Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other concepts have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his assumption of Western superiority over ‘primitive’ peoples, and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions over into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

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Background

Freud was allowed to leave Austria by the newly installed Nazi authorities in early June 1938. The unfinished manuscript of ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’ bears the date July 1938, so scholars think that he began to write it either while waiting for permission to leave Austria or soon after his arrival in England. By early September he had written 63 sheets of notepaper but broke off to undergo a serious operation for the spreading cancer of his jaw and he never resumed work on it.

The manuscript was discovered among his papers after his death in September 1939. The editors of the Pelican Freud Library point out that although it might be unfinished, it is not incomplete. The final chapter is shorter than the others but appears to complete the prospectus laid out in the preface.

Almost all Freud’s previous works (for example, the Introductory and New Introductory Lectures) were aimed at the general public. The Outline, the editors explain, is not. It is more like a refresher course for established students of psychoanalysis with the result that the style is clipped and many matters alluded to only briefly, on the assumption that the reader is already familiar with sometimes quite detailed aspects of the theory.

The work is in three parts. Part one describes the structure of the mind, its division into id, ego and superego, and the pressure of the external world. It lays out the nature of the two great categories of primal drive – the sexual urge to procreate (Eros) and the organism’s wish to cease stimuli and excitation (the death drive or Thanatos).

In part two, Freud discusses the technique of psychoanalysis, what its aims are, how it works.

In part three, Freud (briefly) situates psychoanalysis within the broader realms of philosophy and psychology, before recapping the theory.

Preface

The teachings of psychoanalysis are based on an incalculable number of observations and experiences and only someone who has repeated these observations on himself and on others is in a position to arrive at a judgement of his own upon it.

Part 1. The mind and its workings

Chapter 1. The psychical apparatus

The oldest part of the psyche is the id. It contains everything inherited at birth, which means the instincts. The id develops an outer layer to mediate with the external world, the ego. The ego has the task of self-preservation. As regards external events it does this:

• by storing up stimuli in the memory
• by avoiding excessively strong stimuli (through flight)
• dealing with moderate stimuli (through adaptation)
• learning to bring about change in the external world to its own advantage (activity)

As regards the internal world the ego performs its task of self-preservation by gaining mastery of the instincts, deciding which ones will gain satisfaction and when, or vetoing them altogether.

It is guided in these decisions by tensions caused by (internal and external) stimuli: raised tension is experienced as unpleasure, lowered tension is experienced as pleasure. The ego strives after pleasure and to avoid displeasure. A foreseeable increase in unpleasure leads to anxiety. From time to time the ego retires from its job of mediation into sleep, which appears to be necessary to rest the body and brain.

The long period of human childhood leaves behind a precipitate of parental strictures, the superego. The ego has to satisfy the demands of 1) the superego, 2) the id and 3) external reality. The superego is formed not only from the strictures of the specific parents but from the family, national and racial demands, as well as the demands of the immediate social milieu; and then, along the way, incorporates material from teachers and other authority figures.

The id is the forces of nature, of heredity; the superego, the broad forces of culture and environment; the ego is formed as a result of the accidental experiences of the individual.

Chapter 2. The theory of the instincts

The general theory of instincts is not well understood. Insofar as instincts replace each other and displace energy onto each other there may be thousands of instincts. To be simple, psychoanalysis discriminates two basic instincts, Eros and the destructive instinct, elsewhere referred to as Thanatos. (Contrasting instincts of self-preservation and preservation of the species, between ego-love and object-love, fall within the realm of Eros).

Eros sets out to bind things together and preserve them; Thanatos seeks to tear things apart and destroy them. Thanatos tends ultimately to an inorganic state, hence it is also known as the Death Drive.

The two instincts can combine or oppose. Thus eating is an act of killing something for our satisfaction; sex incorporates aggression with reproduction. A surplus of the destructive instinct turns the lover into Jack the Ripper; a deficit, into a peeping Tom.

