By MARCOS DE QUEIROZ GRILLO*

Considerations on Carlos Estevam's book: Freud, Life and Work

In the book, the author, Carlos Estevam, explains the main foundations of psychoanalysis in a simple and accessible way for the general public. The book is easy to read and understand despite the complexity of Sigmund Freud's ideas.

This is an educational book that was based on the classic “The Psychoanalytic Method and Freud’s Doctrine” by Roland Dabiez. According to the author, his book can be considered as “a kind of popular version of Dabiez’s essay.”

The book is divided into two parts: Freud's ideas and his life.

Freud's ideas

The question arises: what is the human soul?

For Freud, it is better to use the word psyche instead of soul. This is because when we speak of the soul, we immediately think of an entity separate from our body, which continues to live after death and goes to heaven or hell. Since religion is the one who should explain things about the soul, Freud studied the functioning of the psyche, that is, what happens to us in life.

The psyche encompasses all our sensations, emotions, thoughts, judgments, desires, wants and the situations of conflict between them. Furthermore, memory and imagination should not be forgotten.

The psyche is the set of mental or psychic processes, including conflicts between wills and desires. It is different from the body (somatic processes) and the soul (metaphysical processes).

Every psychic process of which we are aware is conscious. The author says, “[…] consciousness is like a small flashlight in a dark room: the object it is illuminating becomes conscious and can be seen by me, and the other objects that it is not illuminating become preconscious, are plunged into darkness and cannot be seen at that moment. The preconscious is thus constituted by the psychic processes that have momentarily disappeared from the field illuminated by consciousness.

However, preconscious processes can become conscious again. All a person has to do is want it to happen. All they have to do is point the flashlight towards the idea they want and it will become conscious. On the other hand, if they want to send the idea away, all they have to do is do so. Thus, according to Estevam, “the preconscious is formed by the psychic processes that we can make conscious spontaneously and voluntarily, whenever we need to.”

Unconscious psychic processes, which cannot be evoked voluntarily, are very different. In order for them to become conscious, special techniques are required, such as hypnosis, suggestion or psychoanalysis.

So far we have an idea of ​​what conscious, preconscious and unconscious mean. The reader can now understand the diagram below:

The ego, that is, I. This is easy to understand. And, as the diagram indicates, the ego is formed by conscious and preconscious psychic processes. Children, however, have not yet formed their personalities and, therefore, do not have an adult ego. This leads us to the question: where does the ego come from?

According to the author, “the ego arises from what, in the diagram, is situated below it, that is, the infra-ego and the super-ego. These two, combined, result in the ego.”

Let us then seek to understand the meaning of infra-ego and super-ego.

The infra-ego (or “primitive” or even “that”) are the powerful impulses that we cannot control and that come from the depths of our psyche. They are the psychic processes that constitute the infra-ego, which is amoral.

The super-ego is society, morality, and education. It is formed by the morality and habits that society instills in us since we are born, in our education and socialization process. It is within us, but it comes from outside.

Since children are still in the process of socialization, they act on impulses. Their superego, which is still being formed, does not completely repress them. It is clear, then, that society causes each of us to acquire a superego, through the education we receive at home, at school, at work and in life in general. We acquire moral conscience, forming our superego which, according to Estevam, “is society within us.” Freud called this process of forming the superego introjection. It means injecting, that is, taking something that is outside and instilling it within us. Introjection internalizes the exterior, the moral convictions that are in our environment.

The instincts of the infra-ego are not subject to social conventions. They are guided by the satisfaction of organic and psychological needs. The only psychic process capable of containing the infra-ego is the super-ego, which children have not yet fully internalized.

Returning to the ego, it is the result of a struggle that takes place every minute within us between the infra-ego (instinct) and the super-ego (moral conscience). With the permanent development of this struggle, the ego is formed, which is nothing more than our infra-ego disciplined by the super-ego.

Repression and sublimation

Looking again at the diagram, which depicts psychic processes, let us understand it dynamically, as if it were a film. The psychic tendencies confront each other, each facing its antagonists and always seeking victory. This was how Freud saw psychic processes.

