Theory and Practice of Contemporary Psychotherapies

Freud Jung and Psychoanalysis Video Transcript

From primitive man to the middle of the 19th century, human psychology evolved from superstition to mysticism, from metaphysics to the empiricism of Hume, Kant, Berkley and Spencer. Amid the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, the burgeoning tree of psychology is branching out into numerous subfields that reflect societal changes and embrace scientific methods of discovery.

The modern scientists or professions all seem to come together at about the same time, in the late 19th century. So for the first time, you begin to see the discipline of political science. You see the development of physiology as a science and a profession. And that is really reflecting the Industrial Revolution division of labor. Except now, we're talking about the division of intellectual labor. And so in that sense, I would say that psychology does parallel anthropology and sociology. And of course, there's some overlap of subject matter, as well.

Englishman, Charles Darwin, knew that genetic variations in sheep, dogs, and cattle could be exaggerated through selective breeding. He then supposed, if man can do it, why can't nature do it better? In 1831, Charles Darwin, in the unpaid position of a naturalist, boarded the now famous vessel, The Beagle, for an epic five-year voyage around the world.

Darwin's theory of natural selection presupposed that the genetic intelligence of living creatures would be perpetuated only by those who prevailed in the struggle to survive and reproduce among limited resources. And that slowly over time, characteristics which promoted survival would remain while those which hampered survival would disappear along with their host species.

There are a lot of fields that claim him, in terms of his influence, and psychology is certainly one. With several books, with the Origin of Species published in '59 and 1871 with The Decent of Man, those two books in particular, linked humans with the rest of the animal kingdom. Not only in terms of similar morphology, but also in terms of behavior and mental process. Suddenly, we were not separate. Suddenly, we were not something seemingly so different from the rest of the animal kingdom.

His emphasis on adaptation and adaptability made psychologists think about consciousness, in particular. If consciousness exists in humans— we acknowledge it does— and if it's evolved, then it must have evolved for some adaptive purposes. So how is it that consciousness helps humans better adapt to the environment? And that's where William James and John Dewey and a lot of the early American psychologists really focused their efforts.

Just as adaptation was a key component of species survival, it would later be discovered by Freud, Jung, and others to also be a cause of psychological aberration.

We're all creatures of adaptation. And our adaptations often become our own worst enemy, so to speak. In other words, one of our biggest obstacles is what we had to become, in order to function in this world, often is a kind of impediment to one's own health and to one's own healing. And so the adaptations that are, perhaps, necessary in any given culture or family of origin also constitute that deep wedge within, that split that we have historically called neurosis.

Evolutionary psychology has its roots in three basic principles of Darwinian Evolutionary Theory. Variation refers to the variety of traits within the population. Heritability refers to traits that can be inherited via reproduction. Selection refers to heritable traits can increase organism reproduction.

Or epigenetically, because the environment shaped the genetics, the genetics shaped the environment, it was sort of a vicious type thing. And it still is because there's some behaviors today that are identical to behaviors that were back in the days of the caveman, such as jealousy. Men are jealous of women if they feel that they have a physical attraction towards another man. Whereas, a woman would not be as jealous if a male has a physical attraction towards another woman as much as they would be if their male had an emotional attachment towards another female.

From the very beginning, males looked for the most fertile female and looked for characteristics that signaled that, in order to pass their genes on to the next generation. Whereas, females were not focused in on male physical characteristics, but how good of a hunter they were. Did they have a cave where I could live in to protect me? And this has continued on up until the present.

And he also wanted to know that— and of course, he never really did— but he wanted to know if he had a genetic investment in his offspring. And the female, of course, she always knew that she had a genetic investment.

Cousin of Charles Darwin, polymath Sir Francis Galton invented psychometrics, the science of measuring mental faculties, and was the first to apply statistical methods to the study of human differences from information collected from surveys and questionnaires. Galton also coined the phrase, Nature versus Nurture, and the term "eugenics."

And he wrote a book was called The Inheritance of Genius, that intelligence was inherited and you could further intelligence by selective breeding. And that was, of course, eugenics. And so he had a lot of criticism because of that, But more and more, we're finding out from really good scientific studies that no matter how enriched your environment is, it can't push you beyond your potential. In other words, your genetics set your outer limits of development.

German scientist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz studied the human senses and his empirical theories on color vision, motion perception, nerve impulses, spatial perception, and hearing formed a scientific foundation in sensory physiology that further clarified the relationship of the body with the mind. Acknowledged as a founder of both experimental and cognitive psychologies, Wilhelm Wundt approached his studies from the Spinozan postulate of Psychophysical Parallelism that regarded physical sensations as psychological events.

And it was Wundt who kind of brought that work, and mostly on issues of sensation and perception, from the physiology laboratory into what he called physiological psychology and its laboratory there at Leipzig. And then, of course, there were many imitators, including many American imitators of that.