The two instincts exist alongside each other in the childish ego-id. The death instinct is easily detected when directed outwards in aggression; when the superego is constructed, the death instinct is attached to it and can operate self-destructively against the organism itself. Holding back aggressiveness can be just as detrimental as restraining sexual desire.

The libido is detectable in the primary infant state of pure narcissism when the ego takes itself as object. As the child develops it projects libido onto external objects. Throughout life the ego remains the reservoir of the libido from which libido is sent out to cathect (or charge) objects and to which it returns. Only when the subject is completely in love is the majority of the libido cathected onto the object which takes the place of the ego.

The nature of the libido has been deduced from its behaviour in the form of the sex instinct. This aspect of the libido develops out of the contributions of a succession of component instincts which are variously attached to different erotogenic zones.

Chapter 3. The development of the sexual function

The traditional view has it that human sexual life consists in bringing your genitals into contact with the genitals of someone of the opposite sex, with accompanying phenomena such as like kissing and touching. This activity is supposed to start at puberty. How does the traditional view then deal with the fact that:

a) some people are attracted to people of their own sex with similar genitals?
b) some people seek sexual satisfaction but ignore the genitals or other people altogether (called ‘perverts’)?
c) some children take an early interest in their own genitals (called ‘degenerate’)?

In contrast to the evident failure of the traditional theory, psychoanalysis has discovered that:

a) sexual life doesn’t begin at puberty but soon after birth
b) it is necessary to distinguish between sexuality and genitality, the former vastly outcompassing the latter
c) sexual pleasure can be obtained from many zones of the body and that these often only imperfectly overlap with the organs of reproduction

Childhood sexuality develops to a peak in the fifth year and thereafter falls into a lull during which much is forgotten: the latency period.

The onset of sexuality in man is therefore diphasic, first occurring in infancy, falling into latency, and re-efflorescing in puberty. The latency period seems to play a vital role in the process of acculturation unique to man, the passing on of traditional wisdom and knowledge to the next generation.

The first stage of childish development is the oral phase of suckling; the continuation of sucking after the baby is fed is evidence of the separation of pleasure-seeking and physiological need. This – the separation of strict physical need from the enjoyment of physical pleasure – is the justification for describing the baby as ‘sexual’.

Elements of sadism are present in the baby biting the nipple. This sadism is expanded in the next stage, the anal-sadistic phase, where biting and defecation become sources of pleasure.

Finally comes the phallic period when the child detaches sexual pleasure from bodily functions altogether and associates it with playing with its penis or clitoris. The little boy playing with his penis obscurely associates this pleasure with his mother; he wants to be the sole object of its mother’s attention and to do away with the father who keeps taking her away. This is the Oedipus Complex. The little girl, as and when she comes to see or hear about a boy’s genitalia, perceives the absence of a penis as a loss and conceives penis envy. The childish turning away from sexuality which this produces in women often lasts a lifetime.

These developmental phases do not develop in a simple pattern but overlap, often becoming fixated at particular levels. With the onset of puberty these earlier patterns return to influence sexual behaviour. Some early pleasures become focussed on traditional genital activity; some remain in residue as types of foreplay; some become the object of perverted sexual practice; some are repressed, or employed by the ego in forming character traits, and the energy of still others are sublimated into higher and socially acceptable cultural activity.

These discoveries mean that:

a) the phenomenology of the subject has to be examined from a dynamic or economic point of view
b) the aetiology of later mental illness is to be found in the patient’s early life

Chapter 4. Psychical qualities

What is the psyche? Behaviourism says there isn’t one, that we observe and quantify each other like machines.

Traditional psychology says there is a psyche and that it is synonymous with consciousness. Consciousness is hard to define but we all know what we mean by it. A psychology which confines itself to consciousness studies the difference between perceptions, feelings, thought-processes and wishes. But it is clear to self-reflection that these processes are not as continual, as transparent or sequential as earlier philosophers, for example John Locke, thought.

What are we to make of the gaps, the blanks, the dysjunctions in attempts to describe our mental life which trouble the ‘continuous consciousness’ model of the old view?