The author says: “Our instinctive impulses are gross and shocking. The impulses of aggression, the feelings of hatred against everything that opposes our desires, the violent and brutal sexual impulses transform man into an animalistic and intolerable being. The need to live in society and coexist with other men forces us to adopt one of the following two attitudes: either we block and prevent the externalization of the impulses coming from the infra-ego or we adopt a second alternative and transform these low and animalistic instincts into good and morally elevated actions, into actions compatible with the needs of social coexistence. The first solution is called the act of repression, repression or, simply, repression. The second solution is called the act of sublimation or sublimation. Repression and sublimation are thus the two psychic processes that we use to dominate the selfish instincts of the infra-ego.”

What is the mechanism of repression? The superego is responsible for this work. It selects and represses our instinctive impulses. The superego acts as the border that exists in our psyche. It is like a border authority between two countries, which is called censorship. Repression means forcing undesirable elements to return to where they came from. Censorship represses unconscious impulses that want to become conscious, but which, because they are reprehensible from the point of view of the superego's convictions, are forced to remain where they were and, therefore, are unable to become conscious. This is what is demonstrated in the left part of the diagram.

Seeing the diagram as a film, we will understand repression as a force constituted by a group of ideas and feelings that oppose another group of ideas and feelings that are repressed because they are contrary to the convictions of moral conscience.

Repressed impulses often form complexes. A complex is a set. In this case, it is the set formed by those repressed desires and the painful emotions felt every time the impulses are repressed. Complexes hinder the full expression of personality. They lead to feelings of inferiority, anxiety attacks, obsessions and distressing states.

In the central part of the diagram there is an arrow that manages to leave the unconscious and reach its final destination. This is an example of an impulse that has not been blocked by the super-ego. It has not been censored and can manifest itself in conscious life.

Now we need to explain the arrow on the right side of the diagram. This is an impulse that tries to pass through the super-ego, is blocked, insists again, and manages to pass through. These are sublimated impulses. The attempt to deceive the super-ego is made every day by our impulses, which pretend to be what they are not and are often successful, managing to manifest themselves in the conscious life of the ego, without the ego or other people being able to discover their true identity. This is sublimation.

For Freud, sublimation is positive. Most of the great lives and great deeds that have occurred in the history of humanity were only possible thanks to sublimation.

The author says: “The great artists, the great scientists, the great political leaders, all the personalities who managed to rise above the average and became prominent figures thanks to the talent and tenacity they revealed in carrying out the most extraordinary and audacious projects, all the great men were, often, men whose instincts did not manifest themselves as they were, did not seek only direct and immediate satisfaction and, instead, sublimated themselves, ceased to be selfish and thirsty instincts, transformed themselves into positive forces of great social value”.

To understand sublimation, Freud says that a human tendency becomes much more intense when it incorporates instinctive sexual forces into itself in order to strengthen itself, in the same way that a small stream can be extraordinarily swollen by the waters of a mighty river. It can thus happen that a man dedicates himself to his work with the same passionate enthusiasm with which other people dedicate themselves to their loves, because work can represent for him what love represents for others, that is, a way of giving expression to his sexual instinct. Sublimation is this capacity that the sexual instinct has to renounce its immediate objective in exchange for other non-sexual objectives that are more appreciated by society.

Everyday life

Chapter 1 presented an overview of Freud's ideas. In this chapter, we will follow a more detailed itinerary, addressing acts of daily life, dreams, sex, neuroses and psychoses.

Em The psychopathology of everyday life Freud examines people's daily lives. Small mistakes, forgetfulness, behavioral flaws, slips of the tongue. All of this goes unnoticed, as if such mistakes were unimportant. For Freud, these small events always have a reason to exist. They are not insignificant facts, but rather significant, because they always want to say something about us. This is our unconscious manifesting itself. Hidden affective tendencies, facts produced by unconscious causes. Freud developed the associative technique to detect the unconscious causes of such events.

The author cites the example of Rousseau, who always walked on the same side of a street, even though it took him longer. After much analysis, Rousseau discovered the reason: it was the disgust he felt for a beggar who was waiting on the opposite sidewalk, whom he always avoided. Rousseau could not admit to himself that he was disgusted by a human being, and so his psyche hid this weakness from him. He felt disgust unconsciously. The external fact was a sign, an effect of the internal psychic process, but Rousseau only became aware of the relationship between the two after some time.

