July 19, 2026 • 46 mins
Sigmund Freud is one of the most famous and contested names in psychology. Often reduced to couches, cigars, dreams, sex, and blaming everything on your mother, Freud’s real story is much more complicated. In this bonus episode, we take a look at who Freud actually was - his medical background, the development of his method, and why his views are so context specific.
We explore:
• The development of free association
• The role of dreams and transference
• Defence mechanisms and the unconscious
• The structural model of the human psyche
• Challenges to his theory
• Freud's legacy: Anna and modern-day psychoanalysis
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Our favourite sources:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK559106/
https://www.cureus.com/articles/303246-matters-of-the-mind-a-look-into-the-life-of-sigmund-freud#!/
https://www.freud.org.uk/2020/04/07/freud-at-home-sigmund-and-annas-studies/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15293843/
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello everybody, I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the
Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through
the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and
what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back
(00:25):
to the show. Welcome back to the podcast, and welcome
to another bonus episode of the Psychology of Your Twenties.
This is a special mini series we're running within the
podcast where we break down psychology concepts, theories and figures
which have become vastly popular beyond the psychology space, especially online,
(00:49):
and we essentially give you the real facts and we
mythbust some of the bogus information and ideas we have
about these things or which are kind of promoted in
online spaces. We've done dopamine, We've done Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
We have mythbusted the legend that our frontal lobe develops
(01:09):
at twenty five. We've done personality tests. But today we
have the big kahuna of all episodes when it comes
to psychology law. We are going to talk about none
other than the infamous, the notorious, the famous, the well
known Sigmund Freud. The figure that I think has come
(01:31):
to define modern psychology more than any other figure, maybe
more than any other concept, and has also prompted a
lot of misconceptions about psychology and the field of therapy
in general. I'm not going to waste any time because
we have a lot to talk about. This man, the man,
the myth, the legend, got up to so many things
(01:52):
during his life, and his legacy is almost as big
as what he actually did. And I'm just going to
tell you this episode takes turns that you will never believe.
Cocaine is mentioned, Feminism, weird sexual beliefs he had. There
is a lot to discuss, so let's get into it.
(02:16):
So let's start with the basics. Who was Sigmund Freud.
If you had never heard of him before, what would
you need to know? So Sigmund Freud is, as I
alluded to, just like the grandfather of modern psychology. He
created an entire new perspective on the human mind, human emotions,
human souls, and it's called psychoanalysis. More on that later.
(02:41):
Before he became the creator of psychoanalysis and the famous
name and figure of today. He was born in eighteen
fifty six in what was then the Austrian Empire. At
the time, Austria was very much the center of psychological
thought and research. It was where so many major figures
(03:01):
were teaching learning. Being born, his family later moved to Vienna.
That's where he spent most of his life and his career.
I was literally in Vienna last week and I didn't
go to the Freud Museum, and I knew it was there,
and I was just kicking myself. I just didn't have time.
I went cycling and I went on a wine tour instead.
(03:22):
So definitely a lot of fun, but yeah, I didn't go.
And apparently it's amazing, and apparently it's literally his offices
with his original couch, with his original carpeting, furnishing. If
you look up a photo of Freud's office, it's very distinct.
But just a reason to go back to Vienna, I guess.
But he lived there. He lived in Austria. He lived
in Vienna with his family, with his daughter up until
(03:45):
his death. More on her later. But he didn't start
out doing psychology as we know it today. He didn't
start out thinking the things that he went on to think. Obviously,
he actually trained as a doctor and he began his
professional life in neurology. He was medically trained. He was
(04:08):
very interested in the nervous system in the brain. He
wanted to help people with things like epilepsy, with forgetfulness,
coordination issues. But he became very interested in patients who
they had physical symptoms, but they didn't have a physical explanation.
So they had things like paralysis, like pain, feinting, distress, compulsion,
(04:32):
speech difficulties, all these other things, and physicians of the
time couldn't account for them medically. They couldn't account for
them really, they didn't think about them as emotional either,
and so at the time he was working in specifically
in neurology. But back then psychiatry, neurology, psychology, they weren't
(04:52):
really divided up in the way they are today. It
was just kind of one big pot of things to
do with the body and the brain and the mind.
And many of the symptoms that they were observing, which
were physical but also emotional in nature, they just got
grouped together and they were given a specific diagnosis of
hysteria or hysteria, depending on how you pronounce it. This
(05:17):
is a term that we would not use today, right,
We wouldn't say that somebody has hysteria. It's very loaded
with gendered assumptions about women's bodies, women's emotions, credibility. In fact,
about eighty percent of the people who were diagnosed with
hysteria were women, and even the symptoms, the way that
it was described was gendered, so it included things like
(05:39):
wanting to have too much sex as a woman, but
equally not wanting to have any sex at all, relationship
to satisfaction, sadness in the home, but then also enthusiasm,
being too passionate. That was another criteria. So not the
nioicest or the most accurate or the most helpful of
(06:00):
diagnosis that you could get at the time. But Freud
saw this and he wanted to understand this label and
the suffering beneath it in a way that was just
a bit more articulate and structured and organized and went
deeper than that current level for his time. The way
he went about this was really scientific. I think that's
a very crucial part. You know, when we look at
(06:23):
his work and some of the things that he does,
which we'll talk about in a second, we often look
at it through the lens of the time period that
we are in now. Where we're kind of like, that's
probably not okay, that's probably not scientific, But we need
to understand where he was at. You know, he was
operating before there was any kind of brain imagery, before
(06:44):
there was any kind of you know, modern trauma science.
It was pre randomized control groups, pre developmental psychology, pre
ethics bodies, and it was born out of the context
of Victorian era assumptions about sex, gender, class, family respect rules.
Were talking here about somebody who was very radical for
(07:06):
his period of time. He was also deeply limited by it.
But the thing is is that we couldn't have gotten
to where we were without him. Like he really pushed
the needle, He really tried things. He really attempted to
construct what we now call a method or a hypothesis
or a sample size or an intervention. So what was
he actually doing? What was what was he actually trying out?
(07:29):
That was so quote unquote radical, So early on he
was influenced by this one case, and this was really
what kind of pushed him into doing more scientific things.
It was the case of Bertha Pappenheim. She's also known
as Anna Oh, so that was her pseudonym that he
wrote about her as Anna oh, and she was experiencing
(07:50):
like really distressing symptoms. She was experiencing paralysis, hallucinations, visual disturbances, confusion,
and at the time she was also looking after her
die father. Freud was very close to this case. He
was a medical student at the time. He was watching it.
He wrote so much about it because it suggested that
(08:11):
physical seeing symptoms might be connected to emotional experiences, and
he kind of put that forward. He goes, you know,
we're trying to find a parasite, We're trying to find
something that's wrong with her brain. We're trying to explain
this through all these different avenues. Did anybody just think
to ask her about how she's coping with her dad?
Did anybody just think to go into her childhood and
(08:34):
her early memories with her father and how they might
be making this particularly distressing? And this really shaped what
became psychoanalysis, the talking cure. Essentially, what Freud said was
that human pain is like kind of like a parasite
in the body that needs to be extracted. Talking through
(08:56):
emotionally charged memories, revealing a emotionally charged moments, being honest
about your feelings and about your past, you know, digging
below the surface of human desire and human thought. That
is what allows that extraction, that is what helps ease
physical symptoms. I also want to say side note, Anna Oh,
(09:18):
back to her. She yes in Freud's work was written
under a pseudonym. But Bertha, the woman who was Anna Oh,
she actually went on to become a very famous writer.
She was a very very well known social worker. She
was a very well known feminist. She was a major
figure in German Jewish women's welfare and did a lot
(09:40):
of activism. So a little bit of a side note
for the history of this. She was also pretty incredible.
So then Freud moved on. He went to Paris and
he studied under a very famous neurologist called Jean Martin Charcotte.
I always butcher the French. I'm sorry if you're French.
Oh you speak French. I know that sounds That's probably
(10:00):
not how it's said, but look it up John Martin
Jacott in Paris, and this is when he started learning
about things like hypnosis and interrogation and suggestion to help
patients access memories or feelings that were buried very deep
in the unconscious mind. Over time, though, he kind of
(10:21):
moved away from that. This was his first kind of
step towards modern practices. He moved away from hypnosis in
particular because he realized, you know, it just didn't work
for everybody. It also wasn't entirely accurate, and he wanted
something that felt a little bit less stressful, and so
he developed a now very famous method called free association.
