Freud Analysis of a Mind
Name:
Institution:
Tutor’s Name:
Date of submission:
Freud Analysis of a Mind
Introduction
Psychiatry may be an old medicine but psychoanalysis is actually very recent, and was actually very developed by the works of Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis is an extremely complicated and not particularly unified set of ideas due to the fact that it has been revised fundamentally and revisions and extensions still continue. in spite of this, the effect it has had on contemporary thinking is astounding. Freud was therefore the first doctor to create the mind as the site for unreason.
This is the procedure for the investigation of mental processes which are almost inaccessible that is based upon the investigation and collection of information obtained along those lines which eventually accumulate to a very distinct discipline. It does basically depend on the method of free association.
Psychoanalysis
Initially he argued that behavior could be explained by traumatic experience in the early childhood that left their mark on the individual despite that fact that the individual as not consciously aware of those experiences. The idea therefore was that once an individual became conscious of this, the events would lose their unconscious power and the individual would be in control.
Psychoanalysis is a specific mind investigation technique and a therapy that has been inspired from this investigation. In order to emphasize, this form of science implies no form of speculation and it tends more towards psychotherapy than it does to philosophy, culture or art.
According to Freud, for a healthy and working mind, a person must have three basic components of their mind. That is the ego, the id and the superego. Generally, the ego finds it difficult to deal with the conflicting demands of the other two components, these is the id and the superego. He continues to state that these conflicts are intrinsic in nature and as such cannot be divorced from the human nature.
It is thus true to argue accordingly that this conflict is one of the fundamental battles that every individual faces in their life. How this conflict, between instant gratification and long-term reward, is then resolved is what determines the individual’s character and eventually build the personality of an individual and how he or she relates with other people.
In this analysis, Freud considered the id of an individual. This included the libido and the tenacious “will to live” and worked on the pleasure principle. People generally did what they found to feel good when they did it. For instance, she took piano lesson because she found pleasure playing the piano. Secondly is the superego. This in contrast is the force of self-criticism and conscience and reflects requirements that stem from the individuals social experience in a particular society or environment.
This superego arises from the first great love attachment. Initially, the child’s experiences are very judgment based but over time they are internalized and become part of his ego. It eventually becomes what the child ideally feels that he should become. Finally it develops to what people generally call a personality. This leans towards the actual reality as it tries to act as a go-between for the strain that the id demands and the prohibitions that the superego impacts.
Given this basic organization of the personality, it is conflict that tends to handle the two aspects. This is because as the individual experiences all sorts of drives and urges coming from the id, and feels guilty about them because of the prohibitions of the superego, they try to handle the situation. For example aggressive and destructive urges may be devoted to a playing the piano.
In contrast, those drives are stuffed back into the unconscious and the individual denies that they exist. They may have a variety of strange effects on behavior as a result. Take for example the idea of sex and sexuality. A person with repressed sexual feelings may end up becoming very prudish about all other sexual matters; or the may project these feelings to another person as where a person who represses there homosexuality are fast to detect homosexual tendencies on others whether they are homosexual or not. This is true also for several other characters or personalities that a person feels guilty to hold.
Freud believed that these basic conflicts can play out in various ways. Each infant, he argues goes through a series of phases in which the basic drives were oriented around, first oral drives, then anal drives and finally genital drives. At the genital stage, the child becomes sexually attracted to the parent of the opposite sex and views the same sex parents as competitions. What is now understood as the Oedipus complex in boys and is comparable to the Electra complex in girls. If the guilt that arises as a result therefore is not handled adequately by the ego, it leaves a lasting imprint that eventually determines the individual’s behavior. There are instances that it extends into adult life and manifests itself in some very anti-social manner.
A major tool that he used to deal with such issues was transference. This is the tendency for the past significant relationships to be replayed during current significant relationships. As the relationship grows, the person tends to bring out these features out as they generate the problems. Sometimes transference results not from real features but presumed ones or the ones that tend to remind the person of previous experiences.
Delinquent behavior therefore, such as drug abuse can be attributed to malfunctions in the ego or the superego as the id will generally lack control for these short term desires as it is constant and in born source of drives and urges and will vary according to the individual.
Conclusion
The intervention that comes where psychoanalysis is involved, include confronting the defenses, the wishes or desires and the guilt. It is through the analysis of the conflicts that arise therefore, including those that cause resistance and even those that involve transference, one can understand how unconscious symbolic reactions have been stimulated over several periods and time by several experiences that make people behave in the way they do as has been illustrated by the video.
As such the video itself tries to elaborate not only Freud’ work but the reason as to why psychoanalysis has been changed so many times over, is tough to develop while at the same time has proved difficult to dispute. It is therefore true that the development of a stable and integrated sense of self is built depending on how much one interacts with others and not just confined in one room or a never changing environment.
Reference
Freud Analysis of a Mind (2007). Retrieved from HYPERLINK “http://www” http://www.veoh.com
