Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [118]
“The pleasure-unpleasure principle is fundamental in Freud’s psychology,” Jones says. “It automatically regulates all the processes of cathexis.”44 “Cathexis,” a critically important term in Freud’s writing, is a word coined by James Strachey, translator of the Standard Edition, to approximate Freud’s use of Besetzung, the German word meaning “occupation” or “filling” that Freud used to signify “charge of psychical energy,”45 or, in lay terms, “emotional investment.”
Hunger is a typical wish. When primary-process thinking (imagining food, dreaming of food) fails to relieve unpleasure, secondary-process thinking takes over; the cathexis or psychic energy is transferred to real-world activities, such as buying food and cooking, that will, after a while, alleviate the hunger and bring about the pleasure of relief.
Primary processes therefore operate according to the pleasure principle, secondary processes according to the reality principle. But as Freud would later add:
The substitution of the reality principle for the pleasure principle implies no deposing of the pleasure principle, but only a safeguarding of it. A momentary pleasure, uncertain in its results [i.e., those of the wish], is given up, but only in order to gain along the new path an assured pleasure at a later time.46
Sexuality; the Oedipus complex: 47 Although Freud’s ideas about sexuality would not assume their mature form or significance in his system until somewhat later, we have seen that even before 1900 he had come to believe that the sexual drive is one of the most powerful, exists even in childhood, and plays a major role in the development of both the normal and the neurotic personality.
The most important aspect of this drive, he held, was that in young children it is usually directed by primary processes toward the parent of the opposite sex. As everyone knows, Freud called these wishes Oedipal, because Oedipus, in the Greek myth, unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother. In the young boy, the sexual wish directed toward the mother is accompanied by hatred of the rival, the father, and by the hostile wish to be rid of him. But through realistic secondary-process thinking the child recognizes that his father is far stronger than he and would certainly win any struggle between them, and that the Oedipal wish involves grave danger.
The resulting conflict between wish and fear causes intolerable anxiety. Not until 1910 would Freud label this the “Oedipus complex,”48 but in letters to Fliess in the late 1890s he had begun drawing the analogy to the Oedipus myth, and he publicly stated the theory in brief form in 1900 in The Interpretation of Dreams. He saw the Oedipus complex as an inevitable part of human experience: “It is the fate of all of us, perhaps”—soon he would drop the “perhaps”—“to direct our first sexual impulse toward our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that this is so.” Later, he would theorize about a different but analogous phenomenon in female children.
Repression: 49 To survive the anxiety of the Oedipus complex, the child represses the Oedipal wishes, hiding them away in the unconscious. Repression is a central and essential mechanism of the mind, the psyche’s basic way of defending itself against a highly anxiety-producing conflict produced by a primitive wish and fear of harm in the real world. Jones says that it “may certainly be counted as one of Freud’s most important and original contributions.”
In the years to come, Freud would extend the theory of the Oedipus complex and its resolution through repression to make it the core of a theory of child development.
Principle