(10:43):
This is a very important term, one of the terms
most associated with Freud. Free association. It was a method
where he essentially found ways to get patients to say
whatever came to mind, whatever memories they were thinking, even
if it was embarrassing, irrelevant, repetitive, strange. He wanted it
to just come out. He just wanted them to just
spill their guts. Basically, he also did dream analysis, so
(11:06):
he really felt that our memories and our pain and
our trauma and what was bothering us was revealed through
dreams because that was when the subconscious mind is most relaxed.
But at its simplest form, all of these methods of
psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis was this theory that underneath our conscious thoughts,
our conscious patterns, our conscious behaviors are these wishes and
(11:29):
these fears and these conflicts and these memories and defenses
that we don't fully recognize that are seeping through. And
once you discover those influences, once you tear apart those conditions,
I guess that is when you can help somebody with
their conscious problems, with their everyday issues. Today, like the
(11:50):
idea that talking about your feelings might help you, or
thinking about your past might help you, or thinking about
your unconscious motivations might help you as pretty obvious, but
back then it wasn't, and Freud helped move western mental
health care towards this idea that again physical or behavioral
symptoms have a psychological emotional meaning, and if you were
to listen carefully to somebody's inner world, you could help them.
(12:14):
And that's where that's where what he did was very
very powerful. Should also be said he did some other
things he tried in order to access the unconscious mind
or the pre conscious mind. He experimented with a lot
of ways of doing this. Cocaine was the other one.
He Freud in the early days of his career loved cocaine.
(12:36):
He loved using it, he loved prescribing it, he loved
giving it away. He thought it not only lowered inhibitions,
so allowing for greater free association. But he also called
it the miracle drug for depression and other mood disorders,
and he wrote this massive, massive paper called uber drug
(12:57):
because of course he spoke German about it, and it
was like it like went the equivalent of like viral,
like back in the day. A lot of people were
reading this. And then he went back on that later
in his life he was like, I think cocaine is awful.
I would not prescribe it. I do not use it.
The reason why he accidentally, well accidentally. I don't think
(13:21):
he intended this to happen, which is why it was
an accident, but he did. He got one of his
best friends addicted to cocaine, like seriously dependent, and he
saw this man suffering with addiction, and he saw him
like his life just like be derailed, and he was like, okay,
so maybe that's not the solution. Let's talk about some
of his other famous ideas and other famous things associated
(13:45):
with Freud, one of them being him and his couch.
I think it is the typical image of Freud to
have him in a chair, his patient laying on their
back on a couch, reciting their dreams being asked about
them mother and their father whilst he takes notes being
shown in blots and asking them, you know, what do
(14:07):
you see here? Is that accurate? Yeah, there is actually
a big grain of truth to this idea. Freud did
use a couch as apparently in the museum that I
didn't see, but apparently the couch is there. He did
ask patients to speak freely. He did interpret dreams slips
of the tongue and as Freudian slips childhood memories. But
(14:30):
it wasn't as freestyle as we think, so he wasn't
just like come in and just chat about it. He
had a very strict set of questions. He had certain criteria,
he had theories, he had structures. He also had this
method of sitting out like directly out of the line
of sight of the patient because he helped well. He
believed it helped them speak more freely. He believed it
(14:53):
was important to not feel like there was somebody analyzing you,
even if that is what was happening. He kept very,
very diligent case notes. And the other part about Freud's
method was that he was really aware of the role
of something called transference. This is the idea that feelings
(15:13):
from early relationships parents, siblings, even early romantic relationships can
be replayed in the therapy relationship. So, for example, a
patient might experience a therapist as rejecting or critical, or
companting or maybe authoritative, not because of what the therapist
(15:35):
is doing in the room, not because they are rejecting
them or judging them, not because they are critical, but
because of old relational patterns that are being activated or
reactivated through the interaction. A therapist can feel like a
parent or a teacher at times, which is not what
we want them to feel like. And Freud was very
(15:56):
aware of that. This was one of his biggest contributions
that I don't think many people talk about, in which
he doesn't get much credit for. He recognized that therapy
is not just confined to a discussion about the patient's
life outside of the therapy room. What is happening in
the therapy room, how they see the therapist, the relationship
(16:17):
between the person trying to help in the person needing help,
and all the baggage that they come in with as
individuals becomes a huge part of that work and becomes
a huge part of whether somebody's therapy or treatment is successful.
So that's how he went about treatment. Beyond that, what
were his actual core theories? Something interesting that is still
(16:40):
very common for psychologists these days to do less. So
then it was very common was that they would practice
and they would help people, and then they would also
research and they would contribute ideas. So they'd spend kind
of fifty to fifty of the time seeing clients, seeing patients,
having that exposure to real people, and then and the
other amount of the time hypothesizing writing articles. They weren't
(17:05):
doing experiments on the grand scale that we would now
expect in psychology. They were just kind of theorizing based
on what they saw. This is what Freud's core theories are. Firstly,
we have briefly mentioned the idea of conscious pre conscious
and the unconscious mind, and how psychoanalysis is really concerned
(17:25):
with the unconscious mind and what's going on in that
kind of labyrinth. This is often explained and you would
have seen it using the Iceberg metaphor. So if you've
ever seen when you were in high school or in UNI,
or just literally your workplace or like therapist's office, an
Iceberg that says, you know, the conscious mind is the
top and then all that's below is the pre conscious unconscious.
(17:48):
That was Freud's idea, and he again believed that there
was this large amount of what influenced our behavior and
our attitudes and our personality and who we were that
we could not touch or even feel or or kind
of see. Now, there are certain aspects of this that
aren't accepted in modern psychology, but the broader idea that
(18:09):
mental processes happen outside of our conscious awareness is pretty
widely accepted. Cognitive psychology, social psychology, and neuroscience, trauma therapy,
like all those things, they all recognize this as an
important thing and something that does occur. Tix to Freud,
he was the one who kind of started that. Another
(18:29):
major contribution is Freud's structural model of the mind. He
believed that the mind wasn't just made up of conscious,
pre conscious, unconscious or subconscious. It was made up of
the id, the ego, and the super ego. We have
spoken about this at length on the podcast before, but essentially,
(18:51):
the term ego, the way that we use the word ego,
is not as Freud initially thought of it, As you know,
it has been misunderstood him. Well, we'll start with the
ID first, So the ID the ego of the super ego.
The ID is the instinctual, impulsive part of your mind.
It is the part of you that wants immediate satisfaction.
(19:13):
It's associated with pleasure, aggression, hunger, sexuality, desire. It doesn't
care about consequences, it doesn't care about what is socially acceptable.
It just wants, It craves. The superego is the opposite.
It represents internalized rules, morality, guilt, ideals, expectations. It's the
part of you that it's critical, that is overly cautious,
(19:35):
and the ego sits between them. Ego doesn't mean arrogance
for him. Ego meant self awareness, balancing. It meant the
brain's ability in the part of our brain that negotiates
between desire and morality, reality and consequences. So if the
ID wants something immediately and the super ego shames you
(19:59):
for wanting to them, the ego is the part that's
trying to manage the conflict in a way that allows
us the person, to function. And I think that captures
something very recognizable in us as humans. We often experience
a conflict between what we want, what we think we
should want and what reality allows for or what is
(20:19):
deemed acceptable. Another key contribution beyond the ear, the sub ego,
the ego, and the unculture prin Oh my god, so
many unconscious preconscious subconscious. He had a lot of terms,
is his idea of psycho sexual development. Now, this is
one of Freud's most famous and most controversial ideas, and
you have definitely heard of it before. Definitely. There are
(20:43):
too many pop culture references to count at this stage.
Freud proposed that this is the part you may not
have heard of, I will say. Freud proposed that children
move through different stages of development. There is the oral,
the anal, the phallic, latency and denital stages graphic, but
he believed that unresolved conflicts at each of these stages
(21:07):
shapes our personalities as adults. For example, he argued that
if a child experienced frustration or over indulgence during the
oral stage, which centers on feeding and sucking, they might
become overly dependent on habits like smoking or overeating or
nail biting later in life because that is how they
(21:30):
learned to suit themselves during the anal stage, which focuses
on toilet training, so it's not all sexual intimate. Overly
strict parenting in the anal stage might produce somebody who
is very orderly, who is a perfectionist, very controlling, and
lacks parenting during the stage means that somebody becomes messy
(21:51):
or impulsive. And he believed that these kind of unresolved tensions,
which he called fixations, would leave a lasting imprint on
how people think, how people behave, how they relate to
others as adults. This is also where the famous Oedipus
complex comes in in Freud's theory. During the phallic stage,
(22:13):
a young child, it gets a bit weird from here,
just a heads up. A young child, he believed, develops
unconscious feelings of desire for the opposite sex parent, and
therefore a sense of rivalry with the same sex parent
to win the opposite sex parents attention. Now he focused
specifically on boys. He argued that boys unconsciously desire their
(22:36):
mother and see their fathers as rivals and fear punishment
from him. He also believed that this process was important
for the development of the super ego. Then that essentially
resolving this is what allows us to understand what is
right and that incest is not okay. There's also the
(22:56):
female version of this, which is the elektra complex. I
think it goes without saying it's not entirely accurate, if
not accurate at all, it's very heteronormative. He Freud was
known to make a lot of things unnecessarily about sex,
including child development, which is obviously a little bit odd,
(23:19):
not a little bit, it's quite odd that he was
very fixated on this, But yeah, he made a lot
of things about sex that didn't need to be about sex,
like parental conflict or you know, growing up, or being
a teenager or being a messy person. You know, has
nothing to do with sex and all these things, but
(23:40):
he really made it so. And this is an example
of that. The last famous theory of his we're going
to talk about today is the idea of defense mechanisms.
