Universal Neurosis Essay, Research Paper
Sigmund Freud defined the goal of psychoanalysis to be to replace unconscious
with conscious awareness, where his ego shall be, and
through this an individual would achieve self-control and reasonable
satisfaction of instincts. His fundamental ideas include psychic determinism,
the power and influence of the unconscious, as opposed to the pre-conscious
mind, the tripartite division into id, ego and super-ego, and of course the
ideas of universal illusion and universal effects of the Oedipal Complex. The
examination of the Oedipal Complex is the most essential to the understanding of
Freud`s theories since he claimed that due to the resistance, repression,
and transference of early sexual energies the world had developed a universal
complex which did not allow for the healthy development of individual`s
but lead instead to the neurosis and mass illusion of religion. For his
perceivably vicious attacks on religion and his logical and yet totally
undermining examination of religion and other vital social issues, Freud has
been slandered and his theories criticised simply because of the away he
addressed these painful issues. Through the systematic development of the
theories of psychoanalysis, all stemming from one another and all tied together
into a universal Oedipal Complex and religious illusion, the ideas of the
tripartite human psyche and wish-fulfilment that Freud developed came under fire
from critics for their controversial messages and analysis. Briefly stated, the
Oedipus Complex is the preservation in the adult individual of the perceptions,
strategies and scars of a conflict the individual underwent during his/her
pre-school years. According to Freud, these perceptions, etc, later colour and
shape the individual’s future experiences. This psychological crisis results
when a young child’s sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex collides
with the competition, rivalry and overwhelming power of the parent of the same
sex. According to Freudian theory, the ghosts of this Oedipal crisis haunt us
our entire lives. Psychopathology, slips of the tongue, dreams, and religious
experience all were understood to be functions whose origins and energy resulted
from this repressed material. In his later work, Freud interpreted the reports
of his clients (reports offered under hypnosis, under verbal encouragement and
suggestion, and finally, in the later work, reports given through
free-associations) as revealing a universal Oedipal drama. Freud found what he
took to be evidence for the universal existence of the Oedipus Complex in the
testimony of patients, in his analysis of the repressed in dreams, in slips,
wit, and the transference phenomenon, as well as in art, philosophy and
religion. As the child develops, he/she identifies with the parent of the same
sex and renounces incestual desire. This renunciation is achieved and
strengthened by the formation of the super-ego, a section of the child’s ego
identified with the childhood image of the parents (the parental Imago)
perceived in consciousness as conscience and as the ego ideal. The ego ideal is
the self`s conception of how he/she wishes to be and is a substitute for
the lost narcissism in childhood when I was my own ideal. When
projected onto or into the world, the Imago (a word used by Freud to describe
unconscious object-representations) is taken by the experience to be a veridical
perception of a divine being. Throughout life, these experiences of this
childhood conflict are alive and present in the unconscious of the individual.
This childish, magically thinking, ever desiring, instinctually driven self is
described topographically by Freud in his tripartite division of the person as
the id (Latin for it). That part of the individual
responsible for maintaining congress and connection with reality and mediating
between the id and reality is the ego. That part of the ego,
largely and usually unconscious, which bears and enforces the ego ideal, is the super-ego. An activity is ego-syntonic just in case it strengthens
the ego in its function of mediating between the demands of reality, basic
instinctual drives (of appetite, aggression, and sexuality), and conscience. As
mediator, the ego needs to make adequate contact with both the external and
internal demands involved. Thus, one of its main tasks is reality
testing – making an accurate determination of the limits imposed on the
organism by the external world including one’s own body. Illusory beliefs are
not ego-syntonic and are thus ultimately destructive if allowed to control
individuals and societies, even if they should happen, e.g., by accident, to be
true. Freud has an unusual definition of illusion. For Freud,
although illusions are usually false, they are not false by definition.
According to the definition Freud offers in his paper, The Future of an
Illusion, what characterises illusions is one’s motivation for believing
them. Freud begins by distinguishing illusions from falsehoods. Though illusions
are derived from human wishes, they, unlike delusions, are not
necessarily false. A middle-class child’s expectation of a royal marriage is one
example Freud gives of an illusion; the belief in the coming of the Messiah is
another. Freud is aware that, whether one classifies this belief as an
illusion or as something analogous to a delusion will depend on one’s personal
attitude. In an attempt to focus on the motivation of the beliefs in
question he defines a belief as an illusion when a wish-fulfilment is a
prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its relations
to reality, just as the illusion itself sets no store by verification. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud considers that religious ideas
are illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest, and most urgent
wishes of mankind, Further, Freud interprets belief in God as a
regressive emotional response to the recognition of human helplessness, namely, the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood aroused the need
for protection for protection through love which was provided by
the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life
made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more
powerful one. Freud was an enemy of all religions. He had
no hope for conscience based on a repressed part of the
personality. Instead, he placed his faith in reason and scientific
analysis thinking that beliefs shaped by wishes cannot be good
for anyone. For Freud, Religious experience is a function of the subject’s
perception of his/her projected parental Imago, the characteristics of which
were produced by the inherited trauma of the pre-historic experience of humanity
along with the subject’s resolution of the Oedipal crisis. The experience of the
projected Imago as real is a function of wish fulfilment; it is tied to illusory
beliefs accepted on the basis of their conformity with the subject’s wishes. The
resulting condition, religion, may be diagnosed as a universal
obsessional neurosis. Belief based on illusion undermines the ego’s
reality-testing function which is needed to deal with the environment. Such
belief is thus destructive for the integration of individual persons and
societies. The step from inadequate neurotic response to reality – as a function
of transference and illusion – to a blatant and dangerous inadequacy in
perceiving reality is a short one. The acceptance of illusions paves the way to
living in a world of delusions. Freudian psychoanalysis provides grounds for a
pragmatic criticism of both popular argument from religious experience and will to believe type arguments. That Freud holds such illusory
belief to be destructive is made clear in his work, New Introductory
Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Through the formation of the Oedipal
Complex, an individual sparks the formation of the super-ego in order to combat
the id both of which are regulated by the ego itself. The transference of the
projected Imago that a child receives through this complex results in the
experience of this projected Imago as wish fulfilment latter in life in the
aspects of religious illusion. Due to his chastising of religion as a product of
a child`s projected Imago, and thereby directly linking it of a
child`s sexuality, Freud himself and his ideas were criticised and
renounced. His use of his own and patients dreams in order to come to this
conclusion about a Oedipal Complex, caused these ideas as well as those of the
tripartite id, ego, and super-ego to be ignorantly discredited instead of
examined and studied for their useful revelations about the human psyche.
Through the systematic development of the theories of psychoanalysis, all
stemming from one another and all tied together into a universal Oedipal Complex
and religious illusion, the ideas of the tripartite human psyche and wish-fulfilment
that Freud developed came under fire from critics for their controversial
messages and analysis. These are important aspects of Freud`s legacy.