A nine-year-old boy who suffered from neurasthenia spent his vacation killing and eating grasshoppers. He told his doctor about it. The doctor used the associative technique to play word ping-pong. He chose the word grasshopper. The boy's association was with green. And what did green remind him of? A teacher for whom he felt a deep aversion. Another association he made was that eating grasshoppers reminded him of a passage in the gospel that tells how Saint John the Baptist lived in the desert, eating grasshoppers. And John the Baptist was idolized by the boy as a very strong person, almost a giant. An idea of ​​strength and power. The boy was certainly playing the good guy that, for him, Saint John the Baptist was.

But why did the boy want to be strong and powerful, especially during his vacation? The boy was shy and fearful and only felt good around his mother. His father inspired fear in him, as did the “green” teacher. During the vacation, the boy would get rid of both of them and have his mother all to himself. However, his father became ill and monopolized his mother’s attention, frustrating the boy’s Oedipal expectation of having her exclusively. So, he invents a compensatory fantasy: killing his enemies symbolized by the grasshopper and eating them to feel stronger and more powerful, like John the Baptist.

According to the author, Freud “believed it was possible to know what people hide without resorting to hypnosis, just by observing what they say or hint at”.

In the words of Freud, “those who have eyes to see and ears to hear are convinced that mortals cannot hide any secret. She who does not speak with her lips speaks with her fingertips; we betray ourselves through every pore. That is why the task of making the most intimate parts of our psyche conscious is perfectly achievable.”

A friend of a doctor asks him the name of a store that sells a certain product. Although the doctor knew the store well, he was unable to remember the name, despite trying hard to do so. Whenever this happens, we say that we have a bad memory. For Freud, in some cases, the cause of forgetfulness is the existence of a struggle between opposing psychic forces. One force seeks to remember and the other to forget. A few days later, the doctor, passing by the store, saw that its name was Lago. Using the method of association of ideas, he fixed his attention on the word. The memory of an old friend named Dr. Lago, who was the top scorer on a soccer team, came to mind.

Then came another memory: the Indian lake where he used to fish as a child. And so on, associating ideas until he came to the memory of him and his brother playing in the lake with their dog, throwing stones for him to fetch, until, inadvertently, he hit the dog with a stone that sank and died. This was a very painful memory that he unconsciously tried to forget.

The fact that countless ideas are somehow linked to each other is what is called psychic thematism.

Nightlife – dreams

One of the great merits of Freud's doctrine was the observation that there is no separation between the normal life we ​​lead and the life of the mentally ill. By showing that the abnormal is closer to the normal than we suppose, Freud indicates that the cure of the abnormal and the reestablishment of normality is much less complicated than we suppose. This appears very clearly in the central theory of psychoanalysis: the dream theory.

Freud's great innovation was to focus scientific attention on dreams. He said: “The interpretation of dreams is the main road that leads to knowledge of the unconscious aspects of our psychic life.”

It was through the study of dreams that he was able to formulate a theory about neurosis.

According to Freud, “we must note that our dream productions, that is, our dreams, on the one hand closely resemble the productions of the mentally ill and, on the other hand, are normal in a state of perfect health.”

In other words, Carlos Estevam adds, “healthy people when they are dreaming are very similar to mentally ill people, but that doesn’t make them any less healthy. Those who cannot understand the meaning of dreams will not be able to understand morbid psychic processes.”

Previous scholars thought that dreams were caused by the sensations experienced while sleeping. For Freud, on the contrary, we do not dream about what is happening outside of us: we dream about what is happening inside of us. For him, dreaming is not a somatic problem, but a psychic process.

For Freud, unlike his predecessors, dreams cannot be just a jumble of images that follow one another without any logical order. On the contrary, for him, they are coherent. They have a meaning. They have a certain logic and a certain unity. The blame for the inability to interpret them lies with us, not with the dreams. The psychic processes that unfold in our psyche when we are dreaming present a certain degree of organization, that is, there are connections between the images that appear in dreams; something similar to the spontaneous association of ideas. There is a certain thematicism: they are images that belong to a single story and, however jumbled they may be, they seek to tell something in the language of dreams.