Contemporary in philosophy and acumen to Wundt, American William James is often regarded as psychology's co-founder.

James never saw psychology as a physical science. His fundamental concept was to use Darwin's theory of natural selection and adaptation to the environment as the underlying theme, rather than physics. And James, more than anyone else, I think, creates the modern psychology that I call the two-headed dog.

On the one hand, William James wants psychology to act as if it is a natural science and use the methods of natural science to make great headway into the processes that underlie human actions and thinking. On the other hand, William James wanted psychology to be a very applied functional science. The goal is to observe, describe, predict, and ultimately control human behavior. The other side of the two-headed dog, of course, is the humanistic side, the clinical side, the side of appreciating the heart and humanity.

German born academic psychologist Hugo Munsterberg was invited by William James to join the faculty at Harvard.

Munsterberg, then, begins to basically take William James at his word. And he creates specialized areas of psychology that we come to know today as forensic psychology, industrial organizational psychology, and a bit of what we might think of, in some respects also, as clinical psychology.

Forensic psychology is concerned with applying psychological principles of mental processes to legal proceedings, law enforcement, and criminal justice. Forensic psychologists often deal with such issues as the art and science of jury selection, or voire dire, criminal profiling, the sanity or competency of defendants, and the memory of witnesses to crimes or events.

Freud says, the data from our memory is not very good, yet we yield to the temptation to ascribe to it more importance than it is due. What are we saying? We're saying that there are many influences, many of them after the event itself, that change memory.

So you've now just witnessed a crime. And now you start comparing notes with the other guy the witnessed the crime. And he says, "What do you think of his tie?" He says, "I didn't even notice it." But later on, when he's now talking to the officer he says, yes, he was wearing a blue and red tie. So he just acquired that memory.

The way you ask the questions and the things you talk about afterwards influence memory a whole lot, including making up things that didn't even happen. A woman by the name of the Beth Loftus, famous series of experiments, staged a car wreck. It was her car. So she made sure that it didn't crash into the other one very hard. So people witnessed this thing. And then she says, "How fast was the car going when it "smashed" into the other one?" And they say, "Oh, it was really going fast."

Another group of folks, she says, "How fast was it going when it contacted the other one?" "Oh, well it was going real slow." See the way you ask the question changed the estimated speed. Then they asked them, "Did you see the broken glass?" Well since she had done it to herself to avoid messing up her car, there was no broken glass. The ones that heard the question phrased, "How fast was it going when it smashed into the other," over a quarter of them said they remembered broken glass.

Germane to the work of Wundt, James, and others were two essential viewpoints described by Englishman Edward Titchener from which psychological phenomena could be perceived and analyzed. Structuralism is a scientific approach which studies consciousness by its specific components or structures, such as thinking, memory, sensation recognition, and intuition. Functionalism grew out of evolutionary theory and studies the function of mental processes and behavior of an individual or group of individuals in relation to their environment.

Under the Functionist Theory, we will look at the family from the perspective that, if the family's not functioning correctly, that is, fulfilling all of its functions of appropriation, of providing economically, the nurturing functions, all those basic functions that belong to the family, then what happens to the young when they leave the family, that they may function in a way that's dysfunctional or not appropriate. And so it helps to explain gang behavior and problems with our young people, as well as the older members of family.

Psychologist, educator, and promoter G. Stanley Hall was a pioneer in child and adolescent psychology. Hall coined the phrase storm and stress taken from the Germans, Sturm and Drang, to encapsulate the rigors of adolescents characterized by conflict with parents, new disruptions, and risky behavior.

Hall's probably better known in modern psychology as a founder. He founded the first psychology laboratory in the States at Johns Hopkins University. He founded the first journal of psychology, The American Journal of Psychology in 1887. He founded The American Psychological Association in 1892. He founded the first Journal of Applied Psychology. He founded the first Journal of Religious Psychology, began an important movement to study child development, child behavior, called The Child Study Movement, which he sort of oversaw for about a decade.

Denied her doctorate from Harvard College, Mary Whiton Calkins became not only an outstanding psychologist, but was also the first woman president of the American Psychological Association. Dr. Calkins' major contribution reconciled structural and functional viewpoints into a Psychology of Selves.

Her self-psychology viewed consciousness as being comprised of three forms— imagination, emotion, and will. Calkins viewed the unconscious as nothing more than a dissociated self from one's consciousness.

French Psychologist Alfred Binet studied what he considered to be normal minds. In the effort to measure the ability to think and reason, he devised tests for Parisian school children based on following commands, copying patterns, naming objects, and putting things in order. In 1905, Binet and his collaborator, Theodore Simon, published the first modern intelligence test, the Simon-Binet.

