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Example research essay topic: Point Of View Id Ego - 2,312 words

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... y suppressed the seduction theory for prudential reasons, then said something equally outrageous about infantile sexuality. Odd, if Freud was trying to be a conformist and avoid opprobrium. In my view Sulloway does not succeed. At the end of his book there is a section called 'Catalogue of Major Freud Myths'. That is probably where the term paranoia crept into my sense of his approach, since about twenty-three of the myths are said to have the function of 'nihil ating' the role of biological assumptions in psychoanalysis.

If I had written a book that destroyed twenty-six myths, twenty-three of which had the function of denying something, I would begin to wonder about my thesis. Again and again there is 'nihil ation of the biological processes, a way of avoiding facing the evolutionary basis as a way of... ' The myth says that psychoanalysis is X, and the function of the myth almost always turns out to be denying what Sulloway is asserting. His thesis is therefore, to put it mildly, counter-inductive. His list of myths becomes very shrill. Most seem designed to avoid acknowledging the role of biology, without giving us any ideas why it should occur to anybody to have avoided biology and to have kept silent about this matter.

It begins to feel a little bit like a conspiracy to hide things for Sulloway. Having said that, I now want to revert to my main argument. What is going on? How can we move to a less simplistic picture? Having mentioned the barest co-ordinates, I should like to put some terms of reference on this map of the sociology of psychoanalytic knowledge - some other cities, as it were.

I shall quote the conclusion to a paper on 'The points of view and assumptions of metapsychology' in which David Rapaport and Merton Gill attempt a succinct expression - which Rapaport considerably extended in a longer essay (Rapaport, 1960) - of the natural scientific heritage in psychoanalysis. The five points of view are partially overlapping and are spelled out in such a way as to achieve maximum resonance with physics, chemistry and biology: In this paper we have stated and discussed the points of view which guide meta psychological analysis and the assumptions which constitute metapsychology proper. We repeat the definitions and assumptions here in synoptic form. The dynamic point of view demands that the psychoanalytic explanation of any psychological phenomenon include propositions concerning the psychological forces involved in the phenomenon. (a) There are psychological forces. (b) Psychological forces are defined by their direction and magnitude. (c) The effect of simultaneously acting psychological forces may be the simple resultant of the work of each of these forces. (d) The effect of simultaneously acting psychological forces may not be the simple resultant of the work of each of these forces. The economic point of view demands that the psychoanalytic explanation of any psychological phenomenon include propositions concerning the psychological energy involved in the phenomenon. (a) There are psychological energies. (b) Psychological energies follow a law of conservation. (c) Psychological energies are subject to a law of entropy. (d) Psychological energies are subject to transformations, which increase or decrease their entropic tendency. The structural point of view demands that the psychoanalytic explanation of any psychological phenomenon include propositions concerning the abiding psychological configurations (structures) involved in the phenomenon. (a) There are psychological structures. (b) Structures are configurations of a slow rate of change. (c) Structures are configurations within which, between which, and by means of which mental processes take place. (d) Structures are hierarchically ordered.

The genetic point of view demands that the psychoanalytic explanation of any psychological phenomenon include propositions concerning its psychological origin and development. (a) All psychological phenomena have a psychological origin and development. (b) All psychological phenomena originate in innate givens, which mature according to an epigenetic ground plan. (c) The earlier forms of a psychological phenomenon, though superseded by later forms, remain potentially active. (d) At each point of psychological history the totality of potentially active earlier forms co-determines all subsequent psychological phenomena. The adaptive point of view demands that the psychoanalytic explanation of any psychological phenomenon include propositions concerning its relationship to the environment. (a) There exist psychological states of adapted ness and processes of adaptation at every point of life. (b) The processes of (autoplastic and / or allo plastic) adaptation maintain, restore, and improve the existing states of adapted ness and thereby ensure survival. (c) Man adapts to his society - both to the physical and human environments which are its products. (d) Adaptation relationships are mutual: man and environment adapt to each other... The future development of psychoanalysis as a systematic science may well depend on such continuing efforts to establish the assumptions on which psychoanalytic theory rests. (Rapaport and Gill, 1959, pp. 8 - 9). There are a number of scientific terms in use in this formulation which are derived from the tradition in which Freud worked as a student, i. e. , physicist physiology - the so-called Helmholtz School of Physiology, involving Back, du Bois-Raymond, and others. It is completely uncontroversial in Freud scholarship that Freud studied and did physiological research in this framework for many years.

He stopped doing it only because he had to earn a living. Most of his meta psychological concepts are seen to have derived indirectly or metaphorically from their physicist approach to how the body works. This is the origin of the use of physical concepts of force, energy, structure. The nineteenth-century physicalist's were a crusading group with a commitment to the proposition that no forces other than those physical and chemical ones studied by physics and chemistry are at work in human or other organisms: no vital forces.

Their research was dedicated to interpreting the nervous system in these terms. When Freud turned to the mind in On Aphasia and in the 'Project for a scientific psychology' (1895), he strove to express mental phenomena in neurological terms and postulated metaphorical neurology-like concepts where the strictly neurophysiological concepts were - as they patently were - inadequate. As is well known, the 'project' proved too much for him, and he moved from a metaphorical physiology to a fully psychological way of writing about human nature and human distress. This is not surprising. The problem about the mind, of course, is that since a part of its Cartesian definition is that it is 'that which does not pertain to matter', it is defined negatively by contrast to physics. Therefore modern philosophy and science are really stuck for a language in which to speak about it, and people come up with all sorts of languages, some of which I will be considering below.

