Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [124]
Dynamic Psychology: Extensions and Revisions
Between 1900 and 1923 Freud expanded and altered his theories of psychology but thereafter, he said, he made “no further decisive contributions to psychoanalysis.”69 He did produce three major works between 1923 and 1939, but they deal with issues reaching beyond the bounds of psychology and are not our concern.*
He also further elaborated his ideas about psychoanalytic technique in a number of papers, but the fundamentals remained unchanged. In truth, Freud was not much interested in therapeutic technique except as a means to two ends—earning a living and, more important, exploring human nature and adding to the science of the mind.70 “Psychoanalysis,” he said late in life, “which was originally no more than an attempt at explaining pathological mental phenomena… [has] developed into a psychology of normal mental life.”71
As a method of investigating mental life, psychoanalytic therapy sees the world in a grain of sand. Freud derived some of his largest and most daring theoretical ideas from tiny details—an image or name in a patient’s dream, a slip of the tongue, a joke, an odd symptom, a remembered scene of childhood, a facial expression. In a lecture on the “parapraxes” (little slips and mistakes), Freud told his listeners he knew they might regard these as too trivial to merit study, but, he explained in his inimitably charming manner, they are clues to hidden psychological realities:
The material for [psychoanalytic] observations is usually provided by the inconsiderable events which have been put aside by the other sciences as being too unimportant—the dregs, one might say, of the world of phenomena… [But] are there not very important things which can only reveal themselves, under certain conditions and at certain times, by quite feeble indications?…If you are a young man, for instance, will it not be from small pointers that you will conclude that you have won a girl’s favor? Would you wait for an express declaration of love or a passionate embrace? Or would not a glance, scarcely noticed by other people, be enough? a slight movement, the lengthening by a second of the pressure of a hand? And if you were a detective engaged in tracing a murder, would you expect to find that the murderer had left his photograph behind at the place of the crime, with his address attached? or would you not necessarily have to be satisfied with comparatively slight and obscure traces of the person you were in search of?72
It was from patient attention to endless trivia that Freud pieced together the main elements of his psychology. The chief extensions and revisions of his early discoveries are as follows:
Infantile sexuality: 73 Although Freud had early recognized sexuality as a powerful force in childhood, not until 1905, in Three Essays, did he state the far more radical conclusion that the sexual drive is present even in infancy. What convinced Freud was his own accumulating clinical evidence plus confirming observations reported in the medical literature. His conclusion: “A child has its sexual instincts and activities from the first; it comes into the world with them.”74
But what he meant by sexuality in infancy and childhood is a broader and more pervasive impulse than the sexuality of adulthood; although Freud called it sexuality or libido, he was speaking of the general desire for sensuous pleasure of any kind. Gentle stimulation of any part of the infant’s body yields such pleasure; the infant is, in Freud’s term, polymorphous perverse. At first, the mouth is the major site of sensuous pleasure, obtained initially by sucking, then by mouthing and eating; when the child is between one and a half and three, the anal region becomes a chief source of sensuous pleasure as he or she begins to control and be aware of the expulsion or the willful retention of feces; and between the ages of three and six the child derives pleasure from self-stimulation of the genitals.
Parents, however, exert a powerful restraining influence on these elemental gratifications, mostly through