Let's have a palette, cleanse up from talking about oralphallic, anal,
all that stuff, and talk about something else. Defense mechanisms
were in part his He started this idea. They were
further developed by his daughter. Defense mechanisms. If you know
(24:04):
this term, you've probably heard it before. They are ways
that the mind protects itself from anxiety, conflict, shame, or
emotional pain by using methods of denial, projection, rationalization, repression,
and displacement to kind of shield us, to kind of
put a buffer or a barrier between us and the
(24:26):
raw feeling. Essentially, it's just the ways that each of
us tries to deal with discomfort in a unique way
to ourselves and our history. A simple explanation is that
maybe you feel hurt, but instead of admitting that someone
has hurt you, you become rude and dismissive towards somebody
else in order to regain a sense of power. That's displacement.
(24:50):
Sometimes someone who has been repeatedly romantically rejected will claim
that they hate relationships. They just don't see the point.
You know, love is lame, Monogamy is un natural. You know,
people who are in relationships are cringe. This is another
defense mechanism. It's called reaction formation, where somebody responds with
the radical opposite of what they are really feeling and
(25:13):
what they really want in order to conceal their true desires.
Another example, you fail a job interview. You fail a
job interview, you really wanted it, and then you find
all the reasons to believe that the job would have
sucked anyways, instead of just feeling unhappy about it, you
start convincing yourself. You know, I would have been miserable.
I didn't like that guy who interviewed me. You know,
(25:34):
I actually didn't really want that job. That's rationalization, creating
a more acceptable explanation to protect yourself from disappointment, rejection,
or vulnerability. Defense mechanisms are not automatically bad, and they
can really protect us from the emotional intensity of certain scenarios.
(25:55):
The problem with defense mechanisms comes from when they become
rigid and they stop us from seeing reality. Clearly. This
is when they become maladaptive. Maladaptive being something that is
at the end of the day, unhelpful for your functioning
and your survival. Now, like I said, Freud had this
initial idea, but it was his daughter Anna Freud who
(26:19):
developed this more systematically and who gave words to what
he was trying to describe. Anna is a really important
part of this episode because she became a very well
known psychoanalyst in her own right. She is especially associated
with child psychoanalysis, with ego psychology, with ways of human
(26:39):
coping with child development, and this still shapes how clinicians
think about psychology to this day. Now, her relationship with
her father was really complicated by modern standards. She was
insanely devoted to him, She worshiped him, She worked very
closely with him, She cared for him during his illness.
She also underwent an analysis with him. He formed some
(27:02):
of his ideas based on his relationship with his daughter. Now,
this is the guy who created the Oedipus and the electrocomplex,
so you can see why that's a little bit weird
that his daughter was also not just a patient but
a case study for him. He provided her with yeah,
with treatment and interventions, and took notes on her own behavior.
(27:25):
That's pretty unethical today. Actually, it was probably very unethical
back then, and it was. When you think about Freud's work,
a lot of what he talked about may have come
from his relationship with his own daughter, which is a
little bit weird. But Anna did like went on and
was very very successful, and she built really incredible institutions.
She worked with children affected by war. She helped basically
(27:50):
establish childhood trauma, or the treatment of children with trauma
and PTSD as its own kind of clinical thing. She
was very interested in children, She was very interested in
their emotional lives. So her relationship with her father, aside
the influence that she's had is positive and is remarkable
(28:12):
and is an important part of this discussion of like
Freud's legacy. Obviously, she acted of her own accord, she
is her own person, but there is a legacy to
this that I think does continue to be quite positive.
And Anna's work going on from her father's is a
big contribution. Okay, let's take a short break here and
when we return, let's talk a little bit more about
(28:34):
his legacy and what psychologists think of him these days.
So stay with us. So Freud's influence is enormous, but
so are the problems with his work. Now, his theories
weren't evidence based in the way that we would want today.
(28:57):
You know, he didn't use random says, he didn't do
control trials, he didn't do an intervention in no intervention condition.
He developed many of his ideas through, as we said,
case studies, in clinic observations, theoretical reasoning. This doesn't automatically
(29:18):
mean that his theories are worthless. They're not, because we
still use a lot of the ideas today. But it
does mean that they weren't tested using the kinds of
methods that we would expect. Now, his theories were also
because of this, and in addition to this, very difficult
to falsify. This basically means that they were hard to
(29:38):
prove wrong. Now this sounds like a really good thing,
but in the field of psychology, falsifiability is one of
the most central principles that separate science from pseudoscience. Basically,
you have to present a hypothesis or an idea that
(29:59):
if there was proof to the contrary is in, you
could find it and you could make an argument for it.
This is to ensure that you know, research isn't just
being created based on a closed belief system. I'm going
to explain this a little bit better. Let's give the
example of the Oedipus complex. If somebody doesn't seem to
(30:21):
have an oedipisk complex, that might be seen as proof
that the Oedipists complex doesn't exist, because here are all
these people who aren't romantically attracted to their own fathers.
But Freud's theories would say that is not true. They do.
It's just that their desire is buried even deeper than
(30:44):
expected in their in their own conscious It's that they
just don't admit it. It's not that the idea is false,
it's that this person is just concealing that desire. So
you can see how a lot of his ideas of
the unconscious make it very easy to dis prove what
he's saying, because he can always just say, well, their
(31:04):
coping mechanisms are shielding them from accessing this. Their memory
or their feelings are repressed more than you can imagine,
and nothing that I can do can get them up,
but those feelings are definitely still there. The other thing is,
you know, if a patient agreed with Freud's interpretation of
their problems, that's evidence that his interpretations are correct. But
(31:27):
if a patient rejected his ideas. If a patient said, hey,
I actually don't think that I have an issue with
my parents. I actually don't think I had an issue
in childhood. I really had a happy childhood. Like I
really disagree with you, he would say, well, that's because
you have resistance. That's because of our therapeutic relationship. It's
because you don't trust me. My theory is correct. Your
(31:50):
memories are the ones that are incorrect. Your resistance to
therapy is what's making you not believe. So as a
result of this, a lot of people have suggested that
psychoanalysis is a bit of a pseudoscience. That's part of
a much broader debate. But it's important to say a
lot of people don't agree with psychoanalysis. They don't think
(32:12):
that every single problem has this weird, unconscious origin. Sometimes
the explanation is just a little bit more clear. That's
for another time. I'm not going to touch that anymore,
because I know people have opinions. Another thing to note
about how applicable his theories are. Freud developed most of
(32:34):
his theories, as I said, from a small group of patients,
But these patients weren't an accurate sample of people living
across the world. They weren't even an accurate sample of
people living in Europe or in Vienna. The majority of
his patients were middle class women of high income, the
(32:57):
majority across his entire career. So that makes our ability
to generalize what he was saying difficulty. His theories probably
don't reflect every single individual in the world. They don't
reflect different cultures, they don't reflect how different societies operate.
They reflect the world around him. When he was writing,
(33:19):
which was very patriarchal, which was Victorian European, deeply classed
and deeply shaped by restrictive ideas about sexuality, gender and race,
even religion. You know, his ideas about women in particular,
You know, they haven't aged very well. One in particular
(33:42):
is another theory that I didn't mention before but is important,
which is seduction theory. Early in his career, Freud argued
that some of his patients symptoms, especially what was then
called hysteria, could be traced back to childhood sexual abuse
or unwanted sexual experiences. He was like, these women are
(34:03):
crazy because at some stage in their past somebody did
something to them that they didn't want to happen. Now,
that is an incredibly layered statement. That is, there is
a lot of stuff that is wrong, made some stuff
that is you know, most of it's wrong. Actually saying that, oh,
(34:24):
this woman is hysterical because of trauma a kind of
belittles the trauma and makes it seem like, well, she's
disturbing everybody else and that's the problem, rather than what's
happened to her. B doesn't necessarily help them with that trauma.
