sigmund freud theory essay

Sigmund Freud’s Theories & Contribution to Psychology

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

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BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

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Sigmund Freud (1856 to 1939) was the founding father of psychoanalysis , a method for treating mental illness and a theory explaining human behavior.

Freud believed that events in our childhood have a great influence on our adult lives, shaping our personality. For example, anxiety originating from traumatic experiences in a person’s past is hidden from consciousness and may cause problems during adulthood (neuroses).

Thus, when we explain our behavior to ourselves or others (conscious mental activity), we rarely give a true account of our motivation. This is not because we are deliberately lying. While human beings are great deceivers of others; they are even more adept at self-deception.

Freud’s life work was dominated by his attempts to penetrate this often subtle and elaborate camouflage that obscures the hidden structure and processes of personality.

His lexicon has become embedded within the vocabulary of Western society. Words he introduced through his theories are now used by everyday people, such as anal (personality), libido, denial, repression, cathartic, Freudian slip , and neurotic.

Who is Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud, born on May 6, 1856, in what is now Příbor, Czech Republic (then part of the Austrian Empire), is hailed as the father of psychoanalysis. He was the eldest of eight children in a Jewish family.

Freud initially wanted to become a law professional but later developed an interest in medicine. He entered the University of Vienna in 1873, graduating with an MD in 1881. His primary interests included neurology and neuropathology. He was particularly interested in the condition of hysteria and its psychological causes.

In 1885, Freud received a grant to study with Jean-Martin Charcot, a renowned neurologist who used hypnosis to treat women suffering from what was then called “hysteria.” This experience sparked Freud’s interest in the unconscious mind, a theme that would recur throughout his career.

In 1886, Freud returned to Vienna, married Martha Bernays, and set up a private practice to treat nervous disorders. His work during this time led to his revolutionary concepts of the human mind and the development of the psychoanalytic method.

Freud introduced several influential concepts, including the Oedipus complex, dream analysis, and the structural model of the psyche divided into the id, ego, and superego. He published numerous works throughout his career, the most notable being “ The Interpretation of Dreams ” (1900), “ The Psychopathology of Everyday Life ” (1901), and “ Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality ” (1905).

Despite controversy and opposition, Freud continued to develop his theories and expand the field of psychoanalysis. He was deeply affected by the outbreak of World War I and later by the rise of the Nazis in Germany. In 1938, due to the Nazi threat, he emigrated to London with his wife and youngest daughter.

Freud died in London on September 23, 1939, but his influence on psychology, literature, and culture remains profound and pervasive.

He radically changed our understanding of the human mind, emphasizing the power of unconscious processes and pioneering therapeutic techniques that continue to be used today.

Sigmund Freud’s Theories & Contributions

Psychoanalytic Theory : Freud is best known for developing psychoanalysis , a therapeutic technique for treating mental health disorders by exploring unconscious thoughts and feelings.

Unconscious Mind : Freud (1900, 1905) developed a topographical model of the mind, describing the features of the mind’s structure and function. Freud used the analogy of an iceberg to describe the three levels of the mind.

The id, ego, and superego have most commonly been conceptualized as three essential parts of the human personality.

Psychosexual Development : Freud’s controversial theory of psychosexual development suggests that early childhood experiences and stages (oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital) shape our adult personality and behavior.

His theory of psychosexual stages of development is predicated by the concept that childhood experiences create the adult personality and that problems in early life would come back to haunt the individual as a mental illness.

Dream Analysis : Freud believed dreams were a window into the unconscious mind and developed methods for analyzing dream content for repressed thoughts and desires.

Dreams represent unfulfilled wishes from the id, trying to break through to the conscious. But because these desires are often unacceptable, they are disguised or censored using such defenses as symbolism.

Freud believed that by undoing the dreamwork , the analyst could study the manifest content (what they dreamt) and interpret the latent content ( what it meant) by understanding the symbols.

Defense Mechanisms : Freud proposed several defense mechanisms , like repression and projection, which the ego employs to handle the tension and conflicts among the id, superego, and the demands of reality.

Sigmund Freud’s Patients

Sigmund Freud’s clinical work with several patients led to major breakthroughs in psychoanalysis and a deeper understanding of the human mind. Here are summaries of some of his most notable cases:

Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim) : Known as the ‘birth of psychoanalysis,’ Anna O . was a patient of Freud’s colleague Josef Breuer. However, her case heavily influenced Freud’s thinking.

She suffered from various symptoms, including hallucinations and paralysis, which Freud interpreted as signs of hysteria caused by repressed traumatic memories. The “talking cure” method with Anna O. would later evolve into Freudian psychoanalysis.

Dora (Ida Bauer) : Dora, a pseudonym Freud used, was a teenager suffering from what he diagnosed as hysteria. Her symptoms included aphonia (loss of voice) and a cough.

Freud suggested her issues were due to suppressed sexual desires, particularly those resulting from a complex series of relationships in her family. The Dora case is famous for the subject’s abrupt termination of therapy, and for the criticisms Freud received regarding his handling of the case.

Little Hans (Herbert Graf) : Little Hans , a five-year-old boy, feared horses. Freud never met Hans but used information from the boy’s father to diagnose him.

He proposed that Little Hans’ horse phobia was symbolic of a deeper fear related to the Oedipus Complex – unconscious feelings of affection for his mother and rivalry with his father. The case of Little Hans is often used as an example of Freud’s theory of the Oedipal Complex in children.

Rat Man (Ernst Lanzer) : Rat Man came to Freud suffering from obsessive thoughts and fears related to rats, a condition known as obsessional neurosis.

Freud connected his symptoms to suppressed guilt and repressed sexual desires. The treatment of Rat Man further expanded Freud’s work on understanding the role of internal conflicts and unconscious processes in mental health disorders.

Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff) : Wolf Man was a wealthy Russian aristocrat who came to Freud with various symptoms, including a recurring dream about wolves.

Freud’s analysis, focusing on childhood memories and dreams, led him to identify the presence of repressed memories and the influence of the Oedipus Complex . Wolf Man’s treatment is often considered one of Freud’s most significant and controversial cases.

In the highly repressive “Victorian” society in which Freud lived and worked, women, in particular, were forced to repress their sexual needs. In many cases, the result was some form of neurotic illness.

Freud sought to understand the nature and variety of these illnesses by retracing the sexual history of his patients. This was not primarily an investigation of sexual experiences as such. Far more important were the patient’s wishes and desires, their experience of love, hate, shame, guilt, and fear – and how they handled these powerful emotions.

Freud’s Followers

Freud attracted many followers, who formed a famous group in 1902 called the “Psychological Wednesday Society.” The group met every Wednesday in Freud’s waiting room.

As the organization grew, Freud established an inner circle of devoted followers, the so-called “Committee” (including Sàndor Ferenczi, and Hanns Sachs (standing) Otto Rank, Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, and Ernest Jones).

At the beginning of 1908, the committee had 22 members and was renamed the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.

Neo-Freudians

The term “neo-Freudians” refers to psychologists who were initially followers of Sigmund Freud (1856 to 1939) but later developed their own theories, often modifying or challenging Freud’s ideas.

Here are summaries of some of the most notable neo-Freudians:

Carl Jung : Jung (1875 – 1961) was a close associate of Freud but split due to theoretical disagreements. He developed the concept of analytical psychology, emphasizing the collective unconscious, which houses universal symbols or archetypes shared by all human beings. He also introduced the idea of introversion and extraversion.

Alfred Adler : Adler (1870 – 1937) was another early follower of Freud who broke away due to differing views. He developed the school of individual psychology, highlighting the role of feelings of inferiority and the striving for superiority or success in shaping human behavior. He also emphasized the importance of social context and community.

• Otto Rank : Rank (1884 – 1939)  was an early collaborator with Freud and played a significant role in the development of psychoanalysis. He proposed the “trauma of birth” as a critical event influencing the psyche. Later, he shifted focus to the relationship between therapist and client, influencing the development of humanistic therapies.

Karen Horney : Horney (1885 – 1952) challenged Freud’s views on women, arguing against the concept of “penis envy.” She suggested that social and cultural factors significantly influence personality development and mental health. Her concept of ‘basic anxiety’ centered on feelings of helplessness and insecurity in childhood, shaping adult behavior.

• Harry Stack Sullivan : Sullivan (1892 – 1949) developed interpersonal psychoanalysis, emphasizing the role of interpersonal relationships and social experiences in personality development and mental disorders. He proposed the concept of the “self-system” formed through experiences of approval and disapproval during childhood.

Melanie Klein : Klein (1882 – 1960), a prominent psychoanalyst, is considered a neo-Freudian due to her development of object relations theory, which expanded on Freud’s ideas. She emphasized the significance of early childhood experiences and the role of the mother-child relationship in psychological development.

• Anna Freud : Freud’s youngest daughter significantly contributed to psychoanalysis, particularly in child psychology. Anna Freud (1895 – 1982) expanded on her father’s work, emphasizing the importance of ego defenses in managing conflict and preserving mental health.

Wilhelm Reich : Reich (1897 – 1957), once a student of Freud, diverged by focusing on bodily experiences and sexual repression, developing the theory of orgone energy. His emphasis on societal influence and body-oriented therapy made him a significant neo-Freudian figure.

• Erich Fromm : Fromm (1900-1980) was a German-American psychoanalyst associated with the Frankfurt School, who emphasized culture’s role in developing personality. He advocated psychoanalysis as a tool for curing cultural problems and thus reducing mental illness.

