Hidden Minds (13 page)

In
Phaedrus,
Plato suggests that the soul, or mind, is like a chariot drawn by two very different horses. One is noble and refined while the other is base and impulsive. To steer the chariot, the charioteer must take into account the temperament of both horses. This is exactly the position of the ego in Freud’s three-way division of mind. The id is constantly seeking to satisfy libidinal urges while the superego is constantly holding back. To steer a steady course, the ego must evaluate each situation in turn, and balance the id’s instinctual needs against the superego’s capacity for disapproval.

Because the id and superego make conflicting demands, a compromise must be reached. This compromise is accomplished by the ego, when defence mechanisms are activated. The most common defence mechanism is
repression.
If an unacceptable thought or wish enters awareness, this will produce discomfort in the form of anxiety. The offending thought or wish is then automatically forced below the awareness threshold, and anxiety subsequently subsides. An individual does not make a conscious decision to repress material. The mechanism functions unconsciously.

Unwanted thoughts and wishes may not always cause discomfort, and the psychic ban may be lifted in due course. Thus, defence mechanisms work like a psychological thermostat, maintaining a state of mental equilibrium.

Unfortunately, there is a cost attached to the deployment of defences. Energy is required to maintain a defence, leaving less energy available for other uses such as general day-to-day functioning. The situation is analogous to an advancing army establishing several defensive garrisons but at the same time reducing its overall power. An ego that is protected by too many defences may be too weak to function. When this happens, the affected individual is likely to complain of symptoms associated with mental illness.

Freud specified two principal situations necessitating the deployment of costly defences. First, when an individual has had a traumatic life experience (particularly an early one) and second, when an individual has failed to mature properly, and is subsequently revisited by the inappropriate wishes and desires of infancy. The most celebrated example of the latter is the Oedipus complex – in which the strong (and often sensual) attachment to mother fails to resolve itself in adolescence and survives into adulthood. The Oedipus complex is also associated with hostile feelings directed at the father (on account of his privileged access to the mother). In both cases, either traumatic memories or unacceptable Oedipal wishes must be kept out of awareness to reduce discomfort. Keeping such material in the unconscious consumes a considerable amount of psychic energy.

Although repression is the most common defence, Freud discussed many others, though he did not attempt to describe them in great detail. This task of naming, cataloguing, and defining defences was undertaken mainly by his daughter Anna, Examples include
reaction formation
(in which real feelings are masked by an intensification of their opposite) and
projection
(in which unacceptable thoughts or feelings are attributed to others). Like repression, defence mechanisms such as reaction formation and projection are deployed unconsciously. Thus, the individual does not realise the extent to which reality is being distorted. Freudian psychotherapy is largely concerned with the achievement of insight and the correction of distorted perceptions.

One of Freud’s most enduring analogies is his comparison of therapy to the Dutch land-reclamation project. He suggested that the ego was like a land mass threatened by the rising waters of the id. Familiar landmarks slowly disappear as thoughts, feelings, and behaviour are increasingly determined by unconscious processes. In the same way that the Dutch reclaimed the Zuider Zee, so must the psychoanalyst win back parts of the mind that have succumbed to the unconscious. When psychoanalytic treatment is successful, the individual can abandon redundant defences, thus liberating sufficient energy to strengthen the ego. The individual can live a full life, in touch with the present moment and free from distortions.

To achieve therapeutic results, the patient must gain insight into his or her symptoms; however, such insight is difficult to accomplish – the major determinants of symptoms (such as repressed memories) and the operation of defence mechanisms being unconscious. Even so, although the unconscious guards its secrets closely, it is not beyond betraying itself. It sometimes makes mistakes or ‘leaks’ information. Subsequently the observant analyst is able to recognise significant signs and interpret them for the patient. Like Breuer, Freud’s first attempts at revealing the content of the unconscious involved hypnosis. But he found the technique unsatisfactory For example, one of his early patients – Fräulein Elisabeth von R – responded to his mesmeric efforts by proclaiming triumphantly: ‘I’m not asleep you know; I can’t be hypnotised’. Subsequently Freud soon developed his own methods, and by rejecting hypnosis managed simultaneously to distance himself from a shamanistic tradition and enhance his own scientific credibility.

Freud discovered that if patients were encouraged to talk freely, without constraint, they tended to touch upon subjects and experiences highly relevant to their symptoms. He called the technique
free association.
Freud also noticed that the unconscious gave itself away through verbal errors – the so called ‘Freudian slip’. Careful consideration of such slips revealed the patient’s true (and often inappropriate) intentions and wishes. Freud also suggested that the relationship between therapist and patient could reveal important information. Often, patients re-enacted elements of previous meaningful relationships, unconsciously projecting the characteristics of parents or significant others on to the therapist. He called this phenomenon
transference;
however, the most important method of probing the unconscious was the ‘royal road’ of dream interpretation.

Like many commentators before him, Freud believed that, in sleep, the barrier between the conscious mind and unconscious mind was weakened. As a result, urges and desires usually confined in the unconscious could escape and ascend into awareness – posing a threat to sleep (as the sleeper could easily be shocked into a waking state by unacceptable images). Because sleep has a restorative function, repeated awakening might eventually injure health. Consequently a censor operates in the mind, transforming unacceptable material into acceptable material that will not disturb the sleeper.

Freud distinguished between the
manifest content
and
latent content
of dreams. The manifest content is the edited or transformed dream, the latent content is the unedited or untransformed dream. The reason why dreams often don’t make very much sense, is that the original narrative has been subject to so many transformations. The purpose of psychoanalytic dream interpretation is to decode the manifest content to reveal the underlying latent content. This is achieved by taking each element of the dream – be it image, thought, or feeling – and using it to initiate a chain of free associations. Predictably, the patient’s associations touch on clinically relevant material and the psychoanalyst can infer the latent meaning of the dream when the process is complete.