Psychoanalysis shifts the whole playing field by saying that the overwhelming bulk of psychic life is unconscious. It cannot be known (as the workings of chemistry or physics in the brain cannot be experienced) but its activity can be deduced and general laws governing its behaviour worked out by observation.

Some things out of consciousness become conscious easily; they originate in the pre-conscious, a kind of ante-chamber to consciousness and can be readily accessed. But the lion’s share of mental activity is unconscious and therefore can only ever be inferred or deduced from other evidence

Preconscious material makes its way into our conscious mind with little effort, but unconscious material can only be reclaimed for consciousness by a great effort. One is aware of resistance to its extraction. Sometimes unconscious material forces its way into consciousness and dominates it – as in psychotic illness. Sometimes preconscious material can be subject to repression and become inaccessible – as when we lose our memory.

Animals may well function with just an ego-unconscious. In men this happy state is complicated by the existence of speech which links perceptions to mnemic images and residues of perception, or memory. We don’t operate in a permanent present; we accumulate a huge weight of experiences.

In human beings, since the invention of language, internal events, thanks to being verbalised, can acquire a kind of reality which rivals outer perceptions. To test which is coming from where the ego develops methods for reality-testing. Errors which easily arise due to the new situation – where we mistake internal psychic experiences for ‘reality’ – are called hallucinations or dreams.

The inside of the ego is largely preconscious, with a thin layer of consciousness monitoring outside perceptions and an inner stream of consciousness. The id is entirely unconscious. What the nature of the physical processes are which make the biochemical changes which the mind is capable of perceiving remain a mystery.

Chapter 5. Dream interpretation as an illustration

A model mind is one in which the frontiers of the ego are safeguarded from the encroachments of the id by effective repression, and in which the superego and the ego work together as one. To find out how these forces work together we should see them malfunctioning and an easy way to begin is with dreams.

Everyone dreams. In dreams our experiences are hallucinatory, surreal, bizarre, nonsensical – everything we believe the unconscious to be. Dream interpretation distinguishes between the manifest content, what we remember of the dream upon waking, and the latent content, the real message of the dreams.

In a dram unconscious material has forced its way past the slumbering defences of repression into the preconscious; here it is scrambled by the Censor in such a way as not to disturb the sleep which the human organism requires. In other words, dreams enable refreshing sleep to occur because, although we are more vulnerable to raids from the unconscious, the censor steps in to distort the latent content of the impulse.

Dreams can originate from either suppressed wishes deep in the unconscious or from preconscious traces of the day’s activities to which deeper unconscious urges attach themselves.

Evidence that dreams are indeed the irruption of the repressed are:

a) dreams contain a high degree of material forgotten or inaccessible to waking consciousness
b) dreams partake of linguistic symbols derived from earlier stages in the subject’s development
c) dreams often repeat scenes from childhood which are repressed in waking life
d) dreams incorporate memories not accessible to the individual, possibly memories from the origins of the race

But Freud has called dream interpretation ‘the royal road to the unconscious’ because dreams make accessible to us the bizarre laws to which unconscious life is subject. These include processes of distortion called condensation and displacement.

The deduction from dreams is that the unconscious is desirous of expending its energy regardless of object. The dream is the guardian of sleep because it fulfils this rude instinct, this pressing unconscious wish, in the shape of a fantasy.

Anxiety dreams, which seem to disprove the thesis that dreams are fulfilments of wishes, happen when the instinct overpowers the Censor and is threatening to storm the ego in the full ugliness of its naked lust. The only option open to the ego is to wake up, switch defences up to full, and stuff the repressed material back into oblivion – but at the cost of an all too palpable effort (sweats, adrenalin, anxiety etc).

Part 2. The practical task

Chapter 6. The technique of psychoanalysis

A dream, then, is a psychosis which remains under our control. By contrast other mental illnesses are less controllable. They may come about when the urgings of the id unbalance the ego, or when the superego makes impossible demands, or when both gang up on the poor ego.