Erik Erikson : Erikson (1902 – 1994)  extended Freud’s theory of psychosexual development by adding social and cultural aspects and proposing a lifespan development model. His theory of psychosocial development outlined eight stages, each marked by a specific crisis to resolve, that shape an individual’s identity and relationships.

Critical Evaluation

Does evidence support Freudian psychology? Freud’s theory is good at explaining but not predicting behavior (which is one of the goals of science ).

For this reason, Freud’s theory is unfalsifiable – it can neither be proved true or refuted. For example, the unconscious mind is difficult to test and measure objectively. Overall, Freud’s theory is highly unscientific.

Despite the skepticism of the unconscious mind, cognitive psychology has identified unconscious processes, such as procedural memory (Tulving, 1972), automatic processing (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Stroop, 1935), and social psychology has shown the importance of implicit processing (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). Such empirical findings have demonstrated the role of unconscious processes in human behavior.

However, most evidence for Freud’s theories is from an unrepresentative sample. He mostly studied himself, his patients, and only one child (e.g., Little Hans ).

The main problem here is that the case studies are based on studying one person in detail, and regarding Freud, the individuals in question are most often middle-aged women from Vienna (i.e., his patients).

This makes generalizations to the wider population (e.g., the whole world) difficult. However, Freud thought this unimportant, believing in only a qualitative difference between people.

Freud may also have shown research bias in his interpretations – he may have only paid attention to information that supported his theories, and ignored information and other explanations that did not fit them.

However, Fisher & Greenberg (1996) argue that Freud’s theory should be evaluated in terms of specific hypotheses rather than a whole. They concluded that there is evidence to support Freud’s concepts of oral and anal personalities and some aspects of his ideas on depression and paranoia.

They found little evidence of the Oedipal conflict and no support for Freud’s views on women’s sexuality and how their development differs from men’.

Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American psychologist, 54 (7), 462.

Breuer, J., & Freud, S. (1895). Studies on hysteria . Standard Edition 2: London.

Fisher, S., & Greenberg, R. P. (1996). Freud scientifically reappraised: Testing the theories and therapy . John Wiley & Sons.

Freud, S. (1894). The neuro-psychoses of defence . SE, 3: 41-61.

Freud, S. (1896). Further remarks on the neuro-psychoses of defence . SE, 3: 157-185.

Freud, S. (1900). The interpretation of dreams . S.E., 4-5.

Freud, S. (1901). The psychopathology of everyday life. SE, 6.  London: Hogarth .

Freud, S. (1905). Three essays on the theory of sexuality.  Se ,  7 , 125-243.

Freud, S. (1915). The unconscious . SE, 14: 159-204.

Freud, S. (1920) . Beyond the pleasure principle . SE, 18: 1-64.

Freud, S. (1923). The ego and the id . SE, 19: 1-66.

Freud, S. (1925). Negation. Standard edition , 19, 235-239.

Freud, S. (1961). The resistances to psycho-analysis. In T he Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX (1923-1925): The Ego and the Id and other works (pp. 211-224).

Greenwald, A. G., & Banaji, M. R. (1995). Implicit social cognition: attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes. Psychological review, 102 (1), 4.

Stroop, J. R. (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. Journal of experimental psychology, 18 (6), 643.

Tulving, E. (1972). Episodic and semantic memory. In E. Tulving & W. Donaldson (Eds.), Organization of Memory , (pp. 381–403). New York: Academic Press.

What is Freud most famous for?

Why is freud so criticized, what did sigmund freud do.

His conceptualization of the mind’s structure (id, ego, superego), his theories of psychosexual development, and his exploration of defense mechanisms revolutionized our understanding of human psychology.

Despite controversies and criticisms, Freud’s theories have fundamentally shaped the field of psychology and the way we perceive the human mind.

What is the Freudian revolution’s impact on society?

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Sigmund Freud's Life, Theories, and Influence

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Cara Lustik is a fact-checker and copywriter.

Keystone / Hulton Archive / Getty Images

Psychoanalysis

• Major Works
• Perspectives
• Thinkers Influenced by Freud
• Contributions

Frequently Asked Questions

Psychology's most famous figure is also one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the 20th century. Sigmund Freud, an Austrian neurologist born in 1856, is often referred to as the "father of modern psychology."

Freud revolutionized how we think about and treat mental health conditions. Freud founded psychoanalysis as a way of listening to patients and better understanding how their minds work. Psychoanalysis continues to have an enormous influence on modern psychology and psychiatry.

Sigmund Freud's theories and work helped shape current views of dreams, childhood, personality, memory, sexuality, and therapy. Freud's work also laid the foundation for many other theorists to formulate ideas, while others developed new theories in opposition to his ideas.

Sigmund Freud Biography

To understand Freud's legacy, it is important to begin with a look at his life. His experiences informed many of his theories, so learning more about his life and the times in which he lived can lead to a deeper understanding of where his theories came from.

Freud was born in 1856 in a town called Freiberg in Moravia—in what is now known as the Czech Republic. He was the oldest of eight children. His family moved to Vienna several years after he was born, and he lived most of his life there.

Freud earned a medical degree and began practicing as a doctor in Vienna. He was appointed Lecturer on Nervous Diseases at the University of Vienna in 1885.

After spending time in Paris and attending lectures given by the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, Freud became more interested in theories explaining the human mind (which would later relate to his work in psychoanalysis).

Freud eventually withdrew from academia after the Viennese medical community rejected the types of ideas he brought back from Paris (specifically on what was then called hysteria ). Freud went on to publish influential works in neurology, including "On Aphasia: A Critical Study," in which he coined the term agnosia , meaning the inability to interpret sensations.

In later years, Freud and his colleague Josef Breuer published "Preliminary Report" and "Studies on Hysteria." When their friendship ended, Freud continued to publish his own works on psychoanalysis.

Freud and his family left Vienna due to discrimination against Jewish people. He moved to England in 1938 and died in 1939.

Sigmund Freud’s Theories

Freud's theories were enormously influential but subject to considerable criticism both now and during his life. However, his ideas have become interwoven into the fabric of our culture, with terms such as " Freudian slip ," "repression," and "denial" appearing regularly in everyday language.

Freud's theories include:

• Unconscious mind : This is one of his most enduring ideas, which is that the mind is a reservoir of thoughts, memories, and emotions that lie outside the awareness of the conscious mind.
• Personality : Freud proposed that personality was made up of three key elements: the id, the ego, and the superego . The ego is the conscious state, the id is the unconscious, and the superego is the moral or ethical framework that regulates how the ego operates.
• Life and death instincts : Freud claimed that two classes of instincts, life and death, dictated human behavior. Life instincts include sexual procreation, survival and pleasure; death instincts include aggression, self-harm, and destruction.
• Psychosexual development : Freud's theory of psychosexual development posits that there are five stages of growth in which people's personalities and sexual selves evolve. These phases are the oral stage, anal stage, phallic stage, latent stage, and genital stage.
• Mechanisms of defense : Freud suggested that people use defense mechanisms to avoid anxiety. These mechanisms include displacement, repression, sublimation, and regression.

Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis

Freud's ideas had such a strong impact on psychology that an entire school of thought emerged from his work: psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis has had a lasting impact on both the study of psychology and the practice of psychotherapy.

Psychoanalysis sought to bring unconscious information into conscious awareness in order to induce catharsis . Catharsis is an emotional release that may bring about relief from psychological distress. 

Research has found that psychoanalysis can be an effective treatment for a number of mental health conditions. The self-examination that is involved in the therapy process can help people achieve long-term growth and improvement.

Sigmund Freud's Patients

Freud based his ideas on case studies of his own patients and those of his colleagues. These patients helped shape his theories and many have become well known. Some of these individuals included:

• Anna O. (aka Bertha Pappenheim)
• Little Hans (Herbert Graf)
• Dora (Ida Bauer)
• Rat Man (Ernst Lanzer)
• Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff)
• Sabina Spielrein

Anna O. was never actually a patient of Freud's. She was a patient of Freud's colleague Josef Breuer. The two men corresponded often about Anna O's symptoms, eventually publishing the book, "Studies on Hysteria" on her case. It was through their work and correspondence that the technique known as talk therapy emerged.  

Major Works by Freud

Freud's writings detail many of his major theories and ideas. His personal favorite was "The Interpretation of Dreams ." Of it, he wrote: "[It] contains...the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make. Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime."

Some of Freud's major books include:

• " The Interpretation of Dreams "
• "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life"
• "Totem and Taboo"
• "Civilization and Its Discontents"
• "The Future of an Illusion"

Freud's Perspectives

Outside of the field of psychology, Freud wrote and theorized about a broad range of subjects. He also wrote about and developed theories related to topics including sex, dreams, religion, women, and culture.

Views on Women

Both during his life and after, Freud was criticized for his views of women , femininity, and female sexuality. One of his most famous critics was the psychologist Karen Horney , who rejected his view that women suffered from "penis envy."

Penis envy, according to Freud, was a phenomenon that women experienced upon witnessing a naked male body, because they felt they themselves must be "castrated boys" and wished for their own penis.

Horney instead argued that men experience "womb envy" and are left with feelings of inferiority because they are unable to bear children.

Views on Religion

Freud was born and raised Jewish but described himself as an atheist in adulthood. "The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life," he wrote of religion.

He continued to have a keen interest in the topics of religion and spirituality and wrote a number of books focused on the subject. 

