Sigmund Freud is an outstanding Austrian psychoanalyst who developed a unique method of studying personality - psychoanalysis. He was the first to explore the hidden part of the psyche - the unconscious, its role in human life. Freud's philosophy laid the foundation for the development of new methods of studying the psyche and methods of psychological assistance.

Major discoveries

Freud made several fundamental discoveries in the field of psychology, introducing new trends and concepts. These include:

1. Unconscious. Under the Unconscious, Freud understood a special area of ​​the psyche, the presence of which a person is not aware of. The unconscious seeks to subjugate the will and save the human being from the pressure of moral norms.
2. Libido. Freud called it the engine of the mental life of the individual. Libido activity affects ambitions and aspirations. Freud draws a parallel between sexual and social activity: a man's libido is stronger than a woman's libido, so he has a stronger need for sex and a desire for competition.
3. Dream interpretation. The unconscious is constantly trying to overpower the will of the individual and sends him signals that remind him of suppressed desires. A person receives these signals in the form of dreams. To get rid of feelings of anxiety, you need to analyze dreams and find the true causes of discomfort.
4. Neuroticism. Mental disorders caused by the suppression of instincts, Freud collected in one group and called nervous diseases or neuroticism. All people who exist within the framework of European culture are subject to neuroticism, because they are distant from nature and are forced to constantly control their natural needs.

Not all contemporaries welcomed Freud's ideas, some criticized them. Karen Horney, an American psychoanalyst, in one of her works examined Freud's theory of women's envy of a man's penis in detail and suggested that in fact a man is jealous of the presence of a uterus and the ability to reproduce offspring, and the driving force of the human personality is not libido, but anxiety. Karen's bold views have made her one of the iconic figures of neo-Freudianism.

Personality

Initially, in philosophy, the idea of ​​a human being as a rational being was entrenched. All actions were seen as the result of a conscious decision.

So it was before the discovery of the unconscious - a hidden component that guides the actions of the individual, but remains unconscious.

Freud suggested that the psyche of the individual is not integral. This is a structure consisting of separate parts:

• "I" - is responsible for the conscious understanding of reality;
• "Super-I" - controls the components formed under the influence of social norms;
• "It" - stores repressed instincts and desires.

Every person has all the ingredients. They constantly interact with each other. When he has any desire, the Conscious evaluates it in terms of moral standards. If the fulfillment of a desire is fraught with a violation of these norms, it passes into the hidden part of the personality structure and remains there until it is satisfied. The more moral prohibitions an individual has (the stronger his will), the more unfulfilled desires he will have, hidden from the conscious beyond the “It”. Constant control over one's aspirations causes neurosis - somatic manifestations, expressed in physical and mental discomfort. Freudianism in philosophy made it possible to make significant progress in the study of one of the main questions of knowledge - the essence of man.

Components of the psyche

The human psyche consists of the Conscious and the Unconscious. They are not equivalent: the Unconscious tries to suppress consciousness and force the individual to follow his primary drives: Eros and Thanatos. Eros causes sexual desire, Thanatos - the need for death, one's own and someone else's. If the primary drives merge, the person becomes a maniac. He is unable to be guided by the principles of reality and sees the world distorted, created to satisfy his desires. The need to achieve harmony between the components of the psyche makes him commit murders and crimes of a sexual nature.

Functions of the Unconscious

"It" or the Unconscious requires a person to satisfy needs. The unconscious is guided only by inner desires, it is selfish and inconsistent. According to Freud, the main human desires are the desire for reproduction and power, the desire to experience pleasure and avoid feelings of fear. If a person in his actions is guided by the Conscious, the Unconscious comes into conflict with him. There is an emotional tension that needs to be eliminated. To do this, the psyche uses the following techniques:

1. Repression is the movement of desires into the area of ​​\u200b\u200bIt, where they continue to affect the psyche, causing a feeling of unconscious fear and anxiety.
2. Rationalization - the search for a more acceptable explanation for true desires, relieving feelings of shame.
3. Sublimation - replacement of instinctive drives for other activities: creativity, social work and others.
4. Regression - refusal of the individual from the perception of reality, a return to the stage of personality development, which could provide psychological comfort.