It just gives them a label without exploring how to
(34:44):
move past what they've experienced. The biggest issue, see, was
that a lot of these women were like, that didn't
happen to me, Like that, you're trying to dismiss me
by saying this thing happened to me, and I'm saying
that it didn't, and so you can't just dismiss me
(35:04):
and say, oh, well, she's a victim of this and
that's why she's behaving that way when I'm telling you
that didn't happen. And he'd be like, well, it's just
because you don't remember it. And that is a really
really messed up situation to put somebody in. And he
I don't really have words to describe, like how I'm
(35:27):
sure you understand the layers of inaccuracy and the layers
of complexity and the layers of just ridiculousness that is
associated with that in many ways. You know, it's interesting
because you see where he's getting at. And I hate
to even say that, but he was like, you know,
emotional trauma creates physical reactions, but the and creates real
(35:48):
pain later in life, and I'm seeing that in certain
patients and hopefully we can get them some help with that.
But he he wasn't He didn't have that delicate gentleness
towards it that you should have. And again he also
tried to falsify people's memories and say, you know, this
is what's happening. He later actually kind of moved away
(36:09):
from that. He had all these other ideas about like, oh,
women who have sexual desire, it's because of again, because
somebody has sexually assaulted them, and all these weird feelings,
and I don't think Freud came close to recognizing like
the impact that that had and the impact that comes
(36:32):
from talking about that and comes from just kind of
experimenting with ideas and theories around that with real people
like that is deeply harmful. It's very complex. The main
issue I think with a lot of his theories, and
it keeps coming back to this, is that they were
incredibly speculative. They were also incredibly high stakes. They speculate
(36:54):
over very serious, very impactful issues with people's lives. Sometimes
he gets it right, but sometimes he doesn't, and getting
it wrong was very very harmful. And it's important that
when we hear Freud's theories today, especially some of his
theories around sex and around false memories, and around the
pre conscious and the unconscious and around all these things,
(37:18):
we take it at face value and understand, you know,
how much we've developed psychology and how much we've developed
our understanding of the mind and trauma from where he
was acting in the late eighteen hundreds, early kind of
nineteen hundreds, So beyond his theories, what was he actually
like as a person? Freud was famously very ambitious, very ambitious.
(37:43):
He was very stubborn, He was very bold, and he
was apparently very aware of his own importance. He inspired
a lot of deep loyalty in some people, accultish following,
and strong opposition in others. His professional relationships in Particula
were very dramatic, like very gossip girl esque, very very dramatic,
(38:07):
partly because psychoanalysts and psychoanalysis as a field became a
movement during that time. It was like a cult. He also,
as the founder of that movement, was very protective. He
guarded membership very very closely, and he did not respond
(38:30):
well when others disagreed, Which is funny because he wrote
all about how the way we behave as representative of
our it and our ego and our super ego and
our impulses and our desires, and yet he really couldn't
get his under control. For example, he had some very public,
pretty major disagreements with people like Carl Jung and Alfred Adler,
(38:51):
who we mentioned all the time on the podcast. Adler
who was very famous at the time and still is
for his ideas of the inferiority complex birth order theory.
If you've ever heard about the eldest daughter syndrome, Alfred
Adler is who you have to thank for that one.
He talked a lot about personality psychology as well. They
had a massive falling out, and I love the drama
(39:12):
of this. I love the drama that these two like
psychological figures were like gossiping about each other and writing
hit pieces and like little snarks in their papers. And
he broke away from Freud. He was a psychoanalyst, partly
because he thought Freud placed too much emphasis on sexuality
and unconscious desire. He was a lot more Adler was
(39:35):
a lot more interested in striving and social belonging and
positive psychology and helping people overcome things and overcome insecurity.
You know, where Freud really wanted to look backwards and
to uncover hidden childhood conflicts. Adler was like, I'm focused
on the future. I'm interested in goals. I'm interested in
social context. I'm interested in meaning and how people find
(39:57):
their place in the world. Even after he died, Alfred Adler,
even after he died, Freud made really awful public comments
about him. So here's this guy who's like the grandfather
of psychology, and psychology is meant to help people, and
he was messy. He he got into some trouble. He
also had a big fight with with Youjung. He had
(40:18):
a big fight. He fought with with everybody. Again, a
lot of the time, the criticism was like, you make
things too sexual, dude, Like you're you make things weird.
A lot of these men were like, we you're not
actually that focused on helping people. You just want to
dig into the into their past, and each professional split,
(40:39):
each argument fragmented psychoanalysts into into like different disciplines and
into different versions of what it meant. Freud was also
very influenced by his own experiences, as we all are.
But I think a lot of people like to think
of him as this impartial genius who was making states
(41:00):
about the human condition that were universal. But he experienced
a lot of social and political upheaval during his time.
You know, the decline of the Austrian Hungarian Empire. He
lived through the First World War, through economic instability, rising
anti Semitism in Europe, and this really shaped the intellectual
(41:21):
climate in which he worked in and his real emphasis
on aggression and desire and conflict and irrationality and the like.
The animalistic nature of the human soul was probably because
he was witnessing a lot of violence and a lot
(41:41):
of destruction. And he was Jewish as well. He was Jewish,
he was living in Europe during a period of growing
anti Semitism. He was acutely aware of the impact of
prejudice and exclusion and political instability. The Nazis literally burnt
his books like they he was like on their hit list,
(42:02):
and so it's important to see him as part of
that as well, and to not try and that he
was this human. He was human. He was just one
guy who had a lot of ideas that were really
informed by his own experiences and his own hurts and
his own trauma. And he wasn't the god that I
(42:25):
think a lot of people think he was. He was very,
very complex, and so I think that's where I stand
personally with his legacy. He pushed psychology forward, there is
no doubt like anytime you go into a therapist's office,
something they do, some part of their practice, something they
have learned was because of Freud and because of how
(42:49):
he saw the therapeutic relationship between client and therapist. He
also really expanded how we think about trauma. I know,
I said he did so controversy, but really a lot
of people weren't talking about it until he did. Even
if he spoke about it in a way that wasn't
particularly delicate, again, it was of the time, and he
really encouraged the exploration about hidden emotional lives. He really
(43:13):
was like he really wanted he was get curious. He
wanted people to be curious about people's emotions, and he
really wanted to get to know people as complex individuals,
which was very different from how psychology operated. So we're
going to give him big, big ticks for that. He
was also very flawed. He had a lot of blind spots,
(43:35):
many blind spots, and that is the duality of Freud.
And it's funny that the very thing he was trying
to point to for his entire career, which is like
humans are these complex things. There's a battle between good
and evil. There's a battle between unconscious and conscious, between
id and super ego, between reality at your current moment
(43:59):
and your part Like can you see where I'm getting? Like?
He represented that as a person in probably one of
the greatest ways. So it's almost a little bit poetic,
isn't it. It's almost a little bit poetic who he
was as a person that he was. He represented his
work so deeply that he was his own attitude, in
his own way of operating, in his personality was like
(44:21):
the caricature of the theories and the ideas that he
was exploring. Oh my god, guys, that would be such
an interesting essay, right, I don't know. Am I going
off on a tangent here? Yeah? I am, Okay, back
to the thing. I just think that'd be so interesting.
Freud's personal life as a manifestation as a representation of
(44:45):
his work would be such an interesting PhD topic. God,
I wish I could do that. If you want to
use that, go ahead, please do and send me the
paper when you're done in like three years with that.
But that is all we have on Freud. I know,
I said a bonus shorter episode. I'm like have been
speaking for like an hour. So thank you if you
have made it this far, I hope you have learnt
(45:06):
something about this mystical man. I hope you enjoyed this episode.
Oh I'll also say he has a great great granddaughter.
Freud's great great granddaughter has a podcast. Yeah, and it's
called Fashion Neurosis and she literally had like Charlie XCX on.
So another interesting part of his legacy. His daughter is
(45:28):
a podcaster. No, not his daughter, his great great granddaughter
is a podcaster. So there you go. Maybe we should
have her on. Maybe I'll reach out to her actually
and just be like I. She probably doesn't want to
talk about her great great great great great great grandfather.
But very interesting tidbit. Thank you to our researcher Libby
for helping us with this episode. Also, everybody say congrats.
(45:50):
I know I was just speaking about PhDs, but Libby
just finished up three months in Australia doing PhD research
and she's coming to the tail end and we're very
very proud of her and she is a hidden force
behind this podcast. So everybody say congratulations to Libby in
the comments below. If you learn something new about Freud,
also leave that if you're listening on Spotify in a
(46:11):
comment below. Make sure that you are following us on
Instagram at that Psychology podcast. You can also watch episodes,
not this one though, because this is a bonus episode,
but all our other episodes on Netflix, and you can
follow us on substack for our Study of the Week group.