Psychologists Influenced by Freud

In addition to his grand and far-reaching theories of human psychology, Freud also left his mark on a number of individuals who went on to become some of psychology's greatest thinkers. Some of the eminent psychologists who were influenced by Sigmund Freud include:

• Alfred Adler
• Erik Erikson
• Melanie Klein
• Ernst Jones

While Freud's work is often dismissed today as non-scientific, there is no question that he had a tremendous influence not only on psychology but on the larger culture as well.

Many of Freud's ideas have become so steeped in public awareness that we oftentimes forget that they have their origins in his psychoanalytic tradition.

Freud's Contributions to Psychology

Freud's theories are highly controversial today. For instance, he has been criticized for his lack of knowledge about women and for sexist notions in his theories about sexual development, hysteria, and penis envy.

People are skeptical about the legitimacy of Freud's theories because they lack the scientific evidence that psychological theories have today.

However, it remains true that Freud had a significant and lasting influence on the field of psychology. He provided a foundation for many concepts that psychologists used and continue to use to make new discoveries.

Perhaps Freud's most important contribution to the field of psychology was the development of talk therapy as an approach to treating mental health problems.

In addition to serving as the basis for psychoanalysis, talk therapy is now part of many psychotherapeutic interventions designed to help people overcome psychological distress and behavioral problems. 

The Unconscious

Prior to the works of Freud, many people believed that behavior was inexplicable. He developed the idea of the unconscious as being the hidden motivation behind what we do. For instance, his work on dream interpretation suggested that our real feelings and desires lie underneath the surface of conscious life.

Childhood Influence

Freud believed that childhood experiences impact adulthood—specifically, traumatic experiences that we have as children can manifest as mental health issues when we're adults.

While childhood experiences aren't the only contributing factors to mental health during adulthood, Freud laid the foundation for a person's childhood to be taken into consideration during therapy and when diagnosing.

Literary Theory

Literary scholars and students alike often analyze texts through a Freudian lens. Freud's theories created an opportunity to understand fictional characters and even their authors based on what's written or what a reader can interpret from the text on topics such as dreams, sexuality, and personality.

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis. Also known as the father of modern psychology, he was born in 1856 and died in 1939.

While Freud theorized that childhood experiences shaped personality, the neo-Freudians (including Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, and Karen Horney) believed that social and cultural influences played an important role. Freud believed that sex was a primary human motivator, whereas neo-Freudians did not.

Sigmund Freud founded psychoanalysis and published many influential works such as "The Interpretation of Dreams." His theories about personality and sexuality were and continue to be extremely influential in the fields of psychology and psychiatry.

Sigmund Freud was born in a town called Freiberg in Moravia, which is now the Czech Republic.

It's likely that Freud died by natural means. However, he did have oral cancer at the time of his death and was administered a dose of morphine that some believed was a method of physician-assisted suicide.

Freud used psychoanalysis, also known as talk therapy, in order to get his patients to uncover their own unconscious thoughts and bring them into consciousness. Freud believed this would help his patients change their maladaptive behaviors.

Freud was the founder of psychoanalysis and introduced influential theories such as: his ideas of the conscious and unconscious; the id, ego, and superego; dream interpretation; and psychosexual development.

A Word From Verywell

While Freud's theories have been the subject of considerable controversy and debate, his impact on psychology, therapy, and culture is undeniable. As W.H. Auden wrote in his 1939 poem, "In Memory of Sigmund Freud":

"...if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd, to us he is no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion."

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By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Sigmund Freud’s The Ego and the Id

Freud died 80 years ago this week. In this “Virtual Roundtable,” three scholars debate the legacy of his 1923 text.

Sigmund Freud died 80 years ago this week, and his 1923 study, The Ego and the Id , which introduced many of the foundational concepts of psychoanalysis, entered the public domain earlier this year. Freud’s ideas have long been absorbed by popular culture, but what role do they continue to play in the academy, in the clinical profession, and in everyday life? To answer those questions, this roundtable discussion—curated by Public Books and JSTOR Daily —asks scholars about the legacy of The Ego and the Id in the 21st century.

• Elizabeth Lunbeck: Pity the Poor Ego! • Amber Jamilla Musser: The Sunken Place: Race, Racism, and Freud • Todd McGowan: The Superego or the Id

Pity the Poor Ego!

Elizabeth Lunbeck

It would be hard to overestimate the significance of Freud’s The Ego and the Id for psychoanalytic theory and practice. This landmark essay has also enjoyed a robust extra-analytic life, giving the rest of us both a useful terminology and a readily apprehended model of the mind’s workings. The ego, id, and superego (the last two terms made their debut in The Ego and the Id ) are now inescapably part of popular culture and learned discourse, political commentary and everyday talk.

Type “id ego superego” into a Google search box and you’re likely to be directed to sites offering to explain the terms “for dummies”—a measure of the terms’ ubiquity if not intelligibility. You might also come upon images of The Simpsons: Homer representing the id (motivated by pleasure, characterized by unbridled desire), Marge the ego (controlled, beholden to reality), and Lisa the superego (the family’s dour conscience), all of which need little explanation, so intuitively on target do they seem.

If you add “politics” to the search string, you’ll find sites advancing the argument that Donald Trump’s success is premised on his speaking to our collective id, our desires to be free of the punishing strictures of law and morality and to grab whatever we please—“a flailing tantrum of fleshly energy.” Barack Obama in this scheme occupies the position of benign superego: incorruptible, cautious, and given to moralizing, the embodiment of our highest ideas and values but, in the end, not much fun. You’ll also glean from Google that Trump’s ego is fragile and needy but also immense and raging, its state—small or large?—a dire threat to the nation’s stability and security.

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In these examples, the ego is used in two distinct, though not wholly contradictory, ways. With The Simpsons , the ego appears as an agency that strives to mediate between the id and superego. When we speak of Trump’s fragile ego, the term is being used somewhat differently, to refer to the entirety of the self, or the whole person. When we say of someone that their ego is too big, we are criticizing their being and self-presentation, not their (presumably) weak superego.

The idea of the ego as agency is routinely considered more analytically rigorous and thus more “Freudian” than the ego-as-self, yet both interpretations of the ego are found not only in popular culture, but also—perhaps surprisingly—in Freud. Further, I would argue that the second of these Freudian conceptualizations, premised on feelings, is more consonant with a distinctively American construal of the self than are the abstractions of ego psychology. Understanding why this is so necessitates a look at the post-Freud history of the ego in America—in particular at the attempts of some psychoanalysts to clear up ambiguities in Freud’s texts, attempts that luckily for us met with only mixed success.

As Freud proposed in The Ego and the Id , three agencies of the mind jostle for supremacy: the ego strives for mastery over both id and superego, an ongoing and often fruitless task in the face of the id’s wild passions and demands for satisfaction, on the one hand, and the superego’s crushing, even authoritarian, demands for submission to its dictates, on the other. The work of psychoanalysis was “to strengthen the ego”; as Freud famously put it 10 years later, “where id was, there ego shall be.”

The Freudian ego sought to harmonize relations among the mind’s agencies. It had “important functions,” but when it came to their exercise it was weak, its position, in Freud’s words, “like that of a constitutional monarch, without whose sanction no law can be passed but who hesitates long before imposing his veto on any measure put forward by Parliament.” Elsewhere in the essay, the ego vis-à-vis the id was no monarch but a commoner, “a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse … obliged to guide it where it wants to go.” Submitting to the id, the ego-as-rider could at least retain the illusion of sovereignty. The superego would brook no similar fantasy in the erstwhile royal, instead establishing “an agency within him” to monitor his desires for aggression, “like a garrison in a conquered city.” Pity the poor ego!

It could be argued that the Viennese émigré psychoanalysts who took over the American analytic establishment in the postwar years did precisely that. They amplified this Freudian ego’s powers of mastery while downplaying its conflicts with the id and superego. They formulated a distinctively optimistic and melioristic school of analytic thought, “ego psychology,” in which the ego was ideally mature and autonomous, a smoothly operating agency of mind oriented toward adaptation with the external environment. More than a few commentators have argued that ego psychology’s celebration of compliance and de-emphasis of conflict fit perfectly with the demands of the postwar corporate state as well as with the prevailing stress on conformity and fitting in. Think here of William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man , published in 1956, or of David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd , from 1950, best sellers that were read as laments for a lost golden age of individualism and autonomy.

Among the professed achievements of the mid-century ego psychologists was clearing up Freud’s productive ambiguity around the term’s meanings; ego would henceforth refer to the agency’s regulatory and adaptive functions, not to the person or the self. Consider that the doyen of ego psychology, Heinz Hartmann, gently chided Freud for sometimes using “the term ego in more than one sense, and not always in the sense in which it was best defined.”

Ego psychologists’ American hegemony was premised on their claim to being Freud’s most loyal heirs; The Ego and the Id ranked high among their school’s foundational texts. Freud’s text, however, supports a conceptualization of the ego not only as an agency of mind (their reading) but also as an experienced sense of self. In it, Freud had intriguingly referred to the ego as “first and foremost a body-ego,” explaining that it “is ultimately derived from bodily sensations.”

Ignored by the ego psychologists, Freud’s statement was taken up in the 1920s and 1930s by, among others, the Viennese analyst Paul Federn, who coined the term “ego feeling” to capture his contention that the ego was best construed as referring to our subjective experience of ourselves, our sense of existing as a person or self. He argued that the ego should be conceived of in terms of experience, not conceptualized as a mental abstraction. Ego feeling, he explained in 1928, was “the sensation, constantly present, of one’s own person—the ego’s perception of itself.” Federn was a phenomenologist, implicitly critiquing Freud and his heirs for favoring systematizing over felt experience while at the same time fashioning himself a follower, not an independent thinker. Marginalization has been the price of his fealty, as he and his insights have been largely overlooked in the analytic canon.