The constant conflict between Conscious and Unconscious leads to mental disorders. The main goal of psychoanalysis is to determine the true desires of a person, and to find compromise ways to implement them.

Origins of smoking addiction

Freud divided mental development into stages depending on the mode of obtaining pleasure. The first he called oral - the stage of obtaining pleasure with the help of the mouth area. Babies, feeding on milk from the mother's breast, stimulate the oral cavity. In the process of saturation, they have a feeling of satisfaction, and it is automatically associated with swallowing, chewing, licking.

Freud believed that smoking addiction appears in people who need to satisfy their needs, but who have the opportunity to fulfill them. These people mentally return to the first stage of development and unconsciously seek to influence the oral cavity.

Freud once said that a woman's addiction to smoking is a subconscious desire for oral sex. The scientist himself suffered from nicotine addiction, and his students immediately reminded him of this, hoping to embarrass him. In response to this, Freud said his famous phrase, which later became famous: "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

Role of culture

For Sigmund Freud, philosophy was a way of analyzing the influence of culture on a person. In his opinion, culture is an external censor of the individual, which determines the norms and boundaries of what is permissible. The process of cultural development is directly related to the feeling of satisfaction. The evolution of culture distances a person from nature, the satisfaction of primitive inclinations, and makes him unhappy.

Restriction of natural desires causes a feeling of guilt. Freud was convinced that culture suppresses man's natural desires for aggression and destruction. His colleague and follower Carl Jung at the beginning of his work was in solidarity with Freud, but later changed his mind. Jung considered in more detail the influence of libido on a person and his desire for creativity. Based on the teachings of Freud, Jung created his own theory of archetypes - images that form in the collective unconscious and affect people's perception.

Oedipus Complex and Electra Complex

The concept of Freud's philosophy includes a deep analysis of human sexual desires. The scientist believed that they are formed in childhood and manifest as the Oedipus Complex or the Electra Complex.

The description of the complexes was based on Freud's observations of parent-child relationships and ways of showing affection in boys and girls. He found that boys pay much more attention to their mother, tend to hug or kiss her, require constant attention. If the mother prefers to spend more time with her husband than with her son, the boy becomes jealous. Unconsciously, he feels sexual attraction to his mother and perceives his father as a rival. Girls show affection for their father and show a negative reaction to his attitude towards their mother.

Freudianism as a philosophical and psychological doctrine arose on the basis of psychoanalysis, a method of treating nervous diseases developed by an Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (1896 – 1939).

Freud's focus is on the problem unconscious.

Engaged in clinical practice, Freud came to the conclusion that the cause of nervous disorders is in the unconscious sphere of the human psyche. Experiences unacceptable to consciousness (mostly sexual) are suppressed and, being forced out into the unconscious, manifest themselves in dreams, hypnotic states, involuntary actions, slips of the tongue. The conflict between the conscious and the unconscious is the cause of neuroses. The task of psychoanalysis is to, with the help of free associations, the interpretation of dreams, and other methods, establish the cause of the disease, help the patient realize it, and so on. get rid of the complex of experiences.

In the human psyche, Freud identified 3 levels:

one)" It"- the unconscious, the sphere of instincts;

2)" I"- the area of ​​consciousness that controls all mental processes;

3)" Super-I» - superconsciousness, the area of ​​​​social norms and cultural prohibitions.

An important role in Freud's teachings is played by the concept of " sublimation”, meaning the switching of energy from socially unacceptable goals to socially approved ones: creativity in the field of science, art, social activity. In his book Totem and Taboo, he writes that religion, art, morality, social activity are nothing but the transfer of libido to non-sexual activities. Sublimation is the source of culture development. In creative activity - a way out of the conflict between the natural, instinctive and social.

Freud's merit is in his attention to the problem of the human psyche, his disadvantage is in underestimating the role of the conscious in human activity and social conditions in the formation of consciousness.

Freud's ideas were developed in the teachings Carl Gustav Jung(Swiss psychologist and sociologist).

Jung developed the concept collective unconscious . the collective unconscious is a deep layer of the psyche, which carries "the properties of all mankind as a kind of common whole." The contents of the collective unconscious are innate images, symbols - archetypes. They appear in fairy tales, myths, as well as in dreams, hallucinations. Such are the images of the Motherland, the Hero, the Dragon - the enemy of the Hero, etc.