Freud called the process by which unacceptable material is disguised
dream work.
Mechanisms operate in the sleeping mind that perform the same anxiety-reducing function as defences when the mind is awake. Freud described several of these mechanisms, but the most well known (and easiest to grasp) is
symbolisation
. When symbolisation occurs, an unacceptable object is transformed into an acceptable alternative. Like von Schubert some forty years earlier, Freud saw phallic significance in knives and clarinets when they appeared in the context of a dream.

Although Freud never insisted that all dreams are ultimately sexual in nature, his clinical work suggested that the unacceptable or latent content of dreams was frequently associated with a forbidden erotic wish. Indeed, he believed that some kind of
wish fulfilment
was the most unvarying feature of all dreams.

Clearly, Freud’s theoretical framework and treatment methods place enormous emphasis on the role of unconscious memories, processes, and motivation. In 1915 Freud started to write a series of papers on metapsychology. He subsequently produced a collection of complex, densely written articles, containing some of his most significant theoretical formulations. It is generally agreed that the most important of these is a seven-part essay on ‘The Unconscious’.

Freud was always at his most combative when defending the concept of the unconscious – an activity that he repeatedly returned to throughout his career. Remarkably, he was still justifying the concept when he died. An unfinished scrap of theoretical writing was discovered after his death which contained yet another defence of the unconscious.

Why was Freud so indefatigable in this respect?

Obviously, Freud was keen to strengthen the theoretical foundations of psychoanalysis. The entire edifice was underpinned by the unconscious, so it was essential that these subterranean struts and supports were well maintained, but Freud was also simply responding to criticism. Although the unconscious had been mooted since the time of Leibniz, it was still regarded as a controversial concept. Many philosophers, scientists, and doctors continued to approach the unconscious with scepticism and a significant body of academics rejected it altogether. There were even dissenting voices within the psychoanalytic movement. Several heretical disciples believed that Freud had exaggerated the role of the unconscious and that more consideration should be given to the accessible contents of the ego.

Resistance (and particularly academic resistance) to the unconscious is -on the face of it – quite understandable. The unconscious is a concept that balances precariously on the cusp dividing science from the paranormal. It is invisible and intangible, and like most things that cannot be directly observed or touched elicits mistrust. Human beings have a strong sense of self, possession of a unique identity that transacts with the world by making rational choices. Although Freud’s assertion that individuals suffering from mental illness might show compromised insight and deficiencies of judgement was plausible, his idea that all of humanity (to a greater or lesser extent) suffered from exactly the same problem was construed by many as an offensive over-generalisation. Most people don’t feel out of control, or driven by dark, primitive forces. How could it be that almost all of human behaviour was determined by unconscious processes? Freud’s suggestion sounded preposterous.

Given Freud’s tireless defence of the unconscious, it is surprising that initially he was rather cautious about the idea. The ‘Preliminary communication’ does not refer to unconscious memories, but this is not because of ignorance or the failure of the medical lexicon to supply an appropriate term. Freud was already very familiar with the concept of the unconscious – and had been for most of his life. In Freud’s school were textbooks which described the work of Herbart, and when Freud was studying medicine at Vienna seniors such as the physiologist Ewald Herring recognised ‘unconscious material nerve-processes’ and ‘unconscious trains of ideas’. Freud would have encountered the unconscious in the context of German romantic philosophy and he was, of course, well acquainted with the work of Charcot and Janet.

Freud was a neurologist. Subsequently, when he began to develop an interest in psychological problems, he was still thinking like a neurologist. At the time of his early publications with Breuer his ultimate ambition was to give an account of psychological phenomena by describing the activity of brain cells and the flow of chemical energies. He was trying to do this by using physical rather than psychical explanatory concepts. This proved to be extremely difficult and by 1899, with the publication of 77ie
Interpretation of Dreams,
he had completely given up trying. Describing mental life in terms of neuronal systems had proved inadequate. The subtleties of mental life could not be captured using a reductionist, physiological theory, and Freud was forced to adopt a psychological vocabulary – making use of the term ‘unconscious’ inescapable.

Although Freud cannot be credited with discovering the unconscious, he can certainly be credited with investing the greatest amount of energy into trying to understand it. More than any of his forerunners and contemporaries, he tried to show what the unconscious was like; how it worked and how it was different from the conscious mind,

Freud opens his 1915 essay on the unconscious with guns blazing – ready to address the critics:

Freud begins by addressing some very basic objections to the idea of the unconscious. The first of these is logical absurdity. How is it possible to arrive at knowledge of the unconscious? If material in the mind is really unconscious, then it is unknowable. Moreover, if unconscious material does enter awareness – becoming known – then it cannot be described as unconscious any more. To get around this problem Freud invokes the notions of transformation. The contents of the unconscious can be inferred by examining phenomena such as slips of the tongue, dreams, and symptoms. Unconscious material remains unconscious, but enters awareness in a modified form or distorts the contents of awareness from below the awareness threshold, In this way Freud neatly disposes of the apparent contradiction of knowing the unknowable.

Freud then appeals to the reader’s everyday experience of mental life, which seems to depend on an unconscious substratum of activity. Freud notes that ideas (and sometimes solutions to problems) seem to just pop into awareness apropos of nothing. Where do they come from? Where are such problems worked out? Simple self-observation seems to suggest that many ideas are the result of prior stages of preconscious analysis or contemplation. Even ordinary thoughts and images just arrive in the stream of consciousness. We are not aware of their assembly, only their delivery.