It is a series where I break down one academic
article into a five minute read for you once a week.
(46:32):
But God, until next time. This has been a big
episode and I really enjoyed it. We will talk very
very soon. Thank you for listening. Be safe, be kind,
be gentle to yourself. Yeah. Talk later.
Hello everybody, I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the
Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through
the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and
what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back
(00:25):
to the show. Welcome back to the podcast, and welcome
to another bonus episode of the Psychology of Your Twenties.
This is a special mini series we're running within the
podcast where we break down psychology concepts, theories and figures
which have become vastly popular beyond the psychology space, especially online,
(00:49):
and we essentially give you the real facts and we
mythbust some of the bogus information and ideas we have
about these things or which are kind of promoted in
online spaces. We've done dopamine, We've done Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
We have mythbusted the legend that our frontal lobe develops
(01:09):
at twenty five. We've done personality tests. But today we
have the big kahuna of all episodes when it comes
to psychology law. We are going to talk about none
other than the infamous, the notorious, the famous, the well
known Sigmund Freud. The figure that I think has come
(01:31):
to define modern psychology more than any other figure, maybe
more than any other concept, and has also prompted a
lot of misconceptions about psychology and the field of therapy
in general. I'm not going to waste any time because
we have a lot to talk about. This man, the man,
the myth, the legend, got up to so many things
(01:52):
during his life, and his legacy is almost as big
as what he actually did. And I'm just going to
tell you this episode takes turns that you will never believe.
Cocaine is mentioned, Feminism, weird sexual beliefs he had. There
is a lot to discuss, so let's get into it.
(02:16):
So let's start with the basics. Who was Sigmund Freud.
If you had never heard of him before, what would
you need to know? So Sigmund Freud is, as I
alluded to, just like the grandfather of modern psychology. He
created an entire new perspective on the human mind, human emotions,
human souls, and it's called psychoanalysis. More on that later.
(02:41):
Before he became the creator of psychoanalysis and the famous
name and figure of today. He was born in eighteen
fifty six in what was then the Austrian Empire. At
the time, Austria was very much the center of psychological
thought and research. It was where so many major figures
(03:01):
were teaching learning. Being born, his family later moved to Vienna.
That's where he spent most of his life and his career.
I was literally in Vienna last week and I didn't
go to the Freud Museum, and I knew it was there,
and I was just kicking myself. I just didn't have time.
I went cycling and I went on a wine tour instead.
(03:22):
So definitely a lot of fun, but yeah, I didn't go.
And apparently it's amazing, and apparently it's literally his offices
with his original couch, with his original carpeting, furnishing. If
you look up a photo of Freud's office, it's very distinct.
But just a reason to go back to Vienna, I guess.
But he lived there. He lived in Austria. He lived
in Vienna with his family, with his daughter up until
(03:45):
his death. More on her later. But he didn't start
out doing psychology as we know it today. He didn't
start out thinking the things that he went on to think. Obviously,
he actually trained as a doctor and he began his
professional life in neurology. He was medically trained. He was
(04:08):
very interested in the nervous system in the brain. He
wanted to help people with things like epilepsy, with forgetfulness,
coordination issues. But he became very interested in patients who
they had physical symptoms, but they didn't have a physical explanation.
So they had things like paralysis, like pain, feinting, distress, compulsion,
(04:32):
speech difficulties, all these other things, and physicians of the
time couldn't account for them medically. They couldn't account for
them really, they didn't think about them as emotional either,
and so at the time he was working in specifically
in neurology. But back then psychiatry, neurology, psychology, they weren't
(04:52):
really divided up in the way they are today. It
was just kind of one big pot of things to
do with the body and the brain and the mind.
And many of the symptoms that they were observing, which
were physical but also emotional in nature, they just got
grouped together and they were given a specific diagnosis of
hysteria or hysteria, depending on how you pronounce it. This
(05:17):
is a term that we would not use today, right,
We wouldn't say that somebody has hysteria. It's very loaded
with gendered assumptions about women's bodies, women's emotions, credibility. In fact,
about eighty percent of the people who were diagnosed with
hysteria were women, and even the symptoms, the way that
it was described was gendered, so it included things like
(05:39):
wanting to have too much sex as a woman, but
equally not wanting to have any sex at all, relationship
to satisfaction, sadness in the home, but then also enthusiasm,
being too passionate. That was another criteria. So not the
nioicest or the most accurate or the most helpful of
(06:00):
diagnosis that you could get at the time. But Freud
saw this and he wanted to understand this label and
the suffering beneath it in a way that was just
a bit more articulate and structured and organized and went
deeper than that current level for his time. The way
he went about this was really scientific. I think that's
a very crucial part. You know, when we look at
(06:23):
his work and some of the things that he does,
which we'll talk about in a second, we often look
at it through the lens of the time period that
we are in now. Where we're kind of like, that's
probably not okay, that's probably not scientific, But we need
to understand where he was at. You know, he was
operating before there was any kind of brain imagery, before
(06:44):
there was any kind of you know, modern trauma science.
It was pre randomized control groups, pre developmental psychology, pre
ethics bodies, and it was born out of the context
of Victorian era assumptions about sex, gender, class, family respect rules.
Were talking here about somebody who was very radical for
(07:06):
his period of time. He was also deeply limited by it.
But the thing is is that we couldn't have gotten
to where we were without him. Like he really pushed
the needle, He really tried things. He really attempted to
construct what we now call a method or a hypothesis
or a sample size or an intervention. So what was
he actually doing? What was what was he actually trying out?
(07:29):
That was so quote unquote radical, So early on he
was influenced by this one case, and this was really
what kind of pushed him into doing more scientific things.
It was the case of Bertha Pappenheim. She's also known
as Anna Oh, so that was her pseudonym that he
wrote about her as Anna oh, and she was experiencing
(07:50):
like really distressing symptoms. She was experiencing paralysis, hallucinations, visual disturbances, confusion,
and at the time she was also looking after her
die father. Freud was very close to this case. He
was a medical student at the time. He was watching it.
He wrote so much about it because it suggested that
(08:11):
physical seeing symptoms might be connected to emotional experiences, and
he kind of put that forward. He goes, you know,
we're trying to find a parasite, We're trying to find
something that's wrong with her brain. We're trying to explain
this through all these different avenues. Did anybody just think
to ask her about how she's coping with her dad?
Did anybody just think to go into her childhood and
(08:34):
her early memories with her father and how they might
be making this particularly distressing? And this really shaped what
became psychoanalysis, the talking cure. Essentially, what Freud said was
that human pain is like kind of like a parasite
in the body that needs to be extracted. Talking through
(08:56):
emotionally charged memories, revealing a emotionally charged moments, being honest
about your feelings and about your past, you know, digging
below the surface of human desire and human thought. That
is what allows that extraction, that is what helps ease
physical symptoms. I also want to say side note, Anna Oh,
(09:18):
back to her. She yes in Freud's work was written
under a pseudonym. But Bertha, the woman who was Anna Oh,
she actually went on to become a very famous writer.
She was a very very well known social worker. She
was a very well known feminist. She was a major
figure in German Jewish women's welfare and did a lot
(09:40):
of activism. So a little bit of a side note
for the history of this. She was also pretty incredible.
So then Freud moved on. He went to Paris and
he studied under a very famous neurologist called Jean Martin Charcotte.
I always butcher the French. I'm sorry if you're French.
Oh you speak French. I know that sounds That's probably
(10:00):
not how it's said, but look it up John Martin
Jacott in Paris, and this is when he started learning
about things like hypnosis and interrogation and suggestion to help
patients access memories or feelings that were buried very deep
in the unconscious mind. Over time, though, he kind of
(10:21):
moved away from that. This was his first kind of
step towards modern practices. He moved away from hypnosis in
particular because he realized, you know, it just didn't work
for everybody. It also wasn't entirely accurate, and he wanted
something that felt a little bit less stressful, and so
he developed a now very famous method called free association.
(10:43):
This is a very important term, one of the terms
most associated with Freud. Free association. It was a method
where he essentially found ways to get patients to say
whatever came to mind, whatever memories they were thinking, even
if it was embarrassing, irrelevant, repetitive, strange. He wanted it
to just come out. He just wanted them to just
spill their guts. Basically, he also did dream analysis, so
(11:06):
he really felt that our memories and our pain and
our trauma and what was bothering us was revealed through
dreams because that was when the subconscious mind is most relaxed.
