2.6 Highlights of psychoanalysis (freud and others)  (Page 4/4)

Importance: What the unconscious wants might seem not logical, but it probably is the truth and very logical because your unconscious mind knows what you want better than your conscious one. Your conscious mind is limited by your logic, but unconsciously feelings motivate your actions without the logic of the conscious but with purpose that is logical. So the person joining the army is actually being logical because it is fulfilling their unconscious desires, even though consciously they don’t understand that. However, you might do also something stupid if you acted just off your unconscious, but it would have been for something you really wanted, so the action would have been logical in one way. An example for that might be shoplifting, you unconsciously want to get the item but you aren’t aware that you might get caught. If the person was more conscious, they would have been more aware that they might get caught and not done the shoplifting (but the shoplifting might have still been considered logical because it would be getting you what you want). Or maybe you unconsciously want to get caught, that would further motivate you to steal the item. The unconscious desire might satisfy current feelings but it wouldn’t be aware of the long term consequences of getting caught. Or maybe the opposite is true, your unconscious might be more aware of the long term result of stealing but not as aware of the short term benefit (it probably depends on what you are feeling at the time)– the unconscious isn’t logical.

• Adler believed that every action reflects the central goal of the human personality: the goal of superiority.

Importance: It is very significant if the people around you are trying to be superior all the time. That could be viewed as being extremely bad, and that they have an inner monster. It could also be viewed as a strength, and that competition between people is healthy. There could be innocent competition or intense, hurtful competition. Some people may lightly care about their superiority and others more heavily.

• Hartmann outlined various ways the ego develops and adapts with patterns of behavior that he labels functioning with secondary autonomy (being secondary to the id or instinctual drives, which would be first). The primitive ego connections become more advanced reaction patterns. For example, an infant might walk not just for fun but because of the appreciation of his parents. He might also eat tidily and have bowel control for fear of parental disfavor.

Importance: Hartmann seemed to be labeling lack of bowel control and eating messily as instincts. Those aren’t exactly instincts they are just functions a human does without thought. There is a relation between lack of thought and instincts, if someone does everything without thought it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are doing everything instinctually, however. Instinct is something natural not just something unlearned. So things that are natural might be changed, it can become natural to control bowel movements. What makes a baby eat messily is just him not thinking about how he should eat, that doesn’t make it the natural way of eating necessarily. For something to really be natural it would probably have to be a strong drive. It could be that the baby has a drive to eat tidily, it just doesn’t understand that it has this drive yet. So it could be that the baby is acting un-instinctively first in his development simply because first he doesn’t think about how he should eat. Just because someone does something first and it is unlearned doesn’t mean that it is a natural tendency for someone to do something unlearned. People can have strong drives to do learned activities the drives just won’t manifest themselves until the activity is learned because it can’t manifest unless it is. On the other hand, childish sexual impulses can reflect the true nature of sexual wishes in adulthood because you can see what sexual impulses are like without the other intellectual development of adults, revealing their true nature. In fact, Freud believed that infantile sexuality played a large role in determining adult goals.

• At birth and early life people respond more instinctively, however attitudes change and build up against these instinctive drives – or counterneeds. The Freudian term for that is countercathexis, the changing of attitudes opposed to direct gratification. In the infantile period infants refrain from actions out of fear, and as biological needs develop punishment stops these impulses.
• As the ego and superego develop, some activities become acceptable to the ego that are not acceptable to the superego so in reaction the behavior of the ego is modified, similar to how the ego can modify the behavior of the id.

Importance: It is interesting to see that as people develop they learn the proper way to function in society, and that this way may be different from how they really wish to respond to the world. People have to conform to society in many ways, if everyone’s inner animal was released society wouldn’t function as properly as it does. It is almost as if for every action, there is a secondary motivation or desire that might not be being fulfilled. But if people just functioned from the id, they would be in a constant state of bliss, receiving large amounts of pleasurable emotions from their instinctual drives. There is a higher order of thought that moderates the unconscious mind and people’s instinctual drives. What would people’s emotions be like if there was no ego or superego? Would people be in a constant state of sexual bliss? Or would it be a constant state of happiness? I would say half of our emotions come from sexual drives, and the other half from happiness. Things leading to happiness can be relatively harmless, like good jokes, conversation, visual stimulus and other activity stimulus. Things that happen, such as sexual encounters, or conversations, can influence a persons emotions for the rest of the day. If the ego and superego were taken away, people would experience emotions in a pure form, because the unconscious is emotional and instinctual.