Scores on this test were the ratio of mental age to chronological age and became known as IQ, or Intelligence Quotient. Binet's IQ tests were used in France to determine which students required special education, and entered America through the work of Henry Herbert Goddard.

And he was working at the time as research director of the New Jersey School for Feeble-minded Boys and Girls. That would have been the label in those days, feeble-minded. They would later be mentally retarded, mentally challenged, developmentally disabled, other kinds of labels. And in Goddard's day, they were characterized in two ways, as idiots or imbeciles, based on some kind of assessment.

Goddard would actually add a third term. He coined the term "moron." And that became, believe it or not, the labeling system for mentally retarded children in those days. Moron being at the top. Imbecile a grade or two lower. And then idiot at the bottom.

This brings us to the discussion of three colleagues who collectively revolutionized psychology and led the profession to new levels of prominence at the beginning of the 20th century— Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Alfred Adler.

Sigmund Freud, physician, neurologist, he was not trained as a psychologist at all. Psychology loves to put Sigmund in its sphere there, because his name is so monumental in Western history and Western thinking. But he's not a psychologist, really.

Now I don't know why people get him mixed up with psychology. He was a medical doctor who specialized in neurology, and then had a small number of patients. And he saw those patients. They were all sick people, mainly women. And from those few patients he developed this fantastic theory.

What Freud gives you, actually, is a good disposition of the mind/body problem. In his original theory, which comes to be called the Seduction Theory, Freud's focus is really on the body and what you have experienced as a child. And Freud's initial belief was that all of his hysterical patients' symptoms, the etiology, the causative factor, was actual, physical, childhood, sexual victimization by an adult.

The idea that to some trauma in our lives can lead to some of our thoughts, anyway, becoming disassociated from the bounds of rationality, and these disassociated thoughts taking on a kind of life of their own expressed through these hysterical symptoms. And if we can at that moment of dissociation through— he initially tried hypnosis, as you know, but then later moved to techniques he found more reliable, such as dream interpretation, the interpretation of resistance, free association, various clinical tools that he developed in this practice— then perhaps we can help the person then, if you will, undo some of that.

If Freud is onto something with his notion of the Oedipus Complex, that a boy at a certain age so loves his mother and sees his father as a competitor for her time, love, energy, that he effectively hates his father, he has to overcome that if he's going to function in our society. He'll have to sublimate his love for his mother into a familial affection. He'll have to do something about his hatred for his father if he's going to relate not only to that father, but to other men who may be in positions of authority. And people who can't find a solution that is acceptable in their society are going to become neurotic.

Neurosis comes from the Greek word neuron, meaning "nerve," and osis, meaning "diseased or abnormal condition." Neurosis refers to a variety of psychological disorders where unconscious conflict or emotional distress is expressed through personality aberrations.

Freud felt that we're all neurotic. That homo sapiens is the neurotic animal. And neurosis is fundamentally pursuing something that is a substitute for what you really want. And so people who will apparently pursue pain and a masochistic relationship are getting something out of that. And it's a neurotic solution to not being able to get what other kinds of pleasure their real desire is.

Neurotic is a person who wants his cake and eat it too. It's a pull inside the person. They want something, and yet they don't want it. They say they need this, but then they reject it. So it's that kind of an internal split that they come in fighting. And it could be anxiety. It could be depression. It could be just people who are just fighting within themselves and it affects every relationship that they have.

Freud provided a model for understanding oneself in relation to the world that employed the concepts of Ego, id, and Superego.

Well the ego, according to Freud is the more rational and intellectual component of the mind. And the ego is there to see that you get your needs met, but in away that is reasonable in accordance with society's standards. And the superego, it's our conscience. It's our morals. It's our authority.

It's saying that behavior is not just governed by pleasure, it's not just governed by intellectual reasoning. It's also governed by a sense of this is good or this is bad. And the unhealthy person, one of these structures is going to be getting it's way too much.

The conscience is too rigid and too moralistic. Or the id, the pleasure seeking, is just too powerful and there's no restraints on the individual. So the ego has got a big job, as far as Freud is concerned, because the ego is kind of like the referee in a boxing match, because it's got to get in between this battle of the conscience and then this pleasure seeking part of mind and balance it out. And it's got to be strong.

And to try to make choices that would be in harmony both with the general ethical demands of the world around me on the one hand, and also in service to my own nature as well. Because if my choices are violating my own nature, that's going to eventuate in what we call psychopathology, through depression, or anxiety states, or addictions, or whatever form they take.

To get at the root causes of psychological problems, Freud's clinical practice employed a method of mental investigation he called psychoanalysis.