But at its simplest form, all of these methods of
psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis was this theory that underneath our conscious thoughts,
our conscious patterns, our conscious behaviors are these wishes and
(11:29):
these fears and these conflicts and these memories and defenses
that we don't fully recognize that are seeping through. And
once you discover those influences, once you tear apart those conditions,
I guess that is when you can help somebody with
their conscious problems, with their everyday issues. Today, like the
(11:50):
idea that talking about your feelings might help you, or
thinking about your past might help you, or thinking about
your unconscious motivations might help you as pretty obvious, but
back then it wasn't, and Freud helped move western mental
health care towards this idea that again physical or behavioral
symptoms have a psychological emotional meaning, and if you were
to listen carefully to somebody's inner world, you could help them.
(12:14):
And that's where that's where what he did was very
very powerful. Should also be said he did some other
things he tried in order to access the unconscious mind
or the pre conscious mind. He experimented with a lot
of ways of doing this. Cocaine was the other one.
He Freud in the early days of his career loved cocaine.
(12:36):
He loved using it, he loved prescribing it, he loved
giving it away. He thought it not only lowered inhibitions,
so allowing for greater free association. But he also called
it the miracle drug for depression and other mood disorders,
and he wrote this massive, massive paper called uber drug
(12:57):
because of course he spoke German about it, and it
was like it like went the equivalent of like viral,
like back in the day. A lot of people were
reading this. And then he went back on that later
in his life he was like, I think cocaine is awful.
I would not prescribe it. I do not use it.
The reason why he accidentally, well accidentally. I don't think
(13:21):
he intended this to happen, which is why it was
an accident, but he did. He got one of his
best friends addicted to cocaine, like seriously dependent, and he
saw this man suffering with addiction, and he saw him
like his life just like be derailed, and he was like, okay,
so maybe that's not the solution. Let's talk about some
of his other famous ideas and other famous things associated
(13:45):
with Freud, one of them being him and his couch.
I think it is the typical image of Freud to
have him in a chair, his patient laying on their
back on a couch, reciting their dreams being asked about
them mother and their father whilst he takes notes being
shown in blots and asking them, you know, what do
(14:07):
you see here? Is that accurate? Yeah, there is actually
a big grain of truth to this idea. Freud did
use a couch as apparently in the museum that I
didn't see, but apparently the couch is there. He did
ask patients to speak freely. He did interpret dreams slips
of the tongue and as Freudian slips childhood memories. But
(14:30):
it wasn't as freestyle as we think, so he wasn't
just like come in and just chat about it. He
had a very strict set of questions. He had certain criteria,
he had theories, he had structures. He also had this
method of sitting out like directly out of the line
of sight of the patient because he helped well. He
believed it helped them speak more freely. He believed it
(14:53):
was important to not feel like there was somebody analyzing you,
even if that is what was happening. He kept very,
very diligent case notes. And the other part about Freud's
method was that he was really aware of the role
of something called transference. This is the idea that feelings
(15:13):
from early relationships parents, siblings, even early romantic relationships can
be replayed in the therapy relationship. So, for example, a
patient might experience a therapist as rejecting or critical, or
companting or maybe authoritative, not because of what the therapist
(15:35):
is doing in the room, not because they are rejecting
them or judging them, not because they are critical, but
because of old relational patterns that are being activated or
reactivated through the interaction. A therapist can feel like a
parent or a teacher at times, which is not what
we want them to feel like. And Freud was very
(15:56):
aware of that. This was one of his biggest contributions
that I don't think many people talk about, in which
he doesn't get much credit for. He recognized that therapy
is not just confined to a discussion about the patient's
life outside of the therapy room. What is happening in
the therapy room, how they see the therapist, the relationship
(16:17):
between the person trying to help in the person needing help,
and all the baggage that they come in with as
individuals becomes a huge part of that work and becomes
a huge part of whether somebody's therapy or treatment is successful.
So that's how he went about treatment. Beyond that, what
were his actual core theories? Something interesting that is still
(16:40):
very common for psychologists these days to do less. So
then it was very common was that they would practice
and they would help people, and then they would also
research and they would contribute ideas. So they'd spend kind
of fifty to fifty of the time seeing clients, seeing patients,
having that exposure to real people, and then and the
other amount of the time hypothesizing writing articles. They weren't
(17:05):
doing experiments on the grand scale that we would now
expect in psychology. They were just kind of theorizing based
on what they saw. This is what Freud's core theories are. Firstly,
we have briefly mentioned the idea of conscious pre conscious
and the unconscious mind, and how psychoanalysis is really concerned
(17:25):
with the unconscious mind and what's going on in that
kind of labyrinth. This is often explained and you would
have seen it using the Iceberg metaphor. So if you've
ever seen when you were in high school or in UNI,
or just literally your workplace or like therapist's office, an
Iceberg that says, you know, the conscious mind is the
top and then all that's below is the pre conscious unconscious.
(17:48):
That was Freud's idea, and he again believed that there
was this large amount of what influenced our behavior and
our attitudes and our personality and who we were that
we could not touch or even feel or or kind
of see. Now, there are certain aspects of this that
aren't accepted in modern psychology, but the broader idea that
(18:09):
mental processes happen outside of our conscious awareness is pretty
widely accepted. Cognitive psychology, social psychology, and neuroscience, trauma therapy,
like all those things, they all recognize this as an
important thing and something that does occur. Tix to Freud,
he was the one who kind of started that. Another
(18:29):
major contribution is Freud's structural model of the mind. He
believed that the mind wasn't just made up of conscious,
pre conscious, unconscious or subconscious. It was made up of
the id, the ego, and the super ego. We have
spoken about this at length on the podcast before, but essentially,
(18:51):
the term ego, the way that we use the word ego,
is not as Freud initially thought of it, As you know,
it has been misunderstood him. Well, we'll start with the
ID first, So the ID the ego of the super ego.
The ID is the instinctual, impulsive part of your mind.
It is the part of you that wants immediate satisfaction.
(19:13):
It's associated with pleasure, aggression, hunger, sexuality, desire. It doesn't
care about consequences, it doesn't care about what is socially acceptable.
It just wants, It craves. The superego is the opposite.
It represents internalized rules, morality, guilt, ideals, expectations. It's the
part of you that it's critical, that is overly cautious,
(19:35):
and the ego sits between them. Ego doesn't mean arrogance
for him. Ego meant self awareness, balancing. It meant the
brain's ability in the part of our brain that negotiates
between desire and morality, reality and consequences. So if the
ID wants something immediately and the super ego shames you
(19:59):
for wanting to them, the ego is the part that's
trying to manage the conflict in a way that allows
us the person, to function. And I think that captures
something very recognizable in us as humans. We often experience
a conflict between what we want, what we think we
should want and what reality allows for or what is
(20:19):
deemed acceptable. Another key contribution beyond the ear, the sub ego,
the ego, and the unculture prin Oh my god, so
many unconscious preconscious subconscious. He had a lot of terms,
is his idea of psycho sexual development. Now, this is
one of Freud's most famous and most controversial ideas, and
you have definitely heard of it before. Definitely. There are
(20:43):
too many pop culture references to count at this stage.
Freud proposed that this is the part you may not
have heard of, I will say. Freud proposed that children
move through different stages of development. There is the oral,
the anal, the phallic, latency and denital stages graphic, but
he believed that unresolved conflicts at each of these stages
(21:07):
shapes our personalities as adults. For example, he argued that
if a child experienced frustration or over indulgence during the
oral stage, which centers on feeding and sucking, they might
become overly dependent on habits like smoking or overeating or
nail biting later in life because that is how they
(21:30):
learned to suit themselves during the anal stage, which focuses
on toilet training, so it's not all sexual intimate. Overly
strict parenting in the anal stage might produce somebody who
is very orderly, who is a perfectionist, very controlling, and
lacks parenting during the stage means that somebody becomes messy
(21:51):
or impulsive. And he believed that these kind of unresolved tensions,
which he called fixations, would leave a lasting imprint on
how people think, how people behave, how they relate to
others as adults. This is also where the famous Oedipus
complex comes in in Freud's theory. During the phallic stage,
(22:13):
a young child, it gets a bit weird from here,
just a heads up. A young child, he believed, develops
unconscious feelings of desire for the opposite sex parent, and
therefore a sense of rivalry with the same sex parent
to win the opposite sex parents attention. Now he focused
specifically on boys. He argued that boys unconsciously desire their
(22:36):
mother and see their fathers as rivals and fear punishment
from him. He also believed that this process was important
for the development of the super ego. Then that essentially
resolving this is what allows us to understand what is
right and that incest is not okay. There's also the
(22:56):
female version of this, which is the elektra complex. I
think it goes without saying it's not entirely accurate, if
not accurate at all, it's very heteronormative. He Freud was
known to make a lot of things unnecessarily about sex,
including child development, which is obviously a little bit odd,
(23:19):
not a little bit, it's quite odd that he was
very fixated on this, But yeah, he made a lot
of things about sex that didn't need to be about sex,
like parental conflict or you know, growing up, or being
a teenager or being a messy person. You know, has
nothing to do with sex and all these things, but
(23:40):
he really made it so. And this is an example
of that. The last famous theory of his we're going
to talk about today is the idea of defense mechanisms.