By the influence of the collective unconscious, Jung explains not only the characteristics of the human psyche, but also a number of social ideas. Thus, he considered the idea of ​​National Socialism in Germany as an awakening in the collective unconscious of the mythological ancient German god of thunder and fury.

Erich Fromm(1900 - 1980) - a representative of neo-Freudianism. In his concept of personality, he uses the provisions of the works of Marx and Freud. Considers man as a synthesis of biological and social. He introduces the concept social unconscious, which is a set of character traits common to most members of a given social group and arising as a result of a common lifestyle and common experiences. Fromm identifies 4 types of social character: passive, typical of a feudal society; accumulative and exploitative, characteristic of capitalism, and market, dominating in modern Western society, when the person himself becomes a commodity. Capitalist, consumer relations do not correspond to human nature, they form a sick society. The task of psychoanalysis is not to treat the individual, but society, to reorient it to the principles of humanism.

Freudianism - In a broader sense, classical (orthodox) psychoanalysis is meant, in contrast to neo-Freudianism, Jung's analytical psychology and Adler's individual psychology. In a stricter and more precise sense, this term refers to the teachings of Z. Freud in the form in which it was created by him in the period from 1900 to 1938. Freudianism thus acts as the theoretical basis of psychoanalysis as a psychotherapeutic method, as well as the theoretical source of modern psychoanalytic concepts. Representatives of classical psychoanalysis still remain committed to the main provisions of Freudianism, in contrast to the representatives of neo-Freudianism, who partially rejected, partially rethought many of them.

Representatives

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)

Subject matter

Unconscious mental processes.

Theoretical Provisions

Psychic life consists of three levels: unconscious, preconscious and conscious. The unconscious level is saturated with sexual energy, i.e. libido, which breaks through the caesura of consciousness, is expressed in neutral forms, but having a symbolic plane (jokes, slips of the tongue, dreams, etc.)

The concept of infantile sexuality:

A child up to 5-6 years of age goes through phases: oral, anal and phallic.

"Oedipus complex" is a certain motivational-affective formula of a child's attitude towards his parents.

Components of personality: "id" (it) - the carrier of instincts, obeys the principle of pleasure; "ego" (I) - follows the principles of reality; "super-ego" (super-I) - the bearer of moral standards. Because of their incompatibility, “protective mechanisms” appear: repression - the arbitrary removal of feelings, thoughts and the desire for action from consciousness; regression - slipping to a more primitive level of behavior or thinking; sublimation - a mechanism by which sexual energy is discharged in the form of an activity acceptable to an individual or society (creativity, etc.)

Practice.

· Experiments with hypnosis have shown that feelings and aspirations can guide the behavior of the subject, even when they are not realized by him.

· Method of “free associations” i.e. an attempt to explain what associations correspond to not in the world of external objects, but in the inner world of the subject (their duality).

Position on the symbolic nature of dreams. According to Freud, in this symbolism the message of the world of unconscious hidden inclinations is allegorically presented.

1. preservation of life (the instinct of love - EROS)

2. oppose life and seek to return it to an inorganic state (death instinct - THANATOS)

Contribution to psychology

The disadvantage of Freudianism is the exaggeration of the role of the sexual sphere in the life and psyche of a person, a person is understood mainly as a biological sexual being, which is in a state of continuous secret war with society, forcing the suppression of sexual desires.

The problem of man in the philosophy of Existentialism (E.)

In the lane from lat. "existence" and Phil. existence.E.-fil current, which considers human life, human existence as its subject.

The ancestor of German E. became Heidegger. He defines the basis of human existence as finiteness, all temporality. As long as human existence lasts, there is a world, it will disappear and the world will disappear. Time is understood by him as the transfer of human existence of its limitations and flows between birth and death. Jaspers I saw the basic concept of phil in existence, borderline situation, care, suffering, guilt, etc. those. the essence of man is revealed in these boundary situations. A person cannot be considered objectively: he should be understood as an existence, representing a ur.human. being, no longer capable of becoming the subject of science. Existence is a person when he acts freely, does not allow himself and others to manipulate him. Man himself freely chooses his essence, he becomes what he makes himself. Chel is a constant opportunity, an idea, a project. He freely chooses himself and bears full responsibility for his choice. Freedom is the very people. existence, people is freedom.