But how can we prove this theory? How can we discover the meaning of dreams?

For Freud, dreams are merely an effect, a symptom of a deeper cause, just as smoke is an effect of fire. If we cannot see the fire, the smoke will seem absurd. It is the unconscious, preconscious, or unconscious psychic processes that produce dreams. We only see the smoke, we never see the fire, which is why we do not understand why we dream.

The method of associations

We will only be able to discover the meaning of dreams if we use the method of spontaneous associations.

One idea naturally pulls another. It is as if the first idea reaches out and pulls the second idea into our mind on its own. The second idea is brought by the first idea, and not by us. It is important to note that this relationship acts on our mind without us being aware of its existence. Why does association occur when we remember a certain thing and not another? When the idea evokes another, it does not evoke any other idea, but only the ideas that are linked to it by some kind of relationship. And the association does not need our interference: it is an objective relationship and not a subjective one.

When we let our thoughts flow freely, without interfering in the direction that this process takes, we see that ideas are associated and passing before us like clouds passing through the sky one after the other. In this process, unpleasant and undesirable emotions may arise. But we do not know in advance what the concatenation of ideas will be. We are not the ones who command the parade of ideas; they are the ones that impose themselves on us, one after the other, one brought by the other, thanks to the objective relationship that exists between them.

This objective relationship between spontaneously associated ideas provided Freud with the scientific basis on which his psychoanalytic method rests. His method is scientific because it is based on objective fact. And it is this method that provides us with the key to deciphering the meaning of dreams. Now, since the images that appear in dreams have an associative link with the unconscious psychic processes that produce the dream, all we need to do to discover the causes of dreams is to follow the associations. It is like following the thread of smoke to reach the fire that created it.

The psychoanalyst asks his patient to lie down on a comfortable couch, close his eyes and let his thoughts flow freely. He creates a situation similar to that of someone who is sleeping. The patient's only obligation is to participate, guided by the therapist, in the process of association, where he detects those that form a "thematism", that is, a story that reveals the true meaning of the dream.

According to Freud, “each dream presents two types of content: a manifest content and a latent content. The first is what appears in the dream itself. The second is the hidden content, the hidden meaning that we can only discover through analysis.” When we apply the associative method, we start with the manifest content and end up discovering the latent content (formed by thoughts and feelings that can be either preconscious or unconscious), which reveals the real cause of the dream. For Freud, it is important to note that the process by which the latent content is transformed into manifest content is never conscious, a process that Freud called “the dream work.”

Freud's first fundamental thesis is that dreams have a meaning. The second fundamental thesis is that every dream is the fulfillment of a wish.

At first glance, it seems that dreams would interfere with sleep. Would we sleep better without dreams? For Freud, dreams facilitate sleep. According to him, “dreams are the guardians of sleep.” A desire is a psychic excitement. Desire wakes us up from sleep. Dreams, the guardians of sleep, eliminate the excitement caused by desire by satisfying it through dreams. A person who is starving can only sleep if they dream.

According to Freud, “while sleeping we experience the satisfaction of desire and, by satisfying desire, we continue to sleep.”

Freud's detractors argued that if dreams represent the fulfillment of a wish, then all dreams would bring us pleasure, since when we fulfill a wish we feel pleasure. And in this case, there could be no nightmares. Freud gets away with this questioning in a simple way, warning us about the role of censorship during our sleep. The concept of censorship complements Freud's theory on the interpretation of dreams.

There are the following possibilities when a forbidden desire reaches the censorship barrier: (i) if the guards are also asleep, it passes directly through as it is, without being noticed; (ii) if the guards are half asleep and cannot completely block the passage, the desire manifests itself in a more or less disturbed way; and (iii) if the guards are attentive and actually block the passage and effectively try to repress the desire, the desire resorts to the trick we already know: it disguises itself and thus manages to manifest itself indirectly. This is the most common possibility and, therefore, the dreams appear jumbled and confused.

Here, Freud's statement applies: “a dream is the disguised fulfillment of a repressed desire.” A good example is a dream that combines two factors: on the one hand, the desire to kill, and on the other, censorship. This results in a dream that is realized while disguising a repressed desire.

But what about the nightmare?