If you are going to talk about the mind as mind, you need to borrow a vocabulary from somewhere. The above concepts are important if one wants to think at all about psychoanalysis as a scholar or as a student of scientific theories. But it is very easy to be taken over by all this and to get oneself engaged in the activity of searching out where these concepts come from, their intellectual and historical roots, and how the five points of view interrelate. Freud never really put one model aside in favour of a later model.

They all continue to be used. Thinking and writing about these concepts and their interrelations implies that we are engaged in an exercise rather like working out a new periodic table of elements or fundamental particles on the model of physics and chemistry. It has that feel about it, and not accidentally: that is the kind of respectability one tradition in psychoanalysis has been looking for. I do not wish to be thought to be seeking to ignore this aspect of Freud's thinking: it is there. Yet, as I have said, it is very easy to get taken over by all this unless one listens for the silences or has an antidote, in this case Bettelheim. He wants to heave all this language overboard or wear it very lightly, and to point out how evocative Freud's own prose was and how it resonates with the dialectic of experience.

The list of concepts you get from Bettelheim is very short and not all that hard to remember: metaphor, symbol, ambiguity, contradiction, dream and myth, perhaps myth above all. Even Freud, when he thought about a science of dreams, finally said that we really cannot have a science of dreams, since each process of symbolization is unique, and the only person who knows the meaning of a dream is the person who has it (aided by his or her analyst). Once alerted to this contrast, one begins to wonder why such a onesie story is being told by Sulloway. For example, Sulloway stresses ontogeny and phylogeny. Ontogeny is the development of the individual; phylogeny is the development or evolution of the species. There is a very, very partial truth (Stephen Gould has written a book on how partial a truth it is) that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: the development of the individual recapitulates the development of the race, of the species and its precursors.

I am sure you have all seen pictures of human embryos. At one stage, an embryo looks a little bit like a fish. Sulloway stresses ontogeny and phylogeny and other biological concepts, but he is practically silent about Freud's most pervasive use of the classics - the Bible, literature, prehistory, archaeology (there were some classical and pre classical figurines on his desk that were so precious to him that he was not prepared to leave Vienna even after the German occupation until he was assured that he could take them with him). His trips to see Italian churches and museums, and the problems he had getting to Rome, are well known. If you think about what he wrote about totemism and Michelangelo and Moses and taboos and jokes and civilization and dreams and myths and the vicissitudes of everyday life and, above all, Oedipus, you begin to wonder how on earth we can put this Freud together with Sulloway's Freud. We have two very, very different accounts.

One way would be to distinguish the early from the late. Bettelheim does a little of that when he writes: The English translations cleave to an early stage of Freud's thought, in which he inclined toward science and medicine, and disregard the mature Freud, whose orientation was humanistic, and who was concerned mostly with broadly conceived cultural and human problems and with matters of the soul. Freud himself stated that he considered the cultural and human significance of psychoanalysis more important than its medical significance. (p. 32) What it is about is the human essence. Now, Bettelheim actually will not settle for that.

He wants to claim much more - that the humanism is of the essence of psychoanalysis. He writes about this very well: How Freud conceived of psychology can be seen from the way he spoke about it in The Question of Lay Analysis: 'In psychology we can describe only with the help of comparisons. This is nothing special, it is the same elsewhere. But we are forced to change these comparisons over and over again, for none of them can serve us for any length of time. ' There are several reasons for Freud's frequent use of metaphors in explaining the nature of psychoanalysis.

One is that psychoanalysis, though it is confronted with hard, objective facts, does not deal with them as such but devotes itself to the imaginative interpretation and explanation of hidden causes, which can only be inferred. The metaphors that Freud used were intended to bridge the rift that exists between the hard facts to which psychoanalysis refers and the imaginative manner in which it explains them. A second reason is even more closely related to the nature of psychoanalysis. Because of repression, or the influence of censorship, the unconscious reveals itself in symbols or metaphors, and psychoanalysis, in its concern with the unconscious, tries to speak about it in its own metaphoric language.

Finally, metaphors are more likely than a purely intellectual statement to touch a human chord and arouse our emotions, and thus give us a feeling for what is meant. A true comprehension of psychoanalysis requires not only an intellectual realization but a simultaneous emotional response; neither alone will do. A well-chosen metaphor will permit both. (pp. 37 - 8) The examples he goes into most persuasively show what happened in the Strachey translation. They are the concepts of id, ego and superego which, he points out, are very classicized terms. In fact it is the 'it', the kind of primitive 'it-ness' of infertility; it is I, not ego; and it is that which is over I - over me - superego. If you actually read Freud's prose in that way, it feels very different from id, Ego and Superego.

It is less arcane and touches one more. One can get in the habit of having some sense of these matters. The other issue Bettelheim goes into concerns the levels of subtlety and the resonances of the Oedipus complex. The meaning of the term 'Oedipus complex' is symbolic. Like all the metaphors Freud used in his writings, this term is valuable primarily for its suggestiveness and referential richness. It is a metaphor operating on many levels, since it alludes to other metaphors by its overt and covert references to the myth and the drama.

Freud chose it to illumine and vivify a concept that defies more concise expression... (p. 2 1) Oedipus, in fleeing Corinth, paid no attention to the admonitory temple inscription 'Know thyself'. The inscription implicitly warned that anyone who did not know himself would misunderstand the sayings of the oracle. Because Oedipus was unaware of his innermost feelings, he fulfilled the prophecy. Because he was unknowing of himself...


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Research essay sample on Point Of View Id Ego

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