Sartre. In man, existence precedes essence. Those. a person is free, there are no objective norms and regulations. Sartre compared a man to an actor .(people suddenly found themselves on the theater stage in the middle of the performance. He does not know the script, the play or his role, he must decide for himself who he should be. He can leave the stage at any time (suicide), but he will do this without understanding what the play is dedicated to in general) A person is doomed to freedom: once abandoned into the world, he is responsible for everything he does, responsible to himself, his beings. A person's life is not predetermined, he is the master of his own destiny.

Conclusion: A human child is born, already exists, but it has yet to acquire a human essence, to become a human being. Awareness of one's uniqueness is the fundamental constitutive moment of human reality.

43. The doctrine of the unconscious: Freudianism and neo-Freudianism

After the death of the Austrian physician and psychologist S. Freud (1856 - 1939), a significant theoretical legacy and conflicting assessments of the original teaching he created were left.

Sigmund Freud Along with studies in science, he practiced as a psychiatrist. He encountered difficulties in the treatment of patients with neuroses. Therefore, he was looking for effective methods to eliminate them. As a result, Freud comes to the conclusion that unfulfilled desires and unsatisfied drives are closely related to the signs of hysteria and neurasthenia in the patient.

Freudianism- the psychological concept of the beginning of the 20th century. Z. Freud and the doctrine of psychoanalysis that developed on its basis, based on the study of the deep layers of the human psyche, which puts unconscious mental processes and motivations in the center of attention.

In explaining human behavior, a three-level model of the psychological structure of the personality (Id - It, Ego - I and Super-Ego - Super-I) was used, which made it possible to highlight the problems of the psychology of business communication, conflicts, mechanisms for relieving stress and methods of psychological protection. Some important Freudian hypotheses:

§ every mental phenomenon has a definite cause;

§ unconscious processes play a more significant role in shaping thinking and behavior than conscious ones;

§ There are three main instances in the organization of human mental activity: Id, Ego and Super-Ego, which unite the consciousness and subconsciousness of a person and are manifested in his behavior.

The main contribution of Sigmund Freud to the theory of psychoanalysis can be considered his discovery of the fact that the human psyche consists of the conscious, preconscious and unconscious.

Under unconscious he understands those elements of the human psyche that are similar to animal instincts, namely, many of our desires and feelings.

The unconscious influences a person's consciousness, manifesting itself in dreams, slips of the tongue, mistakes, and in a hypnotic state. During sleep, consciousness almost completely loses control over mental life. Sleep is the realm of the unconscious. In a dream, the unconscious content of the psyche - pity, affects - “breaks through” into consciousness. Often they cannot be realized in everyday life, because they constantly run into social norms and prohibitions. The study of dreams helped Freud formulate the concept of the unconscious. The unconscious is unrealized desires. preconscious is nevertheless closer to the unconscious. The concept of the unconscious follows from the doctrine of the repressed. Everything repressed from the psyche is the unconscious, but not all the unconscious is repressed - this is the opinion of the great theorist and practitioner of psychoanalysis.

Conscious is consciously perceived by a person. This perception comes from outside and inside and is represented by our feelings and sensations. The state of awareness is not a long process and has limits.

Psychology of the unconscious, according to Freud, one of the greatest intellectual achievements of man.

In the course of developing his theory of psychoanalysis, Freud improves the idea of ​​the three-dimensional structure of the personality psyche. The latter is a combination of three elements - "I", "It" and "Super-I". Here "It" is an unconscious deep beginning, on the surface of which there is "I". The "I" becomes a link between the "It" and the outside world, a modified part of the "It". But inside the “I” itself, differentiation also occurs: the so-called “Super-I” or “Ideal-I” appears. It also reconciles "I" and "It" with each other as two opposites.

The cause of the neurasthenic state is a conflict between "I", "It" and "Super-I".

Man, according to Freud, has two main instincts: "self-preservation" and "reproduction". In the process of development of civilization, the instinct of self-preservation becomes not so important, and the instinct of reproduction - "libido" - comes to the fore. As a result of “libido”, such human qualities arise as cruelty, reaching aggressiveness, leadership, the desire to dominate, suppress other people.