When we talk of the American ego, we are more likely than not speaking Federn-ese. Federn appreciated the evanescence of moods and the complexity of our self-experiences. Talk of our “inner resources” and equanimity, of the necessity of egoism and its compatibility with altruism, of commonplace fantasies of “love, greatness, and ambition” runs through his writings. Even the analytic session is likely focused more manifestly on the “goals of self-preservation, of enrichment, of self-assertion, of social achievements for others, of gaining friends and adherents, up to the phantasy of leadership and discipleship” than on ensuring the ego’s supremacy over the id and superego.

The Ego and the Id supports such a reading of the ego as experiencing self, the individual possessed of knowledge of her bodily and mental “selfsameness and continuity in time.” Federn’s “ego feeling” is also compatible with 1950s vernacular invocations of the “real self” as well as with the sense of identity that Erik Erikson defined in terms of the feelings individuals have of themselves as living, experiencing persons, the authentic self that would become the holy grail for so many Americans in the 1960s and beyond. Erikson, also an ego psychologist but banished from the mainstream of analysis for his focus on the experiential dimension of the self, would capture this same sensibility under the rubric of identity. His delineation of the term identity to refer to a subjective sense of self, taken up overnight within and beyond psychoanalysis, arguably did more to ensure the survival of the discipline in the United States than did the all the labors of Freud’s most dutiful followers.

Thus, while Google may give us images (including cartoons) of a precisely divvied-up Freudian mind, it is the holistic ego-as-self that is as much the subject of most of our everyday therapeutic, analytically inflected talk. This ego-as-self is less readily represented pictorially than its integrated counterpart but nonetheless central to our ways of conveying our experience of ourselves and of others. It is as authentically psychoanalytic as its linguistic double, neither a corruption of Freud’s intentions nor an import from the gauzy reaches of humanistic psychology. When we invoke Trump’s outsized and easily bruised ego, for example, we are calling on this dimension of the term, referring to his sense of self—at once inflated and fragile. Federn has been forgotten, but his feelings-centered analytic sensibility lives on. It may be all the more relevant today, when, as many have observed, our feelings are no longer sequestered from reason and objectivity but, instead, instrumentally mobilized as the coin of the populist realm.

Jump to: Elizabeth Lunbeck , Amber Jamilla Musser , Todd McGowan

The Sunken Place: Race, Racism, and Freud

Amber Jamilla Musser

In a tense scene from the 2017 film Get Out , Missy (Catherine Keener) finds her daughter’s boyfriend, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), sneaking a cigarette outside and invites him into the sitting room, which also functions as a home office for her therapy clients. Chris, a black photographer, has just met his white girlfriend, Rose’s, liberal family, including her mother, Missy, for the first time. As the two sit across from one another, Missy asks Chris about his childhood, her spoon repeatedly striking the inside of a teacup, and Chris, eyes watering uncontrollably, begins to sink deep into the “sunken place.” As his present surroundings shift out of view, he flails and falls through a large black void, before eventually waking in his own bed, uncertain as to what’s taken place. The therapy office setting is worth noting, for while what follows this early hypnosis scene is a horror-comedy about racism, psychoanalytic ideas of the unconscious help illuminate race relations in the film and beyond.

In the film, the “sunken place” refers to a fugue state that subdues the black characters so that (spoiler alert) the brains of the highest white bidder can be transplanted into their bodies. While this large black void is the product of director Jordan Peele’s imagination, the “sunken place” has culturally come to signify a pernicious aspect of racialization; namely, the nonwhite overidentification with whiteness. Recent memes make this connection clear. In one, Kanye West, who not too long ago argued that President Trump was on “a hero’s journey,” appears in the armchair from Get Outwearing a “Make America Great Again” hat, tears streaming down his face. In another, the actress Stacey Dash, who ran for Congress as a Republican from California, stares blankly out of a window.

Freud’s The Ego and the Id , however, gives us another way to understand the “sunken place.” Writing in 1923,Freud presents a comprehensive map of the psyche as a space where the ego, superego, and id form a dynamic structure that reacts to and is formed by multiple varieties of the unconscious. The superego, Freud argues, acts as a sort of “normative” check on behavior, while the id is libidinal energy and purely hedonistic. The ego, what is consciously enacted, balances these two different modes of the unconscious in order to function.

The Freudian model helps us to understand how racialization, the process of understanding oneself through the prism of racial categories, occurs at the level of the unconscious. When viewed in the context of psychoanalysis, the “sunken place” is what happens when the superego’s attachment to whiteness runs amok; when Chris’s eyes tear up and he involuntarily scratches the armchair, he is enacting bodily resistance that is connected to the id. What’s more, Freud’s structure also allows us to extend this understanding of race beyond the individual, toward thinking about why the “sunken place” can be seen as a metonym for race relations in the United States writ large.

Race itself was largely underdiscussed in Freud’s works. In one of his most explicit engagements with racial difference, 1930’s Civilization and its Discontents , he mostlyconfined his theorizations of racial difference to thinking about the atavistic and primitive. Following Freud, other analysts in the early 20th century tended to ignore underlying racial dynamics at work in their theories. For example, if patients discussed the ethnicity or race of a caretaker or other recurring figure in their lives, analysts tended not to explore these topics further. As a rich body of contemporary critical work on psychoanalysis has explored, this inattention to race created an assumption of universal normativity that was, in fact, attached to whiteness.

While psychoanalysis has historically ignored or mishandled discussions of race, Freud’s The Ego and the Id introduces concepts that are useful in thinking through race relations on both an individual and a national level. His tripartite division of the psyche can help show us how race itself functions as a “metalanguage,” to use Evelyn Higginbotham’s phrase , one that structures the unconscious and the possibilities for the emergence of the ego. In Get Out , “the sunken place” is the stage for a battle between a white-identified superego, which is induced through brain transplantation or hypnosis, and a black-identified id. Outside of the parameters of science fiction, however, this racialized inner struggle offers insight into theorizations of assimilation and racialization more broadly.

Sociologist Jeffrey Alexander describes assimilation, a process of adapting to a form of (implicitly white) normativity, as an attempt to incorporate difference through erasure even while insisting on some inassimilable (racialized) residue. Alexander writes , “Assimilation is possible to the degree that socialization channels exist that can provide ‘civilizing’ or ‘purifying’ processes—through interaction, education, or mass mediated representation—that allow persons to be separated from their primordial qualities. It is not the qualities themselves that are purified or accepted but the persons who formerly, and often still privately, bear them. ” The tensions between these performances of white normativity—“civilization”—and the particular “qualities” that comprise the minority subject that Alexander names are akin to the perpetual struggle Freud describes between the superego, id, and ego.

Drawing on psychoanalysis, recent theorists such as David Eng and Anne Anlin Cheng have emphasized the melancholia that accompanies assimilation—Chris’s involuntary tears in the “sunken place” and the instances of staring out the window, going on evening runs, and the flash-induced screams of the other black characters who have received white-brain implants perhaps being among the most extreme forms. Cheng argues that having to assimilate to a white culture produces melancholy at both the unattainability of whiteness for black and brown subjects and at the repression of racial otherness necessary to sustain white dominance. Cheng’s description of the “inarticulable loss that comes to inform the individual’s sense of his or her own subjectivity” helps explain why the conditions of white normativity can be particularly psychologically harmful for nonwhite subjects.

While Freud’s concepts are useful for understanding the psychological burden of racialization for nonwhite subjects under conditions of white normativity, scholars have also explored how Freud’s concepts of the ego, id, and superego can be used to theorize what it means to frame whiteness as a form of national consciousness. Describing the sadistic impulses of Jim Crow, theorist and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon argued that the ego of the United States is masochistic. In imagining the psychic structure of the country as a whole, he saw a clash between the nation’s aggressive id—which was attempting to dominate black people—and its superego—which felt guilt at the overt racism of a supposedly “democratic” country.

Fanon argued that the United States’ desires to punish black people (manifesting in virulent antiblack violence) were swiftly “followed by a guilt complex because of the sanction against such behavior by the democratic culture of the country in question.” Fanon exposed the hypocrisy inherent in holding anti-racist ideals while allowing racist violence to flourish. The country’s national masochism, he argued, meant that the United States could not recognize its own forms of white aggression; instead, the country embraced a stance of passivity and victimization in relation to nonwhites disavowing their own overt violence. Or, in Freud’s language, the country submerged the id in favor of an idealization of the superego.

We see this dynamic, too, in Get Out , where the white characters fetishize black physicality and talent as somehow inherent to their race, while strenuously denying any charges of racism. In the film, the white characters who wish to inhabit black bodies understand themselves primarily as victims of aging and other processes of debilitation, a logic that allows them to use their alleged affection for blackness to cloak their aggressive, dominative tendencies. Before Chris and Rose meet her parents, Rose tells him that they would have voted for Obama for a third term, a statement repeated in a later scene, by her father (Bradley Whitford), when he notices Chris watching the black domestic workers on the property: “By the way, I would have voted for Obama for a third term if I could. Best president in my lifetime. Hands down.” In such a statement, we can see ways that the masochistic white ego Fanon spoke about remains an accurate reflection of national debates about political correctness, what counts as racism, and the question of reparations.