In dreams we seek to satisfy the most primitive and antisocial instinctive impulses, everything that has been repressed and that cannot come to light. According to Freud, “censored desires are above all the manifestation of our limitless and unscrupulous selfishness.”

Carlos Estevam explains: “When we sleep, we disconnect from the outside world and focus all our interest on ourselves. Our “self” becomes overvalued, starts to play the main role in every scene and, feeling free and unencumbered by all moral and social obligations, our “self” gives itself body and soul to sexual appetites, launching itself eagerly in search of pleasure. Freud gave this initiative to seek pleasure wherever it can be found the name libido. Libido seeks objects that bring pleasure, preferably forbidden objects.”

Freud says: the libido […] “chooses not only the neighbor’s wife, but also the objects to which all humanity is accustomed to confer a sacred character: a man chooses his mother or his sister, a woman chooses her father or her brother.”

And he continues: in dreams […] “hatred has free rein. The hunger for revenge, the desire to kill the person we love above all else in life, our parents, brothers, sisters, husbands and children, such desires have nothing exceptional in dreams: they are censored impulses that seem to come from a true hell”.

Selfishness and eroticism are the two sources of dreams.

But human beings are not only animalistic. In addition to their selfish and erotic instincts, there are also high morals and socially appreciated aspirations that arise from censorship. These animalistic and socially elevated tendencies clash and live in permanent conflict. That is why not every dream is pleasant. That is why we have nightmares.

And thus, Freud defines them: “[…] the nightmare is often the undisguised fulfillment of a wish, but of a wish that, instead of being welcomed, has been repelled and repressed. The anguish that accompanies the fulfillment of this wish is a sign that the repressed wish is stronger than the censorship and that it is being fulfilled or will be fulfilled, contrary to the censorship. The feeling of anguish that we experience represents the anguish in the face of the strength of these wishes that, until that moment, we had managed to repress.”

It is really difficult to understand how it is possible that certain dreams, very unpleasant, can be explained as the fulfillment of some wish. But that is what happens.

The mechanisms of dreaming

To recap: (a) Every dream has a manifest content and a latent content; (b) the dream represents a kind of translation of the latent content into manifest content; (c) this process was called “dream work” by Freud.

Among the main types of dream work, Freud distinguished four mechanisms: condensation, displacement, dramatization and symbolization. These are different ways of transforming the latent content of the dream into manifest content.

In condensation, the dream is usually short, poor and laconic despite its causes being much richer, deeper and more complex.

Displacement is the process by which the emotional charge that is released during a dream does not fall, as would be natural, on its true object: the emotional charge deviates its direction and falls on a secondary, apparently insignificant object. This is one of the fundamental mechanisms and occurs both in dreams and in pathological psychic phenomena.

Dramatization is another fundamental mechanism of dreaming. This phenomenon consists in the fact that we never dream of ideas or relationships between ideas. The content of our dreams is always made up of images and associations between images. When we are awake we can reason, when we are asleep we can only imagine. The mental activity of dreams is limited to images of sensory origin, visual, auditory, tactile images, etc. It is a mental activity of a lower type than rational thought. In other words, dreams translate ideas into images, and therefore, dream interpretation must follow the opposite path, that is, discover the rational meaning of dream images.

Symbolization occurs when the images that appear in dreams are related to other images.

the sex

Freud's studies on sex scandalized the society of his time. The importance of sex in human life could not be accepted by the morals of the time.

Carlos Estevam comments that “new ideas are always fought against when they emerge, especially when they clash with old prejudices or old privileges that have been ingrained for a long time”.

For Freud, sexual instinct is a force that excites us and acts continuously: this force gives us a special kind of pleasure every time we satisfy it in the right way. The instinct exists and acts with the aim of achieving a specific goal. This goal can be easily achieved because satisfying the instinct causes us a feeling of pleasure. If we did not feel pleasure when satisfying our instincts, they would certainly disappear.

For Freud, sexuality is one thing, and genitals are another. Genital relations are only one part of sexual life: sexual feelings are not limited to genital sensations. There is a great number of sexual feelings that precede sexual pleasure itself. Before we enter into genital relations, we experience a huge number of psychic processes, such as hopes and fears, desires and attractions, enchantments and tenderness, anxiety and aggression, etc. All of these processes are sexual and not genital. Hence Freud concluded that genital processes constitute only a small part of our sexual life. Sexual life is made up of sexual emotions combined with genital phenomena.