In the last years of his life, Z. Freud dealt with issues of culture, social life and the place of a person in it. Summarizing the data of psychoanalysis, Freud put them at the basis of religious-historical research. Along with biological desires, the scientist also considers social ones. Libido becomes synonymous not only with physical love, but also with friendship, parental love, and even patriotism. During this period, the main driving forces for the development of nature and society are two principles - "Eros" (urges of life) and "Thanatos" (urges of death). In public life, the "Super-I" is understood as the totality of the "I" of individuals - members of society. Contradictions between "I", "It" and "Super-I" are also the source of the development of culture. Culture, in turn, becomes the cause of neuroses. People are afraid of the achievements of civilization, since these achievements may not be used for the best purposes. On the other hand, culture protects a person from external influences.

If a person chooses pleasures at the expense of culture, he remains without support in life and may die; if he prefers culture, he is subject to neuroses. The reconciling "Super-I", which appears in the person of strong personalities, leaders, helps a person to make a choice.

Freud's theory of psychoanalysis is of great importance not only for the development of medicine, clinical psychiatry, biology, but also for philosophy and social psychology.

Endowed with many contradictions and errors, this doctrine, nevertheless, makes a great contribution to the philosophical picture of the modern world.

The founder of Freudianism is an Austrian psychiatrist and psychologist Sigmund Freud(1856-1939). Based on the ideas of Freud, supplementing and clarifying them, a whole psychological direction of psychoanalysis gradually formed. Psychoanalytic theories include the concepts of Karen Horney, Alfred Adler, Carl Gustav Jung, Erich Fromm, Wilheim Reich, and others. Each of them contributed new and original ideas to this direction.

Based on many years of clinical observations, Freud formulated a psychological concept, according to which the psyche, the personality of a person consists of three structures, levels: "It", "I", "Super-I" (structural model of mental life).

• 1. "It" (Eid)- the unconscious part of the psyche, a seething cauldron of biological innate instinctual drives, aggressive and sexual. "It" is saturated with sexual energy (libido). Man is a closed energy system. The amount of energy in each person is a constant value. Being unconscious and irrational, "It" obeys the principle of pleasure, i.e. pleasure and happiness are the main goals in human life. The second principle of behavior is homeostasis - a tendency to maintain an approximate internal balance.
• 2. "I" (Ego) is the level of consciousness. "I" is in a state of constant conflict with "It", suppresses sexual desires. The level of consciousness is formed under the influence of society. The Ego is affected by three forces: "It", "Super-I" and society, which makes its demands on a person. "I" tries to establish harmony between them, obeys not the principle of pleasure, but the principle of reality.
• 3. "Super-I" (Super-Ego) serves as the bearer of moral standards. This is the part of the personality that plays the role of critic, censor, conscience. If the "I" makes a decision or performs an action to please the "It", but in opposition to the "Super-I", then the Ego is punished in the form of guilt, shame, remorse.

"I" is responsible for making decisions, seeks to express and satisfy the desires of "It" in accordance with the restrictions imposed by the rules of society, the outside world. Thus, the ego helps to ensure the safety and self-preservation of the organism. It is the Ego that analyzes, reasons, makes decisions.

The formation of the psyche, especially the "Super-I", in a child occurs through overcoming the oedipal complex. In the Greek myth of King Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother, according to Freud, the key to the sexual complex that supposedly gravitates over every man from all eternity is hidden. The boy is attracted to his mother, perceiving his father as a rival, causing both hatred, fear, and admiration; the boy wants to be like his father, but he also wants his death, and therefore feels guilty, afraid of his father. Fearing castration, the child overcomes the sexual attraction to the mother, i.e. overcomes the Oedipus complex (by the age of five or six), and he has a "Super-I", conscience.

"Super-I" contains a system of values ​​and norms that are compatible with those accepted in the human environment; allow him to distinguish between what is good and what is bad, what is moral and what is immoral. Freud divided the superego into two subsystems: the conscience and the ego-ideal. Conscience includes the ability for critical self-assessment, the presence of moral prohibitions, and the emergence of guilt in a person when he did not do what he should have done. ego ideal is formed from what is approved and highly valued by parents and the individual himself; it leads a person to set high standards for himself. The superego is considered fully formed when parental control is replaced by self-control.

