Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [127]
Earlier, Freud had held that the development of the superego takes place in girls in a fashion exactly analogous to that in boys. Later, he came to think that the girl, lacking castration anxiety, has a less intense Oedipal crisis and therefore a less developed superego and moral sense throughout life.78 (Curiously, the paper in which he stated these patriarchal views was, at his request, read on his behalf at the 1925 International Psycho-Analytical Congress by his beloved daughter, the psychoanalyst Anna Freud.)
The individual’s behavior is thus the outcome of an interplay among the three agencies of the psyche. The id seeks immediate gratification of its desires; the ego, using reality-principle thinking, seeks to restrain the impulse and find acceptable forms of gratification; and the superego exerts control by means of parental values absorbed into the unconscious. When the id is too strong for the ego and superego, the person’s behavior is either pathological or criminal; when the superego is too strong for the ego, the person is guilt-ridden and frustrated or moralistic and persecutory of others.79 In the healthy individual, the ego controls the system, finding ways to permit sufficient gratification of the id but not at the cost of bringing about overwhelming guilt feelings from the outraged superego.
Instinct theory: 80 By “instinct” Freud did not mean what biologists mean: specific forms of behavior coded into the genes—web spinning by spiders, nest building by birds—forms of behavior he referred to by the German word Instinkt. But the German word translated in the Standard Edition as “instinct” is Trieb, which denotes “impulse,” “moving force,” or “drive.”81
In his early work Freud had assumed that the sexual instincts associated with the mouth, anus, and sex organs made up the sum total of psychic energy. But his later research on “repetition compulsions” (tendencies to repeat self-defeating or painful acts) plus the horrendous events of World War I broadened his thinking; he became convinced that there is also an instinct to destroy. When directed outward, it takes the form of aggression, but if blocked, it may turn inward, as seen in repetition compulsions.
He thus propounded a two-instinct theory: The life instinct, or Eros, comprises all life-preserving impulses, among them the sexual drive; and the death instinct, or Thanatos, embraces all impulses toward hostility, sadism, and aggression—and even, he tentatively suggested, a mysterious drive toward one’s own death.
Anxiety, symptoms, defenses: 82 Originally Freud held that neurotic anxiety and its symptoms—as distinguished from the realistic anxiety one feels when facing a real-world danger—arise from the blocked energy of the repressed sexual instinct: unrelieved sexual tension generates anxiety. But as he accumulated clinical data, he developed the more sophisticated explanation on which he based the theory of the Oedipus complex and its resolution, and extended it to account for other forms of neurotic anxiety. An instinctual desire reaching consciousness either as a fantasy or overt action creates an anticipation of harm. This causes the child to feel intolerable anxiety; the ego, to defend itself, represses the instinctual desire, whereupon the anxiety disappears.
But what does the psyche do with the bottled-up energy, the tension-producing unpleasure of the unfulfilled instinctual demand? How does the psyche keep it from breaking through into consciousness? One solution—the defective, pathogenic one Freud saw in his neurotic patients—was the formation of symptoms:
A symptom arises from an instinctual impulse which has been detrimentally