Gestalt therapy by F. Perls and many others. Freud is one of the founders of modern psychology as a science not only about the human psyche - consciousness and the unconscious psyche, but also about the individual, their bearer.
2. Introduction to the field of research of such phenomena of the human psyche that were ignored before psychoanalysis: research into the nature and causes of neuroses, the inner world of the “I” and those structures that did not fit into the actual “conscious” in a person.
3. Empirical value of psychoanalysis: the subject of psychoanalysis - the unconscious - was studied not in the laboratory, but in practice, which gives psychoanalysis great advantages over many other theoretically oriented schools.
4. The relevance of some of Freud's ideas: consideration of the development of the human psyche from the point of view of its adaptation to the environment and emphasizing the eternal opposition between the environment and the organism (although both of them are not initially and always conflicting in relation to each other); consideration of the driving forces of mental development as having an innate and unconscious nature; the opinion that personality is fundamentally formed in early childhood and the mechanisms of its development are innate.
Directions of criticism of theory 3. Freud:
1) a mythological explanation of “sexual complexes*, an ahistorical approach to the analysis of cultural and social processes of society;
2) unlawful transfer of conclusions made on the basis of private observation to more general patterns of development of nature and society;
3) biologization, the absence of a social factor influencing the development of personality, and the pansexuality of Freud’s concept.
4) criticism and reconstruction of the ideas of psychoanalysis on the part of its followers, aimed at introducing social determinants of personality development.
FREUD IDENTIFIED THE FOLLOWING DEFENSE MECHANISMS:
1) repression of desires - involuntary removal of unpleasant or illicit desires, thoughts, feelings, experiences in certain situations from consciousness into the area of the unconscious psyche “IT”; suppression is never final, repressed thoughts do not lose their activity in the unconscious and to prevent their breakthrough into consciousness requires a constant waste of mental energy, as a result of which there may not be enough energy to maintain a person’s activity and health, as a result, repression is often the source of physical diseases of a psychogenic nature ( headaches, arthritis, ulcers, asthma, heart disease, hypertension, etc.). The mental energy of suppressed desires is present in the human body, regardless of his consciousness, and finds its painful bodily expression. The result of suppression is demonstrative indifference to this area, reality. There is complete suppression - when painful experiences are so suppressed that a person completely forgets them and does not know that they were in his life, but they indirectly affect his health and behavior. Repression is a partial suppression
repression, a person “holds back” experiences, tries not to think about them, but cannot completely forget them, and repressed experiences “break through” in the form of unexpected violent affects, inexplicable actions, etc.;
2) denial - withdrawal into fantasy, denial of any event as “untrue.” “This cannot be” - a person shows clear indifference to logic, does not notice contradictions in his judgments; 3) rationalization - an unconscious attempt to justify, explain one’s wrong or absurd behavior, building acceptable moral, logical justifications, arguments to explain and justify unacceptable forms of behavior, thoughts, actions, desires, and, as a rule, these justifications and explanations do not correspond to the true reason perfect action, but the true reason may not be realized by a person; 4) inversion or reaction - substitution of actions, thoughts, feelings that correspond to a genuine desire, with diametrically opposed behavior, thoughts, feelings (for example, a child initially wants to receive his mother’s love for himself, but, not receiving this love, begins to experience the exact opposite desire to annoy mother, anger her, cause a quarrel and hatred of the mother towards herself); 5) projection - an unconscious attempt to get rid of an obsessive desire, idea, by attributing it to another person, attributing to another person one’s own qualities, thoughts, feelings - that is, “removing the threat from oneself.” When something is condemned in others, this is precisely what a person does not accept in himself, but cannot admit it, does not want to understand that these same qualities are inherent in him. For example, a person claims that “some Jews are deceivers,” although in fact this could mean: “I sometimes deceive”; Thus, projection allows a person to place blame on someone else for his shortcomings and failures. Projection also explains social prejudice and scapegoating, since ethnic and racial stereotypes provide a convenient target for attributing negative personality characteristics to someone else;
6) substitution - the manifestation of an emotional impulse is redirected from a more threatening object or person to a less threatening one. For example, a child, after being punished by his parents, pushes his little sister, breaks her toys, kicks the dog, i.e. the sister and the dog replace the parents with whom the child is angry. This form of substitution is less common when it is directed against oneself: hostile impulses addressed to others are redirected to oneself, which causes a feeling of depression or condemnation of oneself;
7) isolation - separation of the threatening part of the situation from the rest of the mental sphere, which can lead to separation, dual personality, and an incomplete “I”;
regression - a return to an earlier, primitive way of reacting; stable regressions manifest themselves in the fact that a person justifies his actions from the perspective of a child’s thinking, does not recognize logic, defends his point of view, despite the rightness of his interlocutor, the person does not develop mentally and sometimes childhood habits return (biting nails, etc.). In severe cases, when “the present situation is unbearable for a person,” the psyche defends itself by returning to an earlier and safer period of its life, for example, early childhood, and regression leads to loss of memory of later periods of life. Milder manifestations of regression in adults include intemperance, resentment (sulking and not talking to others), opposition to authority, childish stubbornness, or driving at a recklessly high speed.
All people use defense mechanisms to some extent, and this becomes undesirable when people rely excessively on them, when they distort the picture of a person’s needs, fears, and aspirations. All defense mechanisms have common properties:
• they operate on an unconscious level and are therefore means of self-deception;
• They distort, deny, or falsify perceptions of reality to make the anxiety less threatening to the person.
Anxiety, or a feeling of impending danger, can be of the following types:
• realistic anxiety - an emotional response to the threat of real dangers in the outside world, helps ensure self-preservation;
• neurotic anxiety - an emotional response to the danger that unacceptable impulses from the “IT” will become conscious, this is the fear that the EGO will be unable to control sexual or aggressive desires, and you will do something terrible that will entail severe negative consequences;
• moral anxiety - when the EGO experiences a threat of punishment from the SUPER-I, when “IT” strives for
active expression of immoral thoughts or actions and the SUPER-EGO responds to this with feelings of guilt, shame and self-blame;
• Social anxiety arises from the threat of exclusion from a peer group due to inappropriate behavior. Freud later showed that anxiety, originating in the superego, ultimately develops into the fear of death and the expectation of retribution in the afterlife for past or present sins.
Anxiety in neurotics is a consequence of inadequate discharge of libido energy and is a means of warning a person about impending danger. When the body is threatened, anxiety arises. With real anxiety, the threat comes from a specific external source; with neurotic anxiety, its source is unknown. In infancy and childhood, anxiety arises as a result of excessive excitation of instincts - later it appears in anticipation of danger, and not as a reaction to danger. An alarm signal mobilizes protective measures, mechanisms aimed at avoiding a real or imagined external threat, or psychological defenses that neutralize the increased excitation of instincts. Instinctive drives that were once, in some situations, unacceptable, and therefore were expelled from consciousness, suppressed, hidden in the unconscious part of the psyche, are preserved as hidden centers of excitation and gradually undermine the defense system. Thus, neuroses develop as a result of a partial failure of the defense system. A more severe disorder of defense mechanisms leads to mental illnesses (for example, schizophrenia), which are characterized by significant deformation of the ego and perception of reality.
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