Freud developed the theory of dual function. The mouth, for example, gives us gustatory pleasures, but it also provides us with sexual pleasure, such as kissing. Whenever a part of the body is transformed into a source of sexual excitement, Freud gives this part of the body the name of an erogenous zone, that is, an area that is capable of generating eroticism.

For Freud, the meaning of sex is very broad, based on which he developed his theory of sex.

By stating that children engage in sexual activity from a very young age, Freud caused great indignation among his contemporaries, since for centuries humanity assumed that children were innocent, asexual angels. This was because they certainly did not take into account the distinction between sex and genital phenomena.

For Freud, adult sex is the result of a long process of evolution that begins at birth. The sexual instinct is present in us from birth and continues to develop until we reach adulthood. When this evolution does not occur normally, cases of sexual perversion appear. These are anomalies, sexual aberrations.

For Freud, the first period of infantile sexuality lasts from birth until the age of five, when it enters latency, remains hidden, and is diverted to other activities. A process of sublimation occurs from the age of five until puberty. During this latency period, the forces of the super-ego appear, causing the sublimation of the sexual instinct. Feelings of shame and modesty in relation to sex arise.

During puberty, the sexual instinct becomes stronger, awakening us to life once again. The genital system begins to function differently.

According to Freud, what children experience first are oral sensations. This is where the dual function theory comes in. The mouth is an erogenous zone and the pleasure that the child feels when sucking is a sexual pleasure, also known as oral eroticism or oral eroticism.

For Freud, there are two different types of sexual pleasure. For example, the pleasure of a kiss is called preliminary pleasure. The pleasure of ejaculation, or orgasm, is called the pleasure of satisfaction, which is only possible after puberty. In childhood, pleasures are already sexual, although there is no erection or orgasm.

According to Freud, “later, when the true sexual object, the male member, is already known, reflexes arise that develop again the excitement of the oral zone, which had remained erogenous. It does not require a great effort of imagination to put in place of the maternal breast or the finger that replaced it, the current sexual object, the penis. Thus, this shocking perversion that is penis sucking has a most innocent origin.”

The second phase that the sexual instinct goes through in childhood is when the anus appears as a source of sexual pleasure. This is the anal phase. For example, the feeling of relief that the act of defecating gives us is, for Freud, a pleasure of a sexual nature. If it were not so, there would never be anal intercourse among adults, which is a sexual perversion common to all peoples on earth.

According to Freud, sexual perversion can only exist based on some type of activity that was normal during childhood. An adult feels pleasure, for example, in anal intercourse because there was some atrophy or deviation in the normal development of his anal sensations during childhood.

When urinating, the child, while satisfying a physiological need, experiences sexual pleasure. This is nothing extraordinary since urination is closely related to ejaculation.

For Freud, unlike his predecessors, the sexual instinct is not born during puberty. It is at this time that the sexual instinct acquires its definitive form, when it becomes mature and adult. The various parts that make up childhood sexuality come together and unite to form a single whole. All the erogenous zones that previously existed independently of each other begin to connect with each other and are all subordinate to the command of the genital zone, which begins to predominate over the others.

Carlos Estevam adds: “The passage to puberty does not occur in the same way in men and women. In men, the passage is direct; in women, there are two phases: in the first, sensitivity is located in the clitoris and, only after some time, it starts to be located in the vagina. The fact that women have to go through two genital stages places them in a situation of inferiority, since they are more likely to have an interruption in the normal development process. For this reason, Freud distinguishes two types of female frigidity: partial frigidity, in which the vagina is insensitive and only the clitoris is sensitive; and complete frigidity, in which neither of the two regions can be aroused.”

The Oedipus complex

Oedipus is the main character of a Greek myth whose story was marked by two tragic events: Oedipus married his mother and killed his own father. After that, consumed by remorse, he gouged out his own eyes to punish himself.

According to Freud, this same story repeats itself in the lives of children in relation to their fathers and mothers.

The Oedipus complex is a phenomenon that can occur in three different ways: in childhood, adolescence and adulthood.