As Get Out helps dramatize, we can use the legacy of Freud’s parsing of the unconscious to identify the tensions at work within individuals struggling to assimilate to a perceived idea of white normativity. But we can also use psychoanalytic concepts to understand how certain ideas of race have created a white national consciousness, which, in the United States and elsewhere, is in crisis. At this broader scale, we can begin to see how the national superego has sutured normativity to a pernicious idea of whiteness, one that manifests psychological, but also physical, aggression against nonwhite subjects.

For, while the presumption that whiteness is the “normal” and dominant culture situates it in the position of the superego for individuals who are attempting to assimilate, this assumption of superiority is actually an anxious position, haunted by racial others and constantly threatened by the possibility of destabilization. For many, this has led to difficulty reckoning with white culture’s violent tendencies, and to an insistence on its innocence. Working more with these Freudian dynamics might help us think more carefully about both strategies of resistance and survival for nonwhite subjects and what fuller contours of white accountability could look like.

The Superego or the Id

Todd McGowan

To properly understand The Ego and the Id ,we should mentally retitle it The Superego . The two terms most frequently invoked from Freud’s 1923 text are, perhaps unsurprisingly, the ego and the id . We have easily integrated them into our thinking and use them freely in everyday speech. The third term of the structural model—the superego —receives far less attention. This is evident, for instance, in the pop psychoanalysis surrounding Donald Trump. Some diagnose him as a narcissist, someone in love with his own ego. Others say that he represents the American id, because he lacks the self-control that inhibits most people. According to these views, he has either too much ego or too much id. Never one to be self-critical, Trump’s problem doesn’t appear to be an excess of superego. If the superego comes into play at all in diagnosing him, one would say that the problem is his lack of a proper superego.

In the popular reception of Freud’s thought, the discovery of the id typically represents his most significant contribution to an understanding of how we act. The id marks the point at which individuals lack control over what they do. The impulses of the id drive us to act in ways that are unacceptable to the rest of society. And yet, the concept of the id nonetheless serves a comforting function, in that it enables us to associate our most disturbing actions with biological impulses for which we have no responsibility. For this reason, we have to look beyond the id if we want to see how Freud most unsettles our self-understanding.

Freud’s introduction of the superego, in contrast, represents the most radical moment of The Ego and the Id , because it challenges all traditional conceptions of morality. Typically, our sense of the collective good restrains the amorality of our individual desires: we might want to crash our car into the driver who has just cut us off, but our conscience prevents us from disrupting our collective ability to coexist as drivers on the road. Historically, the reception of Freud’s work has considered the superego as this voice of moral conscience, but Freud theorizes that there are amoral roots to this moral voice. According to Freud, the superego does not represent the collective good, but manifests the individual desires of the id, which run counter to the collective good.

With the discovery of the concept of the superego, Freud reshapes how we think of ourselves as moral actors. If Freud is right that the superego “reaches deep down into the id,” then all our purportedly moral impulses have their roots in libidinal enjoyment. When we upbraid ourselves for a wayward desire for a married coworker, this moral reproof doesn’t dissipate the enjoyment of this desire but multiplies it. The more that we experience a desire as transgressive, the more ardently we feel it. In this way, the superego enables us to enjoy our desire while consciously believing that we are restraining it.

The concept of the superego reveals that the traditional picture of morality hides a fundamental amorality, which is why the response to The Ego and the Id has scrupulously avoided it. When we translate radical ideas like the superego into our common understanding, we reveal our assumed beliefs and values. In such a translation, the more distortion a concept suffers, the more it must represent a challenge to our ordinary way of thinking. This is the case with the popular emphasis on the ego and the id relative to the superego. What has been lost is the most radical discovery within this text.

Our failure to recognize how Freud theorizes the superego leaves us unable to contend with the moral crises that confront us today. We can see the catastrophic consequences in our contemporary relationship to the environment, for example. As our guilt about plastic in the oceans, carbon emissions, and other horrors increases, it augments our enjoyment of plastic and carbon rather than detracting from it. Using plastic ceases to be just a convenience and becomes a transgression, which gives us something to enjoy where otherwise we would just have something to use.

Enjoyment always involves a relationship to a limit. But in these cases, enjoyment derives from transgression, the sense of going beyond a limit. Our conscious feeling of guilt about transgression corresponds to an unconscious enjoyment that the superego augments. The more that environmental warnings take the form of directions from the superego, the more they create guilt without changing the basic situation. Far from limiting the enjoyment of our destructive desires, morality becomes, in Freud’s way of thinking, a privileged ground for expressing it, albeit in a disguised form. It turns out that what we think of as morality has nothing at all to do with morality.

The superego produces a sense of transgression and thereby supercharges our desire, turning morality into a way of enjoying ourselves. Picking up Freud’s discovery 50 years later, Jacques Lacan announces, “Nothing forces anyone to enjoy ( jouir ) except the superego. The superego is the imperative of jouissance—Enjoy!” All of our seemingly moral impulses and the pangs of conscience that follow are modes of obeying this imperative.

In this light, we might reevaluate the diagnosis of Donald Trump. If he seems unable to restrain himself and appears constantly preoccupied with finding enjoyment, this suggests that the problem is neither too much ego nor too much id. We should instead hazard the “wild psychoanalytic” interpretation that Trump suffers from too much superego. His preoccupation with enjoying himself—and never enjoying himself enough to find satisfaction—reflects the predominance of the superego in his psyche, making clear that the superego has nothing to do with actual morality, and everything with wanton immorality.

When we understand morality as a disguised form of enjoyment, this does not free us from morality. Instead, the discovery of the superego and its imperative to enjoy demands a new way of conceiving morality. Rather than being the vehicle of morality, the superego is a great threat to any moral action, because it allows us to believe that we are acting morally while we are actually finding a circuitous path to our own enjoyment. Contrary to the popular reading of the superego, authentic moral action requires a rejection of the superego’s imperatives, not obedience to them.

Morality freed from the superego would no longer involve guilt. It would focus on redefining our relationship to law. Rather than seeing law as an external constraint imposed on us by society, we would see it as the form that our own self-limitation takes. This would entail a change in how we relate to the law. If the law is our self-limitation rather than an external limit, we lose the possibility of enjoyment associated with transgression. One can transgress a law but not one’s own self-limitation.

In terms of the contemporary environmental crisis, we would conceive of a constraint on the use of plastic as the only way to enjoy using plastic, not as a restriction on this enjoyment. The limit on use would become our own form of enjoyment because the limit would be our own, not something imposed on us. The superego enjoins us to reject any limit by always pushing our enjoyment further. Identifying the law as our self-limitation provides a way of breaking with the logic of the superego and its fundamentally immoral form of morality.

Given what he chose as the title for the book— The Ego and the Id —it is clear that even Freud himself did not properly identify what was most radical in his discovery. He omitted the superego from the title at the expense of the ego and the id, even though his recognition of the superego and its role in the psyche represents the key insight from the book. In this sense, Freud paved the way for the popular misapprehension that followed.

What is missed or ignored by society often reveals what most unsettles it. Our commonly held beliefs and values might try to mute the disturbance caused by radical ideas like the superego, but they don’t eliminate their influence completely. By focusing on what Freud himself omits, we can uncover the insight in his work most able to help us think beyond the confines of traditional morality. The path of a genuine morality must travel beyond the superego.

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The Uncanny

One hundred years ago, sigmund freud wrote his paper on ‘the uncanny’ (das unheimliche). by jamie ruers, one hundred years ago, sigmund freud wrote his paper on ‘ the uncanny ’ (das unheimliche). his theory was rooted in everyday experiences and the aesthetics of popular culture, related to what is frightening, repulsive and distressing..

The paper tackles the horrific concepts of inanimate figures coming to life, severed limbs, ghosts, the image of the double figure (doppelgaengers) and lends itself to art, literature and cinema.

Essay In Two Parts

Freud’s essay is written in two parts. The first part explores the etymology of the words ‘heimlich’ and ‘unheimlich’ (or ‘homely’ and ‘unhomely’, as it directly translates into English), their uses in the German dictionary and how these words are used in other languages. This must have been an unimaginable challenge for the translator!

In the second part, Freud begins to tackle people, things, self-expressions, experiences and situations that best represent the uncanny feeling.

Freud’s paradigm example is the short story of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ , a tale that parents would tell their children to encourage them to go to sleep. The story goes that the child must be asleep for the Sandman to put sand in the child’s eyes – if they are not asleep, the Sandman will take out their eyes. The protagonist is a boy named Nathaniel whose fate eventually does fall to the Sandman, losing not only his sight but his sanity, then his life. Freud asserts that the removal of the eyes alludes to an infantile fear of castration, but the castration complex is masked by a fear of losing a different sensitive organ: the eyes. This same theme is present in the tragedy of Oedipus.

Doppelgaenger

Freud also touches upon the notion of ‘the double’ or, as it is better known, the doppelgaenger, first explored in the psychoanalytic literature by Otto Rank in 1914. Freud writes that doppelgaengers can be found in:

Mirrors, shadows, guardian spirits, with the belief in the soul and the fear of death. The idea of the eternal soul allows us an energetic denial of the power of death. This was the first double of the body. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death. (p. 235)

“Uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.” Sigmund Freud

Freud writes:

We can understand why linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche into its opposite, das Unheimliche; for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression. (p. 241, SE XVII)

Through this process, we can see that the nature of the uncanny is entirely subjective, based upon our own experiences but haunts each of us to varying degrees.

By Jamie Ruers, Freud Museum Researcher

Buy The Uncanny by Sigmund Freud from the museum shop now.