In analysis the analyst comes to the ego’s aid with a promise to reinforce his mechanism of defence in return for the subject giving us the complete honesty and candour we need to examine the unconscious. [N.B. it is this bolstering of defences which was pursued in the work of ego psychology developed by Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud].

Psychotics who have completely abandoned contact with reality are beyond the terms of this pact and cannot be treated by psychoanalysis. But there is another class of psychiatric patient who still has enough contact with reality to undertake the pact required to carry out therapy – ‘the vast number of people suffering severely from neuroses.’

The therapeutic pact If the neurotic gives us his full story in full candour we will help rebuild his ego. Sounds like the role of the master-confessor from the olden days of religion? Yes, except for the all-important distinction that a psychoanalyst can learn from the patient what he does not know himself, which Christian confession can never do.

In order to do this the psychoanalyst must extract everything whatever that comes to the patient’s mind, no matter how trivial. It is from this material that the analyst deduces the unconscious urges which are dominating the patient.

But the analyst will meet resistance. And after resistance, transference. The patient will begin to project onto the analyst all the feelings evoked by their memories of childhood, for example, the ambivalent love-hate feelings which every child projects onto its first authority figure, the Father.

Transference has the advantage that the analyst can then act with the authority of the father and the patient may make great efforts to please Daddy. Plus, the analyst has the advantage of seeing a key period from the patient’s life acted out in front of them rather than inconclusively reported by a confused patient.

Unfortunately, transference has a negative side as the repressed anger and defiance of the patient, also, can be projected onto the analyst. Worse, the repressed erotic wish for the parent of the opposite sex can emerge in the shape of the patient falling in love with the analyst.

If the patient thinks these are real experiences, it’s tricky; the analyst has to disabuse them and make them see that these are just repetitions of childhood feelings. Once transference is acknowledged, the patient can begin the process of rebuilding, of broadening the area of control of, the ego.

The second part of the cure is the overcoming of resistances. The ego, threatened from within and without, expends a lot of energy clinging to certain anti-cathexes, resistances to repressed material. It is the job of analysis to embolden the ego, to give it the power to regain mastery over its whole domain and not to feel threatened and embattled (anxious, hysterical, neurotic or obsessive).

As resistances to the expression of forbidden material are overcome, welcome mental energy is liberated for the ego to redeploy across its kingdom. When the analysis has progressed this far, two factors now become evident. The first is Guilt, which is the shape taken by resistance in the superego, which expends energy punishing the ego. The superego insists that:

The patient must not become well but must remain ill because they deserve no better.

The analyst has to make the unreasonableness of this self-punishment clear to the patient. The second factor is a complete takeover of the ego by the will to destruction, the death wish, which often leads to suicide.

Chapter 7. An example of psychoanalytic work

One fundamental discovery of psychoanalysis has been that neurotics have the same pathology as normal people, they have the same innate disposition as normal people, the same experiences, the same problems to solve. They are simply people who find this framework of requirements too much, resulting in misery, anxiety, symptoms.

On closer investigation, it appears that almost all these neuroses have their origin in childhood. Hardly surprising when you consider the primal power of the id and the vulnerability of the still-developing ego, feeble, immature and incapable of resistance.

The ego copes with excess stimuli from the external world with flight; with excess stimuli from the internal world with repression, attempts at mental flight, denial and rejection. It later turns out that these have been paid for at the cost of full development, and that the libidinal energy devoted to holding these instincts back, permanently cripples and disables the ego; stunts its proper development.

Why has evolution permitted such an apparently costly mechanism to afflict the young animal? Because it’s a small price to pay compared to the epic task which the ego has to achieve in its first five years:

In the space of a few years the little primitive creature must turn into a civilized human being; he must pass through an immensely long stretch of human cultural development in an almost uncannily abbreviated form. This is made possible by hereditary disposition; but it can never be achieved without the additional help of upbringing, of parental influence which, as a precursor to the superego, restricts the ego’s activities by prohibitions and punishments and encourages the setting-up of repressions.

Thus, the influence of civilisation is among the determinants of neurosis. It is easy for a barbarian to be happy – he gives way to all his basest desires, represses nothing and so has no neuroses. For a civilised man it is a long strenuous journey, with many pitfalls.