Psycho is "mind." Analysis is "to break apart." And so the idea was, let's break apart the mind into different structures— structures that are pleasure seeking, structures that are moralistic, structures that are realistic and intellectual. Once you break these structures apart, then you analyze which structure is in a more dominant or dormant position in the mind. And if you have the id, for example, that is in a dominant position, then most likely you're an individual that's in trouble, or society is in trouble having you in society, because you are pleasure seeking individual without much restraint.

Freud said that the goal of psychoanalysis is not happiness. That it is to move from misery to common unhappiness. Now that's also one reason why psychoanalysis never truly became the dominant clinical approach in the United States, because in my view, Americans are more pragmatic, they're optimistic. We believe that we should be able to change things. That, by God, we should be able to get to a happy ending somewhere in there.

Investigation of the unconscious mind was expanded by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung who was welcomed by Freud into his close group of associates.

And one of the attractions of Carl Jung was that, not only was he very articulate and dynamic, he also was a Gentile. And Freud placed great hopes on this. That Jung would be the conduit through which psychoanalysis, then, could be accepted by the Gentile, the non-Jewish population. They traveled to the United States together in 1909 and gave talks. And apparently, on that trip the event occurred that led to their eventual split. And that was, they had agreed when they set out the boat that each morning they would share their dreams with one another and interpret those dreams.

One morning, Carl Jung shared his dream and Freud interpreted it, but Freud refused to share his dream. And Jung then thought that Freud might have a streak of, perhaps, intellectual dishonesty.

Freud, as we know— and I don't want to overgeneralize too much here— was basically driven by the biology of the human animal. And that certainly is true. Jung was far more interested in the way in which our spirituality develops out of that biological nature, too. So where Freud saw, basically, our drives governing our life, Jung felt the deepest drive of all was the need for meaning— the desire that our lives count, the desire to be connected in some way which produces a resonance within us that we experience as synchronous in some way with our own nature.

Jung saw people as unique individuals. And the goal of life was to achieve self-realization, where all aspects of the personality are in balance. Jung drew from the Taoist model of Yin and Yang to describe personality types of introversion and extroversion.

Jung postulated that we interact with our inner and outer worlds through five basic functions— sensing, or obtaining information via our physical senses—thinking, or evaluating information or ideas logically and rationally— feeling, or evaluating information via emotional responses— intuiting, a kind of general impression born from our stores of knowledge.

And there's a fifth, he said, and that's the transcendent function, which is the activity of the psyche to try to transcend the boundaries between conscious and unconscious life, and to promote healing, to emote wholeness. That's why he said once, the task isn't goodness, it's wholeness.

Jung's types and functions proved to be so revealing of human personalities they were used to design a psychological diagnostic instrument, the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator, a paper and pencil test of 125 questions still being used today.

One of Jung's contributions was to recognize what he called the contrasexual within each of us. He talked about the so-called feminine within the man psyche he called the Anima. And the so-called masculine energies within the woman's psyche he called the Animus.

We are not just these gender roles and gender identities, but there is this kind of energy within each of us that needs to be brought into greater consciousness, needs to be claimed. There are within us tasks, common tasks, whether we're men or women, that have to do with accessing two things—the need for nurturance, and the need for empowerment.

Jung's Analytical Psychology has stood the test of time.

Analytical Psychology was simply the term used to differentiate Jungian psychology, from Freudian Psychoanalytic Psychology. At one point, Jung actually preferred the term Complex Psychology, not only because of the role of complexes in his early thinking, but also because of the enormous complexities of the human psyche. But generally speaking, the word analysis from the Greek verb from which it comes means to stir up from below, to move those materials down there, to bring them to the surface as you would the vegetables in a bowl of soup, to see what's down below there.

Bill Wilson wrote to Jung while he was the founding of the Alcoholics Anonymous. And among other things, Jung said to him, you have to remember, there's got to be a spiritual piece to that. Because, he said, underneath this is an enormous hunger and an enormous quest for connection to that which is meaningful to one's life. And so as a result of this, the whole idea of a higher power became very much apart of the 12-step movement.

Contemporary to Freud and Jung was Austrian medical doctor Alfred Adler, who sought to explain human behavior as a result of a single motivating force. Adler first described this force as the Aggression Drive that resulted when other basic drives for food, sex, or love were frustrated. He later described this drive as compensation, or a striving to overcome, and finally, a striving for perfection.

Adler felt we are drawn purposefully forward towards our goals and ideals. A viewpoint known as Teleology. However, along the way, our progress is impeded by our failures that accumulate into what Adler called an inferiority complex. To overcompensate we might construct a superiority complex, whereby, we try to make everyone else feel small as we really do inside.

Pampering and neglect were two other childhood situations Adler saw as contributing to a faulty personality he thought was basically formed by the age of five. Adler's individual psychology also studies effects on a child's personality formation such as, the child's birth order, the influence of adults other than the child's parents, and a classification of psychological type based on levels of energy.