Psychoanalytic Perspective Notes

Pioneered by Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalytic perspective is unique in that it constructs its perspective independent of all the other traditions in the social science. Building on his experience as an experimental biologist, Freud employs dominant evolutionary themes, including his strongest claim that people are organisms and that the physical human body is the first point of contact with reality and remains in constant dialogue with it. All other understandings of social structures and phenomena are thus incomplete.

Educated in gymansium, Freud was also inspired by the German humanist tradition and employs linguistics, art, poetry, and literature in his work, as well as utilitarian models from Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill that human behavior is driven by a primal psyche driven around the pleasure principle. In this sense, he breaks with Marx and other materialists in asserting that human ideologies are not completely rooted in economic conditions but are products of tradition and the past as displayed in the replication of the superego from parent to child. But to understand that past, as well as human experience, social structures, language, a researcher must examine how the construction of the psyshce is itself a product of historical and social functions.

Society, for Freud, is the human psyche, which translate better as the soul or mind. The individual may be the methodological unit of analysis, the purpose of psychoanalysis is to generate an understanding of that individual's soul's construction, which requires a dialogue with the dominant cultural and economic structures of the period. External reality is only made known to us through subjective reality, which is something of another order that cannot be merely understood as the product of external or social reality.

Culture and society are thus composed of institutionalized compromise formations, collective defense mechanisms, shared projections and sublimations that both express and manage the necessary and universal conflicts of human life, especially in its unconscious dimensions.

Human nature, conflict, sturggle, etc are not just the infinite desires and finite resources explained by utilitarians, but the product of repressed unconscious with further implications of persistence of all stages of life in psychic reality, including childhood and of intrapsychic conflict.

All of our social behavior is contingent upon a heretofore unacknowledged social reality. Consciousness is a sense organ, preconsciousness is comprised of an attention processor, memory banks, and censor. The unconscious mind is not directly accessible, knows not time, does not know the world no, the contents of which are universal biological drives plus repressed memories and voices.

Transference is the process through which we are able to jump from one system to the next: your capacity to recall on command the capital of certain states or countries is the result of lessening any extneral pressures blocking the way as well as any internal stumbling blocks. The unconscious is inaccessible to the conscious mind because of repression barriers which are the product of an internal conflict forcing a stream of psyhic energy to block our capacity to recall or summon certain impulses or memories. To make the unconscious conscious requires a method of overcoming those barriers.

Unconscious thinking has peculiar characteristics and properties: it is filled with energy from biological instincts for which neither logic nor negation apply. The psychoanalytic project is one through which we seek to build a model of the mind to explain and organize empirical observations.

Freud's earliest model had the ego, superego, and id as a system of places but he scrapped it due to overlapping aspects of unconsciousness in the ego and superego. Repression is the quantom of psyhic energy split off and used to put up a barrier between it and consciousness.

We can not understand the psyche except through inferring its structure from its effects. This is no different than social life for we infer without knowing personalities, backgrounds, etc based on behavior. It is like understanding how a camera works by only glancing at the lens.

Free association is critical for analysis as only when one relaxes the guards of the gates of reason and allow thoughts to arise pell mell can we hope to penetrate events suppressed into the unconscious. This may lead to chaos, but nothing that is said is purely random. Symptoms of socially degenerate behavior have a meaning in terms of an individual's life as well as typical conditions.

How does one go from free association to theory? Well, the interpretation of dreams, symptoms, jokes, and slips of tongue are meaningful ways of viewing the unconscious. We know our interpretation is correct when the person in therapy gets better and the free association and other data points provide sources of evidence.

Clinical data forms the basis of findings, but for judgments of society as a whole we can turn to the aforementioned dreams, jokes, and slips of tongue that are messages from the unconscious and taken together form the collective unconsciousness of a whole set of people.

And what is in that unconscious? Well, what it is to be a living creature, for starters, as drives are really just psychological expressions of instincts. This is a Hobbesian world view through which repression is necessary for society to function. The ego serves to negotiate between internal reality and the demands from external agencies. Social and cultural traditions are internalized super-egos passed down from an older set of super-egos.

Critics are many. The easy one is reduction of human behavior to sexual and bilogical drives. Another is that this is little more than crude utilitarianism and historians levy the same critiques fired at that field as reasoning by analogy supersedes knowing through a close examination of data. Another tautlogical fallacy is pretty apparent: you don't believe us, you're just repressed. The projective theory of culture also allows the observer too much power in defining the outside culture in his own terms. Also, tied to a worldview that was very early 20th century Jewish Vienna.