The central role of sexuality in this developmental journey has been proved by psychoanalysis time after time:

The symptoms of neuroses are either a substitutive satisfaction of some sexual urge or measures to prevent such a satisfaction; usually some kind of compromise between the two.

Why should this be so surprising? The one essential role of every organism is to reproduce; preparation for reproduction is crucial; and yet in the rise of civilisation no instinct is more thoroughly repressed than sexuality. Given such strong opposing forces why be surprised that so many people fall victim in one way or another to illness caused by the repression of their innermost desires?

Central to the child’s experience is the Oedipus Complex. Freud approaches it via a developmental history of the child.

The child’s first erotic experience is sucking at the breast, the primary model of gratification (‘Love and hunger meet at a woman’s breast’, The Interpretation of Dreams, page 295). Initially breast and baby are one polymorphously perverse substance.

Soon the breast is differentiated and becomes cathected (i.e. charged) with conflicting feelings of love and hate (tiny aggression is shown by biting the nipple) in the oral phase. Soon the breast forms itself into the whole of the mother who pampers and plays with the child, prompting a galaxy of feelings, gratifications and frustrations, pleasures and rages.

Thus the mother is the first seducer, the prototype of all later love-relations.

At three and four, in the phallic stage, the baby boy is aware of the pleasure given by playing with his penis and shows it off proudly to his mother. He associates this pleasure with her and wants to possess her, according to the prompting of obscure feelings. If the child shares the Mother’s bed and then Daddy comes home and he is returned to his cot, the feelings of little Oedipus can be imagined. Rage and hatred and lust and desire seethe in the toddler mind. Eventually the mother or father tell little Johnny to stop playing with himself or being so stubborn or bad tempered and all these injunctions are accompanied by the explicit or implicit threat to deprive the boy of the source of his greatest pride and pleasure, his penis.

This is the castration complex and is the most terrifying experience of a small boy’s life. It echoes down the ages in the Greek myths where successive gods castrate their father, and in the age-old practice of circumcision by which pubescent boys submit to authority, in both Judaism and Islam.

In response to this terrifying fear the child suppresses its masturbatory activities and sublimates them into fantasies. It fosters resentment, defiance and fear of the father and practices a total renunciation of the mother or slavish identification with her, in order to be spared by the Father.

It is precisely because this ‘nuclear complex’ paves the way for so many strategies of defence that psychoanalysis calls it the founding moment in the development of human character. All these seething feelings are repressed in childhood, go underground during the latent phase. But then they return in new guises at puberty that explosive period of sexual and egoistic efflorescence, with the arrival of full-blown sexual awareness. The revival of repressed material with the onset of puberty plays a large role in determining character.

On this model girls are born inferior. Their lack of a penis leads to penis envy. Their attempts at masturbation are failures, hence a general turning away from sexual life in girls and women.

They may try to introject the masculinity they lack and become lesbians. They may turn to hatred of the mother who brought them into the world without a penis and so turn their love toward the father. In this narrative the girl’s attempt to be like their father and to incorporate his penis-authority is finally sublimated into the wish to take the mother’s place, to bear Daddy a baby. Once formulated, this wish may, like the boy’s forbidden fantasies, be repressed into the unconscious but, with the onset of puberty, the wish is revived but directed outwards, so that the young woman goes off to attach herself to the first suitable male who reminds her of Daddy.

Part 3. The theoretical yield

Chapter 8. The psychical apparatus and the external world

Ultimate reality is itself unknowable. All we can know is reality as mediated by our sense perceptions and ‘known’ as it is perceived by our organ of knowledge, the mind.

Thus, in describing the workings of the mind most psychology, and most ordinary people, have to work with concepts which are largely metaphorical, concepts like height, depth, width or more advanced concepts like time, like cause and effect, which have no physical, tangible ‘reality’. We have imposed them on ‘reality’ because they provide us with a working model, a way of getting on with the real world.