Examples of the Uncanny

The Uncanny in Art

Waxwork dolls, automata, doubles, ghosts, mirrors, the home and its secrets, madness and severed limbs are mentioned throughout The Uncanny, influencing painters and sculptors to explore these themes and blur the boundaries between animate and inanimate, human and non-human, life and death.

Podcast: Freud in Focus 2

Posted in Museum Blog by Jamie Ruers on September 18th, 2019. Tags: The Uncanny

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what is the title of the first piece in the photograph in the blog on the uncanny in your website? (i.e. the sculpture of the life-size man lying down, death). thank you !

It is the Death Mask of the Wolf Man, Sergei Pankejeff.

Hi! Fascinating post! Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ has proven in my experience to be especially good for analysing the familiar yet somewhat unknown presences we might encounter in our lives. What in your opinion are good examples of the Uncanny in literature?

Thanks for your message! My favourite example is The Double by Dostoyevsky. The story begins with the protagonist who finds himself compelled to confront a familiar figure he sees in the distance, who turns out to be himself. This is an unbearable experience and the whole story continues with many twists and turns (I won’t ruin it!). I think it’s not only a good example of doppelgaengers but this is a familiar scene for most people in dreams. This then becomes a nice example of the uncanny nature of dream scenes and nightmares. Do you have any other recommendations yourself, Isabelle?

Does anyone else have a favourite example of the uncanny in literature? Please join in the discussion!

Very interesting subject! Do you have examples of the use of The Uncanny in television shows?

Almost all, if not all, episodes of “The Twilight Zone”. One I would suggest is “The Living Doll”, it features a talking, sentient doll named Talky Tina. I won’t spoil the ending though.

Hi, I’m currently looking at examples of the uncanny in gothic literature, for example its occurrence in the iconography of the haunted house – looking specifically at The Haunting of Hill House. I was wondering, what translation of Freud’s Das Unheimliche do you quote in this article?

Hi Lucy! We use the Standard Editions for quoting Freud. For the full reference: Freud, S., Standard Edition XVII (1917-1919), “On Infantile Neurosis and Other Works” (trans. Strachey, J) You can find the full citation and details here. Hope this helps!

Hi! I am currently writing my dissertation on the psychodynamics of Jacobean Revenge drama and am due to start an MA in Victorian Studies so I have some literary suggestions. Middleton’s Changeling is a great example of ‘doubling’ and the castration anxiety described in the article, especially in reference to eyesight. The Duchess of Malfi by Webster features some very interesting uses of wax work limbs and its very very creepy! The uncanniness of automatons is also used in Decadent literature a lot, especially Rachilde’s Monsieur Venus.

Fascinating information!! To my mind, an excellent example of the uncanny appears in F. Scott Fitzgerald’ s story, “One Trip Abroad.” This story has been particularly admired for Fitzgerald’s effective adaptation of the Doppelgänger device. Obviously, I highly recommend this story. Laura Rinaldi

Hi! This is the most understandable passage about the idea of the uncanny. I’m still reading Freud’s article about the uncanny though, and now i’m on the ‘double’ section. So, i’m writing my undergraduate thesis using the uncanny theory by Freud and taking H.P Lovecraft short stories as the main source for the analysis. Btw, i use 2 of Lovecraft short stories, Whisperer In The Darkness and At The Mountain of Madness which i think it would be good using this theory since the whole idea of the uncanny is ‘all that is terrible, arouses dread and creeping horror, whatever excites dread.’ So, do you think that most of Lovecraft works (especially those two short stories) are suitable for “the characteristics” of the uncanny? And if you were me, how would you analyze a literary work using the uncanny theory?

Thanks in advance!

What about the story of ‘the Nutcracker’ then? That is about toys and other objects coming alive!

Hi Gerda. That is a great question! The modern popularised versions of the Nutcracker (Tchaikovsky’s ballet or TV/Films adaptations) are in fact watered down versions of the original tale! Interestingly, the original ‘Nutcracker’ was written by E.T.A. Hoffmann, who also wrote ‘The Sandman’ which Freud analyses in his Uncanny essay. The original story was actually rather uncanny full of references to death and castration; mice have their tails chopped off and the dolls come alive when the protagonist, a little girl named Marie, cuts her arm and begins to have fever dreams from the blood loss (perhaps this is an allegory for the loss of her childhood…?). Throughout, Marie finds it difficult to differentiate between her fever dreams and reality. The story ends with one paragraph – sorry, a spoiler here – as Marie falls in love with the Nutcracker and goes to live with him in the Marzipan Kingdom forever. I’m sure wonderful papers have been written about why Marie stayed in the fantasy world 🙂

This is a welcome set of posts and comments. It seems to me that we are about to engage with the uncanny in the way the Freud would have hoped – facing the call to all embrace the reality of the all the things our “developed” judeo-christian-informed academic circles have rendered superstition and unscientific. Some hypotheses and questions arise for me. This could be a time of awakening for organisations, individuals and society at large, as we turn and face the emergence of the unconscious in the age of AI. The Chthonic turn, the hermetic gaze and the masonic philosophical position will have to find a new home side by side with the Judeo-Christian world view. It may also be seen as an ancestral healing of the legacy of the various Inquisitions led by the Vatican in centuries past that wiped out epistemologies rooted to the earth and non-human ways of Being. May open a new perspective on climate peril, collapsing democracies and a host of other discontents of our (un)civilisation. Lots of questions…..

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Sigmund Freud: Theory of Psychosexual Development Analysis

Sigmund freud theory: introduction, phallic phase, latent phase, genital phase, sigmund freud psychosexual theory: conclusion, works cited.

Sigmund Freud’s contribution to science is immense. His psychoanalytic theories of personality, unconscious mind, and child development forever changed the way we see human behavior. This essay will focus on Sigmund Freud theory of psychosexual development.

Sigmund Freud, in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality explored the concept of sexual development from psychological point of view arguing that sexual development intricately links the behaviour, beliefs and psychology of an individual. Freud changed the perception of sex when he proposed that sexuality forms an integral part of childhood development as sex mediates between the body and the mind (Perron 5). He noted that sexual instincts are major driving forces in personality development.

Sigmund Freud has redefined the ordinary physical perspective of sexual development by incorporating psychological aspect of psyche. In his psychoanalysis theory, Freud proposed that the psyche has three components, namely, the ego, the super-ego and the id. Super-ego is the conscious component of the psyche that imposes and regulates cultural sexual constraints while the id is the unconscious component that determines the sexual instincts of pleasure and is important in socialization.

The ego is the component of the psyche that interfaces and coordinates the super-ego and the id in the harmonization of the conflicting sexual instincts and cultural sexual constraints in the process of psychosexual development (Dhanyasree Para. 1). To study sexual development, Freud divided the development process into five phases, namely the oral phase, anal phase, phallic phase, latency phase and genital phase basing on the source of the sexual drive.

Oral phase is the first phase of psychosexual development that begins from birth and continues up to about two years. In this phase, the primary source of sexual instinct or the erogenous zone is the mouth because the baby finds the pleasure in sucking her mother’s breast, sucking the fingers, or even putting any objects into the mouth (Stevenson Para. 3).

Critically, at this stage the baby is actively putting things into the mouth in order to satisfy the stimulating sexual instinct in the mouth. The psychological explanation is that, since the baby is still very young, super-ego and ego components of the psyche are immature thus the baby is under unconscious control of the id and cannot coordinate components of the psyche.

Therefore, the dominant component of the psyche is the id, which makes the baby be under the unconscious control of the id hence the baby focuses on the sexual instincts to derive pleasure (Perron 8). As the ego develops, the baby differentiates the environment and the body by the senses and can start demanding her mother’s breast or anything to suck.

Poor nursing or early weaning deprives the baby the pleasure of parental care and this forms part of the early challenges the baby experiences. During these challenges, fixation can occur, the baby will have problems in future such as aggression, dependency, nails biting, smoking, drinking or eating (Cherry Para 2).

Persistence of fixation characteristics into the live of an adult is an indication of the effects of the early sexual instincts in the development and modification of personal character. This implies that one can modify human behavior as early as the beginning of sexual instincts and proper childcare can help prevent fixation, which is the residual consequences of due to the unsatisfied motherly pleasure on the kid at an early stages of sexual development.

This is the second phase of psychosexual development and it involves a shift of sexual instinct from the mouth into the anus. This phase occurs between the ages of about 2 years and 3 years when a child trains on how to use a toilet. The source of sexual drive is the anus and the child finds pleasure in the “repulsion or retention of feces” (Stevenson Para. 4).Since the ego and super-ego have developed, they child psyche now have conflicting components of the psyche.

While the dominant id component unconsciously seeks pleasure in expulsion of feces, the super-ego component is the pressure seeking to instill proper toilet training to the child by the parent. The ego then tries to harmonize the conflicting demands from the parent, which is the super-ego and child’s desires, the id.

In the anal phase, the child has two options to choose: the child can either follow the desires of the id or comply with the demands of the super-ego. If the child opts for the desires of the id, it means the child is going to have pleasure in expulsion of feces at any time and place as they please and if the parents do not correct this habit, the child will continue with it into the future affecting the character.

The future character of the child will be an “anal expulsive character” that is careless, messy, reckless, disorganized, and defiant personality (Stevenson Para. 4).

On contrary, if the child opts for the demands of the super-ego, it means that the child either followed the demands of the parent in toilet training or has the pleasure of retaining the feces. If the child finds pleasure in the retention of the feces and continue enjoying without the notice of the parent, the child will overindulge this habit and develop an “anal retentive character” that is obstinate, clean, precise, orderly, meticulous, careful, stingy and passively-aggressive personality (Stevenson Para. 4).