Let's have a palette, cleanse up from talking about oralphallic, anal,
all that stuff, and talk about something else. Defense mechanisms
were in part his He started this idea. They were
further developed by his daughter. Defense mechanisms. If you know
(24:04):
this term, you've probably heard it before. They are ways
that the mind protects itself from anxiety, conflict, shame, or
emotional pain by using methods of denial, projection, rationalization, repression,
and displacement to kind of shield us, to kind of
put a buffer or a barrier between us and the
(24:26):
raw feeling. Essentially, it's just the ways that each of
us tries to deal with discomfort in a unique way
to ourselves and our history. A simple explanation is that
maybe you feel hurt, but instead of admitting that someone
has hurt you, you become rude and dismissive towards somebody
else in order to regain a sense of power. That's displacement.
(24:50):
Sometimes someone who has been repeatedly romantically rejected will claim
that they hate relationships. They just don't see the point.
You know, love is lame, Monogamy is un natural. You know,
people who are in relationships are cringe. This is another
defense mechanism. It's called reaction formation, where somebody responds with
the radical opposite of what they are really feeling and
(25:13):
what they really want in order to conceal their true desires.
Another example, you fail a job interview. You fail a
job interview, you really wanted it, and then you find
all the reasons to believe that the job would have
sucked anyways, instead of just feeling unhappy about it, you
start convincing yourself. You know, I would have been miserable.
I didn't like that guy who interviewed me. You know,
(25:34):
I actually didn't really want that job. That's rationalization, creating
a more acceptable explanation to protect yourself from disappointment, rejection,
or vulnerability. Defense mechanisms are not automatically bad, and they
can really protect us from the emotional intensity of certain scenarios.
(25:55):
The problem with defense mechanisms comes from when they become
rigid and they stop us from seeing reality. Clearly. This
is when they become maladaptive. Maladaptive being something that is
at the end of the day, unhelpful for your functioning
and your survival. Now, like I said, Freud had this
initial idea, but it was his daughter Anna Freud who
(26:19):
developed this more systematically and who gave words to what
he was trying to describe. Anna is a really important
part of this episode because she became a very well
known psychoanalyst in her own right. She is especially associated
with child psychoanalysis, with ego psychology, with ways of human
(26:39):
coping with child development, and this still shapes how clinicians
think about psychology to this day. Now, her relationship with
her father was really complicated by modern standards. She was
insanely devoted to him, She worshiped him, She worked very
closely with him, She cared for him during his illness.
She also underwent an analysis with him. He formed some
(27:02):
of his ideas based on his relationship with his daughter. Now,
this is the guy who created the Oedipus and the electrocomplex,
so you can see why that's a little bit weird
that his daughter was also not just a patient but
a case study for him. He provided her with yeah,
with treatment and interventions, and took notes on her own behavior.
(27:25):
That's pretty unethical today. Actually, it was probably very unethical
back then, and it was. When you think about Freud's work,
a lot of what he talked about may have come
from his relationship with his own daughter, which is a
little bit weird. But Anna did like went on and
was very very successful, and she built really incredible institutions.
She worked with children affected by war. She helped basically
(27:50):
establish childhood trauma, or the treatment of children with trauma
and PTSD as its own kind of clinical thing. She
was very interested in children, She was very interested in
their emotional lives. So her relationship with her father, aside
the influence that she's had is positive and is remarkable
(28:12):
and is an important part of this discussion of like
Freud's legacy. Obviously, she acted of her own accord, she
is her own person, but there is a legacy to
this that I think does continue to be quite positive.
And Anna's work going on from her father's is a
big contribution. Okay, let's take a short break here and
when we return, let's talk a little bit more about
(28:34):
his legacy and what psychologists think of him these days.
So stay with us. So Freud's influence is enormous, but
so are the problems with his work. Now, his theories
weren't evidence based in the way that we would want today.
(28:57):
You know, he didn't use random says, he didn't do
control trials, he didn't do an intervention in no intervention condition.
He developed many of his ideas through, as we said,
case studies, in clinic observations, theoretical reasoning. This doesn't automatically
(29:18):
mean that his theories are worthless. They're not, because we
still use a lot of the ideas today. But it
does mean that they weren't tested using the kinds of
methods that we would expect. Now, his theories were also
because of this, and in addition to this, very difficult
to falsify. This basically means that they were hard to
(29:38):
prove wrong. Now this sounds like a really good thing,
but in the field of psychology, falsifiability is one of
the most central principles that separate science from pseudoscience. Basically,
you have to present a hypothesis or an idea that
(29:59):
if there was proof to the contrary is in, you
could find it and you could make an argument for it.
This is to ensure that you know, research isn't just
being created based on a closed belief system. I'm going
to explain this a little bit better. Let's give the
example of the Oedipus complex. If somebody doesn't seem to
(30:21):
have an oedipisk complex, that might be seen as proof
that the Oedipists complex doesn't exist, because here are all
these people who aren't romantically attracted to their own fathers.
But Freud's theories would say that is not true. They do.
It's just that their desire is buried even deeper than
(30:44):
expected in their in their own conscious It's that they
just don't admit it. It's not that the idea is false,
it's that this person is just concealing that desire. So
you can see how a lot of his ideas of
the unconscious make it very easy to dis prove what
he's saying, because he can always just say, well, their
(31:04):
coping mechanisms are shielding them from accessing this. Their memory
or their feelings are repressed more than you can imagine,
and nothing that I can do can get them up,
but those feelings are definitely still there. The other thing is,
you know, if a patient agreed with Freud's interpretation of
their problems, that's evidence that his interpretations are correct. But
(31:27):
if a patient rejected his ideas. If a patient said, hey,
I actually don't think that I have an issue with
my parents. I actually don't think I had an issue
in childhood. I really had a happy childhood. Like I
really disagree with you, he would say, well, that's because
you have resistance. That's because of our therapeutic relationship. It's
because you don't trust me. My theory is correct. Your
(31:50):
memories are the ones that are incorrect. Your resistance to
therapy is what's making you not believe. So as a
result of this, a lot of people have suggested that
psychoanalysis is a bit of a pseudoscience. That's part of
a much broader debate. But it's important to say a
lot of people don't agree with psychoanalysis. They don't think
(32:12):
that every single problem has this weird, unconscious origin. Sometimes
the explanation is just a little bit more clear. That's
for another time. I'm not going to touch that anymore,
because I know people have opinions. Another thing to note
about how applicable his theories are. Freud developed most of
(32:34):
his theories, as I said, from a small group of patients,
But these patients weren't an accurate sample of people living
across the world. They weren't even an accurate sample of
people living in Europe or in Vienna. The majority of
his patients were middle class women of high income, the
(32:57):
majority across his entire career. So that makes our ability
to generalize what he was saying difficulty. His theories probably
don't reflect every single individual in the world. They don't
reflect different cultures, they don't reflect how different societies operate.
They reflect the world around him. When he was writing,
(33:19):
which was very patriarchal, which was Victorian European, deeply classed
and deeply shaped by restrictive ideas about sexuality, gender and race,
even religion. You know, his ideas about women in particular,
You know, they haven't aged very well. One in particular
(33:42):
is another theory that I didn't mention before but is important,
which is seduction theory. Early in his career, Freud argued
that some of his patients symptoms, especially what was then
called hysteria, could be traced back to childhood sexual abuse
or unwanted sexual experiences. He was like, these women are
(34:03):
crazy because at some stage in their past somebody did
something to them that they didn't want to happen. Now,
that is an incredibly layered statement. That is, there is
a lot of stuff that is wrong, made some stuff
that is you know, most of it's wrong. Actually saying that, oh,
(34:24):
this woman is hysterical because of trauma a kind of
belittles the trauma and makes it seem like, well, she's
disturbing everybody else and that's the problem, rather than what's
happened to her. B doesn't necessarily help them with that trauma.