Psychoanalysis is no different. It invokes metaphorical concepts like the unconscious, the repressed, the libido and so on. We can never know exactly what these things ‘are’. Possibly, we will one day be able to correlate them to specific physical, biochemical changes in the brain. In the meantime we use them because they provide a workable explanation of the many other phenomena we observe in the mind.

To recapitulate: the id is the realm of unconscious drives; it is ruled by two broad instincts 1) the desire to fulfil every instinctual wish 2) the equal and opposite drive to reduce tension. Ultimately, the second wish is pushing for the cessation of all tension and stimuli (‘Nirvana’). The two broad streams of instincts are assigned to two broad categories: the desire for pleasure, of which sexual pleasure is a subset, fall under the heading of Eros; and the wishes for all stimuli to cease fall under the death instinct.

Mediating between the id and external reality is the ego. The ego attempts to control the instincts of the id such that they can be fulfilled at the most propitious moments in the external world. Sometimes desires which threaten the ego’s function have to be entirely repressed and the ego has to expend energy doing this. The id is driven exclusively by desire for pleasure, the Pleasure Principle, while the ego is driven by a desire for safety, the Reality Principle.

Most of the ego is preconscious. Occasional strands of association, images and verbal residues, drift across the part of the psyche which is capable of self-reflection, often puzzling or even bewildering us.

The ego develops and separates itself off from the primal id at a price. Its autonomy is always contingent and subject to disruptive incursions from ‘below’, from the unconscious, and to a constant stream of punitive demands from ‘above’, from the superego. And the ego is constantly under attack from the terrifying forces of external reality.

No wonder the ego often cracks under the strain and has a ‘breakdown’. It is at this stage that psychoanalysis sets out to trace the fissures, the cracks of the breakdown, back to their earliest origins in childhood. And, once the repressed material has been dragged into the light of consciousness, the patient can acknowledge the long buried childhood experiences which are at the root of the problem and begin rebuilding new, better ego defences with which to face the world.

Chapter 9. The external world

Guilt is the punitive action of the superego upon the ego. The superego is the concentrate of injunctions laid upon us by our first objects, the parents. Thus the psyche has three parts:

1. the deep inner world – the id
2. a special part of the outside world introjected or brought inside – the superego
3. a bit that mediates between outer and inner – the ego

The superego is the heir to the Oedipus Complex. Its intensity has nothing to do with the actual strictness of the real-life parents, but is a function of the intensity of the Oedipal feelings which the child had to repress.

It is a dim perception of this sense of a planting-from-outside which has led theologians to account for conscience as being implanted in us by a higher cause, God.

The superego is initially based on the residue of the Oedipus Complex, but attracts to itself all the teachings of the parents, of teachers and authority figures, general social morality and the accumulated wisdom of the past…

[Here the manuscript breaks off in mid-sentence. The editors of the Pelican edition end the text with ellipses…Quite poignant.]

Comment

This is Freud’s most concentrated theoretical exposition of psychoanalysis, rich in new insights and cross-connections and very persuasive, especially where he gives a bit of wider context, mentioning (albeit briefly) psychoanalysis’s position vis-a-vis philosophy and other psychological theories i.e. it goes deeper than both, far, far deeper.

The passage describing the actual process of psychotherapy is the clearest, most persuasive summary of how the analytic therapy works which I have read.

Possibly it is so effective because he largely eschews the florid metaphors he is so prone to in the rest of his work (analysis as archaeology etc) and also because he doesn’t waste time going off on one of his rants against religion or into a long digression on a literary text (Gradiva, Hamlet etc).

Instead, he bases the theory on the basis of a materialist, biological interpretation of the human organism and human mind,  stopping to consider what the evolutionary reason or advantage for this or that mental strategy might be – and this gives it more scientific weight and authority than almost anything else I’ve read by him.

If you were going to read one work by Freud, maybe this is the one; it’s barely 70 pages long in the Pelican Freud Library paperback.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’ was first translated into English by James Strachey in 1964 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. My quotes are from the version included in volume 15 of the Pelican Freud Library, published in the 1986.

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