The two characters, the anal repulsive and the anal-retentive characters result from the autonomy of the ego and not compulsion from the super-ego or the id. The ego choice of character and proper toilet training in the anal phase will significantly affect individual inclinations and attitudes towards authorities on how one can comply or disobey.

If the parent imposes toilet training to the child, physically the child will seem to comply but the ego of the child did not harmoniously sort out the conflict between the super-ego and the id resulting into perpetual conflict that affect the personality of the child. The resulting effect of dictating the ego of the child will lower the self-esteem and decision-making ability since the autonomy of the ego is interfered.

This stage occurs between the ages of 3-6 years and it is the most critical stage in sexual development. Here there is shift in the erogenous zone from anus into genitals as the child explore own genitals and genitals of the friends as an adventure to understand sexuality. Although the source of the sexual instinct originates from the genitals, the genitals are not mature as adults but boys experiences occasional erection in their sleep and they find pleasure (Cherry Para. 2).

The major conflicts at this stage are the Oedipus and Electra complexes for boys and girls respectively, which are the “unconscious desire to possess the opposite-sexed parent and to eliminate the same-sexed one” (Stevenson Para. 5).

Oedipus complex is the unconscious selfish interests the boy experiences as he competes with the father for the love and attention of the mother. The unconscious desire and natural love for his mother is due to the sexual instincts experienced at the oral and anal stages and it is transforming into real sexual desire (Dhanyasree Para. 5). As a boy mature, he begins to identify his sexual identity and associate with his the mother more than the father.

The boy feels that his father threatens his love towards the mother and he begins to envious as he tries to compete with his father for the attention and affection of the mother The boy develop fears when he realizes that her mother do not have penis like him because the father has castrated her. Freud describes this fear as “castration anxiety” (Cherry Para 5). This fear is due to the super-ego that tends to dominate the id as the boy mature and become more conscious about the choices he makes.

The term Electra complex describes the unconscious envy that the girl child experiences at the phallic stage. When the girl identify her sexuality and realizes the difference between mother and father or boy and girl sexuality, Electra complex ensues. After realization that she do not have penis and perceiving that her mother castrated her, she become envious for the penis of her father.

Freud describes this envy for the penis as “penis envy” (Stevenson Para. 5). The envious demands for the penis by the id outweighs super-ego cultural demands leaving the girl fixated, still envying men into the marriage. Since the girl has no option, she begins to identify with her mother and start to learn her sexual role.

The phallic phase is the most crucial stage where children learn their sexual roles after they experience the battle in their psyche. At this stage, there is a shift in the psyche as the id that is dominant in the childhood gradually dominates the super-ego. The ego then harmonizes the conflicting forces in the psyche making the child to accept reality and love both parents without fear of castration or envy of the penis.

If the conflicting super-ego and the id demands remain unsolved, fixation will occur. In women, it results into extreme characters such as hunger for superiority over men, seductive or low self-esteem, and while in boys, fixation may result into immorality, narcissistic, over ambition or careless behavior.

Freud further proposes that fixation can be the root of cause of homosexuality and other sexual anomalies (Stevenson Para. 6). The aberrant sexual behaviors that occur in an adult life originate from the phallic stage of psychological and sexual development, thus, phallic stage is very critical in the development of sexual characters as well as personality.

Latent phase occurs at the age when the child start schooling up to the age when adolescence begins. This stage is latent because the sexual instinct or libido drives are dormant and the erogenous energy of the genitals is directed into other areas of thinking process such as intellectual pursuits, games, and social interactions (Cherry Para. 6). Although sexual drives are dormant in this stage, the habits formed at earlier stages of psychosexual development are processed into concrete behaviors.

Essentially, what really happens at this stage is that the ego is taking control of the id because at the phallic stage, the Oedipal and Electra complexes causes repression of the id, hence the child is do not longer operates under the unconscious demands of the id but is under the conscious control of the super-ego and ego coordination.

In the conscious state the child begin exploring and discovering the environment as a way of exercising the ego in making decision and choices. This stage determines the personality in terms of communication, socialization, and self-esteem.

Latent phase critical depend on the resolution of the Oedipus and Electra conflicts that occur at the phallic phase because the conflict between super-ago and ego can be resolved or it may remain unsolved.

The importance of conflict resolution in the preceding stages of psychosexual development is that it forms basis for the development of subsequent psychosexual development stages. Thus, any anomaly in conflict resolution in the psyche will result into the aberrant behaviors such as poor communication skills, anti-social character, and low self-esteem.

This is the last stage of the psychosexual development and it occurs at the age of about 12 years when puberty begins until the end of puberty where major secondary sexual characteristics occur (Perron 12). At this stage, the dormant erogenous energy drive at latent stage is activated resulting into strong sexual urge to the opposite sex. Here there is the shift of interest from selfish needs to the consideration of the needs of others (Cherry Para. 7).

The shift in the needs is due to the maturity of the ego that allows proper coordination of the conflicts in the psyche making the child to transition well from the childhood into the adulthood. The child at this stage experience sexual maturity and get interested in doing responsibilities of the adults like doing work, love relationships or can even marry.

If there are conflicts that are unresolved from the preceding stages, now the child starts to feel their impacts at this stage. It is at this stage where there is a manifestation of the psychosexual development experiences, since secondary sexual characteristics are more pronounced. Proper development of ego and genitals at this stage results into a balanced individual with a normal personality.

Sigmund Freud has greatly changed the perception of sex by incorporating the psychological aspect into the sexuality. The earlier perception that sexual development is just a physical and only occurs during puberty is quite unsatisfactory in explaining the causes of aberrant sexual behaviors and diverse personalities. Psychosexual development theory elucidates what really constitutes sexually right from when the child is born up to the puberty point of maturity.

The psychological components of psyche, the super-ego, the ego, and the id clearly demonstrate psychological perspective of sexuality and character development of an individual. From Freud perspective, sexuality and character development are more of psychological rather than physical appearances that only depend on the biological dictation.

Psychosexual development theory gives five sequential phases that a human being undergoes in the course of sexual development. These phases are closely linked and dependent on one another in the cumulative building up of the sexual and psychological development and eventually the overall character of an individual. Psychosexual theory has significantly changed the perception and the definition of sexuality in the modern world.

Dhanyasree, Munnar. “Psychosexual Analysis” Oneindia Living. 2008. Web.

Cherry, Kendra. “Freud’s Stages of Psychosexual Development.” Psychology. 2010. Web.

Perron, Roger. “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.” International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. 2010. Web

Stevenson, David. “ Freud’s Psychosexual Stages of Development .” The Victorian Web 2001. Web.

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Home — Essay Samples — Psychology — Sigmund Freud — Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalysis Theory

Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalysis Theory

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Biography of sigmund freud, key concepts of psychoanalysis theory, methods of psychoanalysis, significance of freud’s psychoanalysis theory, criticism of freud’s psychoanalysis theory.

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Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

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Sigmund Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality was first published in 1905. Freud expanded it several times in later editions, and it reached its final form in 1924. The book occupies a major place in Freud’s body of work, but it was controversial when it first appeared. Freud pointedly blurs the line between perversions and normal sexual behaviors, and he develops a radically new and surprising theory of human sexuality—in particular, of childhood sexuality. The essays present some of Freud’s most famous ideas, including the stages of psychosexual development, polymorphous perversity, drive theory, and the Oedipus complex. Finally, the book makes contributions to Freud’s thinking about aggression, ambivalence, sublimation , and more.

In 1953, the multivolume Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Freud appeared in English with a translation of the Three Essays by James Strachey. This version remains definitive, although though there is a long history of disputing some of Strachey’s translations of key terms. Strachey’s annotations and footnotes explain the position of the Three Essays in the overall development of Freud’s thought. Strachey’s notes also explain the development of the book over time, describing its expansions and revisions between 1905 and 1924.

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Most English editions reproduce Strachey’s translation including his notes. (Some e-book editions rely on an outdated, although sometimes elegant, English translation from 1915 by A. A. Brill.) This guide relies on the Basic Books edition of Strachey’s translation published in 2000. Still in print, it is also available for free at the Internet Archive. Citations refer to the page numbers in that edition.

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The first essay, “The Sexual Aberrations,” analyzes various perversions to challenge commonplace ideas about human sexuality. These commonplaces are, first, that infants and children do not have sex lives because the sexual impulse only arrives with puberty and, second, that sexual instincts are naturally directed to the opposite sex and procreation.

Freud discusses “inversion,” or homosexuality, to demonstrate that the sexual instinct does not contain an innate sexual object (such as the opposite sex). Freud looks at various theories about inversion that were prevalent in his day and finds fatal problems with each of them. Next, under the category of the sexual aim, he discusses the perversions proper, like fetishes for feet or other body parts, and so on. Freud concludes that the sexual instinct is itself various and nonunitary, but that its primitive and partial components come together or amalgamate to produce various macro-level sexualities. In some cases, the result is an amalgamation that we call normal. In other cases, the result is a perversion.

Freud then turns to the topic of neurotics and their sexual lives. He writes that the sexual instinct is key to the formation and maintenance of a neurotic’s symptoms because sexual libido is what charges or gives energy to the neurotic’s symptoms. As a result, the neurotic’s sex life, he writes, is in some way really nothing more than the (unhappy) experience of their symptoms.