It just gives them a label without exploring how to
(34:44):
move past what they've experienced. The biggest issue, see, was
that a lot of these women were like, that didn't
happen to me, Like that, you're trying to dismiss me
by saying this thing happened to me, and I'm saying
that it didn't, and so you can't just dismiss me
(35:04):
and say, oh, well, she's a victim of this and
that's why she's behaving that way when I'm telling you
that didn't happen. And he'd be like, well, it's just
because you don't remember it. And that is a really
really messed up situation to put somebody in. And he
I don't really have words to describe, like how I'm
(35:27):
sure you understand the layers of inaccuracy and the layers
of complexity and the layers of just ridiculousness that is
associated with that in many ways. You know, it's interesting
because you see where he's getting at. And I hate
to even say that, but he was like, you know,
emotional trauma creates physical reactions, but the and creates real
(35:48):
pain later in life, and I'm seeing that in certain
patients and hopefully we can get them some help with that.
But he he wasn't He didn't have that delicate gentleness
towards it that you should have. And again he also
tried to falsify people's memories and say, you know, this
is what's happening. He later actually kind of moved away
(36:09):
from that. He had all these other ideas about like, oh,
women who have sexual desire, it's because of again, because
somebody has sexually assaulted them, and all these weird feelings,
and I don't think Freud came close to recognizing like
the impact that that had and the impact that comes
(36:32):
from talking about that and comes from just kind of
experimenting with ideas and theories around that with real people
like that is deeply harmful. It's very complex. The main
issue I think with a lot of his theories, and
it keeps coming back to this, is that they were
incredibly speculative. They were also incredibly high stakes. They speculate
(36:54):
over very serious, very impactful issues with people's lives. Sometimes
he gets it right, but sometimes he doesn't, and getting
it wrong was very very harmful. And it's important that
when we hear Freud's theories today, especially some of his
theories around sex and around false memories, and around the
pre conscious and the unconscious and around all these things,
(37:18):
we take it at face value and understand, you know,
how much we've developed psychology and how much we've developed
our understanding of the mind and trauma from where he
was acting in the late eighteen hundreds, early kind of
nineteen hundreds, So beyond his theories, what was he actually
like as a person? Freud was famously very ambitious, very ambitious.
(37:43):
He was very stubborn, He was very bold, and he
was apparently very aware of his own importance. He inspired
a lot of deep loyalty in some people, accultish following,
and strong opposition in others. His professional relationships in Particula
were very dramatic, like very gossip girl esque, very very dramatic,
(38:07):
partly because psychoanalysts and psychoanalysis as a field became a
movement during that time. It was like a cult. He also,
as the founder of that movement, was very protective. He
guarded membership very very closely, and he did not respond
(38:30):
well when others disagreed, Which is funny because he wrote
all about how the way we behave as representative of
our it and our ego and our super ego and
our impulses and our desires, and yet he really couldn't
get his under control. For example, he had some very public,
pretty major disagreements with people like Carl Jung and Alfred Adler,
(38:51):
who we mentioned all the time on the podcast. Adler
who was very famous at the time and still is
for his ideas of the inferiority complex birth order theory.
If you've ever heard about the eldest daughter syndrome, Alfred
Adler is who you have to thank for that one.
He talked a lot about personality psychology as well. They
had a massive falling out, and I love the drama
(39:12):
of this. I love the drama that these two like
psychological figures were like gossiping about each other and writing
hit pieces and like little snarks in their papers. And
he broke away from Freud. He was a psychoanalyst, partly
because he thought Freud placed too much emphasis on sexuality
and unconscious desire. He was a lot more Adler was
(39:35):
a lot more interested in striving and social belonging and
positive psychology and helping people overcome things and overcome insecurity.
You know, where Freud really wanted to look backwards and
to uncover hidden childhood conflicts. Adler was like, I'm focused
on the future. I'm interested in goals. I'm interested in
social context. I'm interested in meaning and how people find
(39:57):
their place in the world. Even after he died, Alfred Adler,
even after he died, Freud made really awful public comments
about him. So here's this guy who's like the grandfather
of psychology, and psychology is meant to help people, and
he was messy. He he got into some trouble. He
also had a big fight with with Youjung. He had
(40:18):
a big fight. He fought with with everybody. Again, a
lot of the time, the criticism was like, you make
things too sexual, dude, Like you're you make things weird.
A lot of these men were like, we you're not
actually that focused on helping people. You just want to
dig into the into their past, and each professional split,
(40:39):
each argument fragmented psychoanalysts into into like different disciplines and
into different versions of what it meant. Freud was also
very influenced by his own experiences, as we all are.
But I think a lot of people like to think
of him as this impartial genius who was making states
(41:00):
about the human condition that were universal. But he experienced
a lot of social and political upheaval during his time.
You know, the decline of the Austrian Hungarian Empire. He
lived through the First World War, through economic instability, rising
anti Semitism in Europe, and this really shaped the intellectual
(41:21):
climate in which he worked in and his real emphasis
on aggression and desire and conflict and irrationality and the like.
The animalistic nature of the human soul was probably because
he was witnessing a lot of violence and a lot
(41:41):
of destruction. And he was Jewish as well. He was Jewish,
he was living in Europe during a period of growing
anti Semitism. He was acutely aware of the impact of
prejudice and exclusion and political instability. The Nazis literally burnt
his books like they he was like on their hit list,
(42:02):
and so it's important to see him as part of
that as well, and to not try and that he
was this human. He was human. He was just one
guy who had a lot of ideas that were really
informed by his own experiences and his own hurts and
his own trauma. And he wasn't the god that I
(42:25):
think a lot of people think he was. He was very,
very complex, and so I think that's where I stand
personally with his legacy. He pushed psychology forward, there is
no doubt like anytime you go into a therapist's office,
something they do, some part of their practice, something they
have learned was because of Freud and because of how
(42:49):
he saw the therapeutic relationship between client and therapist. He
also really expanded how we think about trauma. I know,
I said he did so controversy, but really a lot
of people weren't talking about it until he did. Even
if he spoke about it in a way that wasn't
particularly delicate, again, it was of the time, and he
really encouraged the exploration about hidden emotional lives. He really
(43:13):
was like he really wanted he was get curious. He
wanted people to be curious about people's emotions, and he
really wanted to get to know people as complex individuals,
which was very different from how psychology operated. So we're
going to give him big, big ticks for that. He
was also very flawed. He had a lot of blind spots,
(43:35):
many blind spots, and that is the duality of Freud.
And it's funny that the very thing he was trying
to point to for his entire career, which is like
humans are these complex things. There's a battle between good
and evil. There's a battle between unconscious and conscious, between
id and super ego, between reality at your current moment
(43:59):
and your part Like can you see where I'm getting? Like?
He represented that as a person in probably one of
the greatest ways. So it's almost a little bit poetic,
isn't it. It's almost a little bit poetic who he
was as a person that he was. He represented his
work so deeply that he was his own attitude, in
his own way of operating, in his personality was like
(44:21):
the caricature of the theories and the ideas that he
was exploring. Oh my god, guys, that would be such
an interesting essay, right, I don't know. Am I going
off on a tangent here? Yeah? I am, Okay, back
to the thing. I just think that'd be so interesting.
Freud's personal life as a manifestation as a representation of
(44:45):
his work would be such an interesting PhD topic. God,
I wish I could do that. If you want to
use that, go ahead, please do and send me the
paper when you're done in like three years with that.
But that is all we have on Freud. I know,
I said a bonus shorter episode. I'm like have been
speaking for like an hour. So thank you if you
have made it this far, I hope you have learnt
(45:06):
something about this mystical man. I hope you enjoyed this episode.
Oh I'll also say he has a great great granddaughter.
Freud's great great granddaughter has a podcast. Yeah, and it's
called Fashion Neurosis and she literally had like Charlie XCX on.
So another interesting part of his legacy. His daughter is
(45:28):
a podcaster. No, not his daughter, his great great granddaughter
is a podcaster. So there you go. Maybe we should
have her on. Maybe I'll reach out to her actually
and just be like I. She probably doesn't want to
talk about her great great great great great great grandfather.
But very interesting tidbit. Thank you to our researcher Libby
for helping us with this episode. Also, everybody say congrats.
(45:50):
I know I was just speaking about PhDs, but Libby
just finished up three months in Australia doing PhD research
and she's coming to the tail end and we're very
very proud of her and she is a hidden force
behind this podcast. So everybody say congratulations to Libby in
the comments below. If you learn something new about Freud,
also leave that if you're listening on Spotify in a
(46:11):
comment below. Make sure that you are following us on
Instagram at that Psychology podcast. You can also watch episodes,
not this one though, because this is a bonus episode,
but all our other episodes on Netflix, and you can
follow us on substack for our Study of the Week group.
It is a series where I break down one academic
article into a five minute read for you once a week.
(46:32):
But God, until next time. This has been a big
episode and I really enjoyed it. We will talk very
very soon. Thank you for listening. Be safe, be kind,
be gentle to yourself. Yeah. Talk later.
Host
Jemma Sbeghen
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