The "Super-I" does not let the instincts into the sphere of the "I", and then the energy of the instincts is sublimated, transformed, embodied in other forms of activity that are acceptable to society and man (creativity, art, social, labor activity), in forms of behavior (in dreams, misspellings, slips of the tongue, jokes, puns, free associations, features of forgetting). Thus, sublimation is the transformation of the energy of repressed, forbidden desires into other activities that are allowed in society.

If the energy of the libido does not find a way out, then a person may have mental illness, neuroses, tantrums, longing. To save from the conflict between "I" and "It" means of psychological protection are used. Such behavior allows a person to protect himself from those problems that he cannot yet solve; allows you to relieve anxiety from threatening events (loss of a loved one, favorite toy, loss of love from other people, loss of love for yourself, etc.); "get away from a threatening reality", sometimes transform this threat. For a while, a defense mechanism is needed because the person cannot solve the problem at the moment. But over time, if a person does not solve the problem, the defense mechanism can be an obstacle to personal growth. Human behavior becomes little predictable, he can harm himself; he moves away from reality and from the problems that he needs to solve. Thus, the defense mechanisms themselves often give rise to more and more new problems, and a person hides his real problem, replacing it with new pseudo-problems.

Freud identified the following defense mechanisms:

• 1) repression (suppression) - involuntary removal of unpleasant or unlawful desires, thoughts, feelings, experiences in certain situations from consciousness to 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, a constant expenditure of psychic energy is required. As a result, energy may not be enough to maintain human activity and health, as a result of which repression is often a source of bodily diseases of a psychogenic nature (headaches, arthritis, ulcers, asthma, heart disease, hypertension, etc.). Allocate:
  • o complete suppression, when painful experiences are so suppressed that a person completely forgets them and does not know that they were in his life, however, they indirectly affect his health and behavior;
  • o partial suppression(repression), when a person restrains experiences, tries not to think about them, but cannot completely forget, and repressed experiences erupt in the form of unexpected violent affects, inexplicable actions, etc .;
• 2) negation- withdrawal into fantasy, denial of any event as untrue ("this cannot be"). A person shows a vivid indifference to logic, does not notice contradictions in his judgments;
• 3) rationalization- an unconscious attempt to justify, explain one's wrong or absurd behavior, and, as a rule, these justifications and explanations do not correspond to the true reason for the committed act, which may not be realized by a person;
• 4) inversion (counteraction) - the substitution of actions, thoughts, feelings that meet 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, he begins to experience the opposite desire to annoy, anger his mother, cause a quarrel;
• 5) projection - an unconscious attempt to get rid of an obsessive desire, idea, attributing it to another person; attributing to another person their own qualities, thoughts, feelings, shortcomings, in which it is difficult for a person to admit to himself. When something is condemned in others, it is precisely this that a person does not accept in himself, but cannot recognize, does not want to understand that these same qualities are inherent in him. For example, a person claims that "some Jews are deceivers" when in fact it may mean: "I sometimes deceive." Thus, projection allows a person to place the blame on someone else for their shortcomings and blunders;
• 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 younger sister, breaks her toys, kicks the dog, i.e. the sister and the dog stand in for the parents at whom the child is angry;
• 7) isolation - separation of the threatening part of the situation from the rest of the mental sphere, which can lead to a split personality, an incomplete "I";
• 8) regression - a return to an earlier, primitive way of responding. Stable regressions are manifested in the fact that a person justifies his actions from the position of a child's thinking, does not recognize logic, defends his point of view, despite the correctness of the interlocutor's arguments. In difficult stressful situations, sometimes children's habits return (nail biting, etc.). In severe cases, when the present situation is unbearable for a person, the psyche defends itself, returning to an earlier and safer period of its life, for example, to early childhood, and regression leads to a loss of memory of later periods of life.

Weight protective mechanisms have common properties:

• a) act at an unconscious level and therefore are a means of self-deception;
• b) distort, deny or falsify the perception of reality in order to make anxiety less threatening to the person.