In the second essay, “Infantile Sexuality,” Freud turns to early childhood, which he argues plays a pivotal role not just in the development of adult sexual preferences but in human psychological development as a whole. Infantile sexuality is fundamentally autoerotic in nature and “polymorphously perverse” (115). Freud argues that the whole variety of neurotic and normal psychological structures emerge from the process of psychosexual development that begins with oral satisfaction and thumb-sucking and proceeds through the other so-called erotogenic zones, including the anal, arriving finally at genital sexuality. He discusses key ideas like the incest barrier and penis envy in this section.

In the final essay, “The Transformation of Puberty,” Freud discusses the changes ushered in by puberty following the latent stage—itself begun at around age five. In a normal case, the adolescent will discover an attraction to the opposite sex and begin to break away from the emotionally incestuous confines of the family unit. While some adolescents make the transition to adult sexuality in the normal way, others do so differently, leading to what we call perversions and to various neurotic formations that may not at first seem like they are related to sexual life.

Throughout the book, Freud emphasizes that perversion, neurosis, and normality are continuous and often overlapping categories. Drawing on an enormous wealth of observations about both neurotic and normal psychological experience, he connects his theory of psychosexual development, elaborated for the first time in this book, to the framework for psychoanalysis that he had already developed, in which repressed childhood experiences are found to be the causes of present-day psychological formations. To summarize most briefly, this is the book that made sex fundamental to Freudian theory.

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On Narcissism, 1914, by Sigmund Freud

On Narcissism , 1914 was a significant point in the development of Freud's theories. The work was produced after work on his earlier theories on dreams and the unconscious mind. It also comes immediately he began to explore the various aspects of the unconscious mind such as the 'id'. However, Freud does not mention the 'id' in this work. Instead, he gives suggestions on the existence of these various parts of the mind. In addition, Freud begins to talk about the mind's self-control mechanisms, which he refers to as the 'ego-ideal'. However, he does not directly mention the superego, which would be the basis of his later works. It is important to note that it is one of his most technical works. In this work, Freud uses many clinical terms, which might not be easy for the common reader to understand.

In the work, Freud introduces the concept of 'narcissism'. He defines it as adoration one accords themselves in light of them being an object of sexual desire. He views narcissism as some sort of neurosis. However, he also postulates that all humans have some level of narcissism throughout their development. In his work, Freud differentiates between two types of narcissism, primary and secondary narcissism. Primary narcissism preexists in all human beings; this type of energy is present from birth. He postulates this is the type of narcissism, which causes individuals their affection towards an object. For instance, when a mother expresses unadulterated love for her child it is a result of this primary narcissism. In addition, he speculates this is the same type of energy evident in young kids. At this point in their life, kids will often believe themselves to be super beings capable of performing amazing feats just by their words.

However, at some point in their life, this primary narcissism is directed outwards to an object. This is because it causes too much conflict within the individual. Freud speculates that secondary narcissism develops when individuals turn this object affection back on themselves. This is after the affection had already been projected outwards to other objects besides themselves. The result is that an individual becomes cut off from society and disinterested in others. Freud postulates that such an individual will have low self-esteem. This is due to their inability to express love to others and have it expressed back to them. In addition, such a person is full of shame, guilt and often very defensive. This is because narcissism causes an individual to seek self-preservation.

In his work, Freud speculates that narcissism from to distinct sources. In the first place, the person is driven by a need to self-preserve; secondly, the individual is driven by the sex drive, essentially the need to procreate. During childhood, these two drives are usually the same and no differentiation can be made. In essence, the more affection 'libido' is projected to others 'object-libido', the less energy there exists for self-love 'ego-libido'. In essence, Freud postulates object libido emanates from a need to ensure the survival of the species. Consequently, Freud argues that the concept of love is for ensuring continuation of the species. He further argues that for the individual and the species to survive, there is a need for maintaining a delicate balance between these two libidos. For instance, if an individual want to eat, he must have some ego-libido, however if he want the species to survive, he must have object-libido. An imbalance occurs when too much energy is directed inwards to the individual. The result is that the personality of the person becomes infected and they can no longer function properly in society.

In later chapters of his work, Freud seeks to explain the cause of homosexuality. According to Freud, the mother-child relationship, the child directs their outward affection towards the mother. However, homosexuals do not learn to project their object-libido correctly, according to Freud, these individuals chose a different object of their choice. Instead, they tend to choose a different object on which to project their affection. According to Freud, this is narcissism in its purest form. In addition, Freud had a few choice words for the behavior of beautiful women. He postulated that most of these beautiful females were narcissists interested in self-adoration. He postulated they tended to look for someone who could develop an admiration for them in the same obsessive way they loved themselves. Consequently, such women were found to be highly attractive to men primarily due to their indifference of what other though of them.

Freud postulates that children expressed their love for children as a way of fulfilling their own narcissistic desires. This primary narcissism reemerges after the child's birth. Freud later explores the ego ideal. In this work, he explains that as a person develops, they develop a sort of self-censorship. In paranoid individuals, the ego ideal is too strong and uncontrolled, which causes an individual to develop of being monitored by unseen persons. Freud also explains, the ego ideal could be the cause of the voice reported in mental patients, which is often said to be critical of the individual.

Consequently, self-esteem is weighed against the satisfaction of this ego ideal. How much self-esteem one has then depends on how much affection and love they are able to derive form the object of their desire. If object-libido is projected outwards without reciprocity, it can lead to low self-esteem.

Freud's work, particularly touching on homosexuality, has elicited much criticism over the years. However, even his critics still find inspiration when they trying to develop their own psychoanalytical theories. His work is still relevant today, for instance, the current societies are arguably some of the most narcissistic in the history. The phenomenon where young and old people seem to have developed lack of empathy for each other is subject of interest for many scholars. However, Freud quite complex work may not provide all the answers to this phenomenon. However, it does raise interesting issues on the role of family in the development of individuals into caring members of a society.

The Influence of Sigmund Freud’s Theories on our of Maternal Bonds

This essay about Sigmund Freud’s theories explores the significant impact of maternal relationships on psychological development. It discusses Freud’s controversial Oedipus complex and broader psychosexual stages, emphasizing the deep emotional bond between mother and child. Freud’s insights suggest that the quality of early maternal attachment profoundly influences an individual’s ability to form relationships later in life. Additionally, the essay examines Freud’s views on the consequences of extreme maternal behaviors, such as overprotection or neglect, and their potential psychological repercussions. It also touches on how these early dynamics influence gender identity formation. Despite criticisms and the evolution of his theories, Freud’s ideas on motherhood continue to resonate within modern psychological and cultural contexts, shaping our understanding of the pivotal role mothers play in emotional and social development.

How it works

Sigmund Freud, a name synonymous with psychoanalysis, had quite a bit to say about the emotional entanglements between mothers and their children. His theories have stirred up discussions that ripple through not just the field of psychology, but also touch on everything from novels to parenting blogs. Let’s take a closer look at how Freud’s thoughts on motherhood still echo in today’s conversations about parenting and emotional development.

Freud introduced some head-turning ideas, among them the Oedipus complex, which suggests a child harbors deep, subconscious desires for the parent of the opposite sex while viewing the same-sex parent as a rival.

This notion, focusing particularly on boys’ feelings toward their mothers, sparked more than a few debates. While it’s a theory that has met its fair share of criticism, it points to something undeniable: the emotional depth of the mother-child relationship is profound and complicated.

Diving deeper, Freud argued that the mother is not just the first caregiver but also the first object of affection. This relationship, according to him, lays the foundation for all the relationships we form later. The quality and security of this initial attachment play a significant role in how we learn to connect with others as we grow. Freud’s insight here invites us to think about the lasting impact of our earliest interactions and how they shape our ability to foster relationships throughout life.

Freud didn’t stop there—he also looked at what happens when maternal care swings to the extremes, either too distant or too smothering. He suggested that these imbalances could lead to psychological challenges down the line, including issues with personal identity and emotional stability. His thoughts on this matter push us to consider how delicate the balance of parenting really is, with both neglect and overprotection carrying potential consequences.

His theories even extend into how we come to understand our own gender identities, with the mother playing a pivotal role in guiding the child through these early stages of identity formation. Freud’s reflections give us a window into how deeply our family dynamics can influence our perceptions of ourselves, including how we see our gender roles.

While the field of psychology has grown and many of Freud’s ideas have evolved or been challenged, the essence of his views—that our earliest relationships, particularly with our mothers, are crucial to our later psychological landscape—continues to influence modern psychology. Researchers and theorists build on his ideas, incorporating modern understandings from developmental and social psychology, but the basic premise that Freud laid down about the importance of maternal attachment remains influential.

Moreover, Freud’s theories have trickled into our cultural understanding of motherhood, influencing how society perceives and discusses the responsibilities of being a mom. His influence is evident in the ongoing cultural fascination with how parenting shapes us, a topic that’s as likely to appear in scientific journals as it is in pop culture critiques and parenting manuals.

In sum, Freud’s exploration of mother-child dynamics offers valuable insights into the complex interplay of early emotional bonds and their long-term effects on our psychological makeup. His work prompts us to consider the powerful role these early interactions play in shaping who we are. While modern psychology has moved on in many ways, Freud’s legacy in how we think about the psychological impact of motherhood is still very much alive, reminding us of the deep and lasting influence of those first few years.

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PapersOwl.com. (2024). The Influence of Sigmund Freud's Theories on Our of Maternal Bonds . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-influence-of-sigmund-freuds-theories-on-our-of-maternal-bonds/ [Accessed: 14-May-2024]

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