During early childhood, the Oedipus complex, although sexual in nature, cannot present genital characteristics. This happens when the boy begins to show an exaggerated preference for his mother. The boy begins to wish that his mother existed only for him, becomes jealous of his father and does everything to eliminate him from his life with his mother. At the same time, or later, he feels guilty of a serious mistake and experiences remorse towards his father. The same thing happens to the girl: she begins to desire her father and repel her mother. In this case, the name given to the complex is the Electra complex.

Freud states that the Oedipus complex is a normal thing, which appears and then disappears during childhood.

Carlos Estevam summarizes what happens in the normal evolution of the Oedipus complex, which appears, gains strength and then, little by little, is eliminated without major problems:

The boy bonds with his mother through maternal care, attention and affection. Over time, he begins to want his mother all to himself. Little by little, he discovers the importance of his father. He realizes that he is not the only one who loves his mother. His father also loves her and so he becomes her rival. The boy wants to marry his mother, he wants to have her completely for himself, without his father's interference. Since she already has a husband, the boy wants to eliminate this inopportune rival. He fights to achieve this but, evidently, he cannot defeat his father, since he is much more powerful than he is. The way he finds to get revenge is to become aggressive, cynical, disobedient, mocking, etc.

Over time, the boy changes his way of loving. Instead of wanting his mother all to himself, he adopts a new tendency: he wants to protect his mother, he tries to wrap her in a protective mantle against anything that might come against her. He doesn't allow anyone to hurt her. At this stage, he continues to compete with his father, but now he admires his father's qualities. He starts to imitate him, he wants to be like him and become more important than him. At this point, the boy is already "playing the little man."

As he becomes an adult, the boy becomes independent, gradually distancing himself from his mother. As his virile personality becomes more established, he stops competing with his father and begins to treat him normally. Like a normal adult, he begins to be interested in other women. One fine day he marries normally, without the Oedipus complex having left any deep mark on his personality.

However, when, for some reason, certain factors prevent this normal development, the consequences can be very painful. Depending on the case, the Oedipus complex can completely ruin an adult's life: men who are unable to overcome it often become effeminate, cowardly and fearful; women acquire excessive and harmful virility; men and women become impotent and cold, showing great sexual shyness; they experience feelings of inferiority and a permanent fear of not being approved for the things they do; they feel guilty for acts they did not perform without any reason for it; they become excessively aggressive or, on the contrary, feel disarmed in the face of life; and often, the Oedipus complex causes male or female homosexuality.

Oedipus manifestations during childhood are completely normal. In adolescence, things are more complicated because the person has already entered the genital phase. It is not uncommon for the attraction to the mother to be linked to sensations of pleasure located in the genital area.

When the Oedipus complex is not eliminated normally during childhood and continues to act at later ages, it is to be expected that it will manifest itself in various forms of symptoms during adult life.

Carlos Estevam summarizes this subject: “Let us suppose that the boy, loving his mother and hating his father, is unable to face the fight against his father as a man. When this happens, the complex enters an abnormal path of evolution. Unable to fight against his father face to face, the boy feels inferior and soon begins to experience feelings of remorse whose origin he does not know. He feels that something is wrong, but is unable to discover its cause. He feels guilty towards his father, but does not know why, since these psychic processes are unconscious and repressed. In order to redeem himself from his guilt, the boy seeks to find some way to obtain his father’s forgiveness. Striving to be forgiven in order to free himself from his unconscious anguish, the first thing the boy does is to abandon the idea of ​​a man-to-man fight against his father. He gets rid of his aggressiveness in order to obtain his father’s indulgence and admiration. To please his father, he increasingly gives up his virility, becomes subservient and submissive, and debases and demeans himself. Instead of playing the man, he starts playing the woman, trying to identify with his mother in order to share his father's sympathies and attention with her.”

When he reaches adulthood, in extreme cases the boy becomes homosexual. In less serious cases, he becomes a submissive and cowardly type, who always feels the need to feel inferior to others. In general, the mechanism of this process is as follows. When he becomes an adult, the boy tends to see a reproduction of his father in all the men he comes into contact with. He sees all his superiors as if they were his own father. As he continues to experience feelings of guilt, he seeks to gain the good graces of his boss, his teacher, his employer, and the authorities in general. He does everything he can to be likeable because he needs, more than any other normal person, to feel approved by others and to win their sympathy and indulgence.

