When his father died in 1896 Freud was devastated even if it was something to be expected and started analyzing his own dreams as a patient of his own and called this method self-analysis. Ended up to the conclusion that as a child he had a “sexual” or a desire stated correctly for his mother and wanted the removal (death) of his father in order to fulfill his needs, but as an adult things can be interpreted differently, So Freud himself, was the original evidence for the Oedipus complex which he assumed that is an inevitable and inescapable consequence of any child's development at early stages of life. This helped Freud to solve a problem for a treatment in hysteria, he was impressed that his patients were recalling scenes from childhood and in most cases there was included a parental sexual abuse. Freud (1896) had published papers with a “seduction theory” of hysteria stating that childhood sexual abuse was necessary past fact for that illness. After that point a physician called it a scientific fairy tale because there was no scientific methods involved so Freud began having doubts about his methods of understanding and confessed to his friend that most of the patient’s memories failed to show the certain symptoms and he couldn’t prove if the assumptions made were valid.
Gradually Freud gave more emphasis on the analysis of the patient’s dreams than on their symptoms because dreams provided more detailed and vivid point of view without any individual dynamic. Freud discovered that usually the content of his patients' dreams included unconscious fantasies about himself and other relationships the patients had had with important people in their lives.
Another method of Freud is to do a free association starting without a particular stimulus word, but merely encouraging the client to talk about himself. Without much questioning , the client is encouraged to go on with these free associations and discuss all kinds of previous experiences. When he gets anywhere near of a suppressed conflict, he is liable to become inhibited and that, in itself, is considered to be diagnostic.
A method theory that is occasionally used for more stubborn cases where it is suspected that the real problem ,goes back to some early childhood experience, is to use hypnotic age regression. The patient is hypnotized, told that he is a child at some particular age and asked to describe what he has been doing.This technique, it is hoped , may bring out traumatic details that would be difficult to recover in the waking state. The effective treatment of such approach involves locating the suppressed conflict and bring it to the surface by talking about it so that there is no more conflict suppression. Furthermore Freud attempted to introduce a structural model of personality composed of three elements, the id, the ego and the superego. According to Freud, the key way to a healthy personality is keeping a balance between the id, the ego, and the superego, those three scales can be important to one’s personality structure.The id is present in an individual from birth, it is totally unconscious and includes instinctive behaviour is driven by pleasure (needs and wants) and if the needs of the individual are not satisfied anxiety and tension is created. The ego is responsible for dealing with reality and tries to find something in the real world that can be matched with the id’s desires. Additionally superego is having the sense of what is right and wrong and what individuals have learned from the society and their parents, eventually is what is driven individuals to make judgments.
Generally Freud’s work contribute to the understanding of personality, abnormal psychology and human development as something beyond science.
Freud’s first topography in 1900-1923 was a qualitative approach of the levels of mental awareness, he distinguished between three different levels, the conscious, the preconscious and the unconscious. Conscious is the worries that we are aware of at every minute, the everyday feelings of life when we are awake, preconscious is remembering recent activities and facts such as phone numbers, is a long term memories which is easy to remember, and the unconscious part are the memories of our early years, for example childhood memories that are in the unconscious level but can still influence our behaviour today. Freud’s theories were more based on the unconscious part, he assumed that by understanding the memories of past experience, he could explain the behaviour of the patient more easily (hypnosis).
Furthermore, Sigmund Freud believed that humor was a key issue to escape from the unconscious level, stated that humor was a way to say things to one another that you really feel but cannot express them openly, individuals using humor as a window to a situation might actually have some truth in their sayings. According to Freud when a person express the wrong statement and is being mistaken then sometimes the mistaken statement can tell us more about what the person is thinking at a specific case.
Nowadays , Freud’s method is the only one among different types of psychoanalysis that it is used in psychiatry but despite that is not something that can be reliable and often fails to introduce standards of treatment.. Another way to undertake psychoanalysis is the traditional method where the two participants, the patient and the therapist do not even face each other during the analysis but nowadays patients prefer a more interactive psychoanalysis with the therapist. Freud’s method was not used even by the ones who still have to deal with psychoanalysis. According to Colby (1960) psychoanalysis cannot be considered a science due to its shortage of predictions with any accuracy. Furthermore, because of the lack of interpretative regulations two analysts may examine the same phenomenon and interpret it differently. Holt (1986) finds fault with the demographically restricted sample of individuals on which Freud based the majority of his data and theory.Much of Freud’s work and theory was developed through individual case studies and these tend to be highly subjective and difficult to generalize results to a larger population. According to Farrel (1981) because psychoanalysis deals chiefly with unconscious motives and repressed emotions common sense no longer seems to be applicable.
These critics of Freud’s theory stressed the interpersonal aspect of the relationship between the psychoanalyst and the patient, and gave more emphasis on the processes of the ego
Freud is not scientific in the sense that observations and replications assumed by himself cannot introduce an experiment that can be tested again and again and obtain the same results, so unconsciousness cannot be seen or measured scientifically with any scale (criticized by Beystehner). Freud method only gets involve with ideas, motivations, wishes , motives of the individual on the hysterical behaviour and cannot give a structural information or diagnose if there is a unique functioning of the body or mind. . Freud’s theory was a collection of qulitative data instead of quantitave data ,so he couldn't make any scientific predictions.The justifications for supporting the theory were less than the critiques against it so the reader can conclude that psychoanalysis may not be as great of a theory as previously supposed.
Nevertheless , psychoanalysis can be used to explain many aspects of human psychology , the only thing that confirms the theory is the fact that although so many criticisms were made against it the theory is still remaining as a scientific method, containing some valid arguments that can be proved in clinical and research psychology. So in spite of the fact that psychoanalysis and its methods have survived for so long, yet strictly speaking it does not conform to the rigid demands of scientific theory and method.
.
(word count :1616)
Referencing
1) Raymond E. Fancher's Psychoanalytic Psychology: The Development of Freud's Thought (1973).
2) Peter Gay's Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988).
3) Patricia Waugh : Literary Theory and criticism (2006) page 199-211
4) The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition 2007
5) Eysenck, H. J. (1986). Failure of treatment--failure of theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 9, 236.
6) Farrel, B. A.(1981): “ The Standing of Psychoanalysis”. Oxford: Oxford University
7) Holt, R.R.(1986): “ Some reflections on testing psychoanalytic hypotheses”.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 9, 242-244.
8) Colby, K.M (1960) : “ An Introduction to Psychoanalytic Research”, New York.