The castration complex

Some children have a mental fear of being castrated or even the conviction that they have already been castrated (in the case of girls). This complex can arise in many different ways. The girl's feeling of inferiority for not having a penis, the idea that all are born boys and some are castrated to become girls, parents' repression of the frequent contact that children have with their genitals, among others.

Neuroses and psychoses

There are many types of neuroses and psychoses. What is the difference between them? Generally speaking, the difference lies in the degree of awareness that the person has of their condition.

For example, a person thinks that others are persecuting him. If he feels this but at the same time is aware that it is absurd, then he is simply neurotic. But if, on the contrary, he thinks that what he is feeling is true, that his hallucination is not an illusion but something real, then this is psychosis.

Psychosis is a more serious illness than neurosis because the patient cannot compare what he imagines with what happens in reality; and loses awareness of his condition.

Every normal person feels fear when faced with danger. The fear that the neurotic feels is not a normal fear; it is a morbid, pathological, unhealthy fear. This fear derives from an imaginary danger, a danger that does not exist. The danger does not exist, it is imaginary, but the anguish he feels is real.

If a normal person thinks of castrating himself, what does he do? He puts the idea out of his head and starts thinking about something else. A neurotic person struggles with this idea, but does not castrate himself. For Freud, in our psyche there are two locomotives moving along the same track in opposite directions. There comes a time when one locomotive stops the other because they are both pulling in opposite directions. There is a struggle, the idea of ​​conflict between two opposing forces. Thus, for Freud, the most important cause of neuroses is the existence of some internal conflict between the psychic forces that make up our psyche. For him, psychic factors are more important than organic factors. When studying a case of neurosis, Freud's attention was focused on the psychic elements acquired throughout life. It is therefore necessary to try to discover what the events of childhood were, the education, the influences exerted by the environment, the emotions experienced, etc. It is precisely throughout a person's life that conflicts, dramas and inner struggles must have arisen, which eventually found an outlet in neurosis. Our natural and legitimate impulses, originating from our instinct for self-preservation, are often repressed, impulses that are repressed in the unconscious day after day, like a river that is being dammed. Eventually, the day comes when the water overflows, often for no apparent reason. The neurotic has strange, unreasonable reactions, anxiety attacks, delusional dreams, mental confusion, the desire to commit suicide, etc. Thus, in short, for Freud, the origin of neurosis comes from the repression of our instinctive impulses and, in particular, the repression of sexual impulses. If education overcomes instincts, the impulse is repressed into the unconscious. Someday the force that was repressed will reappear, more powerful than ever. If this does not happen, the repressed impulse will manifest itself through crises (sexual perversions, somatizations, anger, etc.).

Lay people may think that it is easy to cure a neurosis. It would be enough to show the person that he or she is mistaken in experiencing an obsession. For Freud, on the contrary, one should never tell the patient that he or she is wrong in feeling a certain fear, obsession or delusion. Only the patient himself or herself is capable of curing himself or herself, which only happens when he or she discovers the cause of his or her neurosis.

Carlos Estevam comments: “Through psychoanalysis, one can help the patient to delve into his unconscious in order to find the cause that is provoking the neurotic symptoms. The symptom is only an effect and not a cause, and can only be successfully combated if it is attacked from behind.”

Freud cites a case of a patient of Dr. Joseph Breuer, the founder of psychoanalysis. A young woman who was thirsty and could not drink any liquid. She had to eat fruit to quench her thirst. The most she could do was hold the glass and put it to her lips and then throw it away. Subjected by Breuer to the technique of association of ideas, while in hypnotic sleep, she remembered that one day she saw the dog of her housekeeper, for whom she harbored a deep hatred, drinking water from the glass of water she kept in her room. Upon seeing this situation, she felt an urge to explode at the maid and fire her, but she did not do so, because her father always protected her. This memory hidden in the unconscious came to the illuminated field of consciousness. In doing so, she expressed all her repressed anger. When the session ended, she drank a glass of water normally.

In this case, psychoanalysis helped the patient to clear her psyche, eliminating mental confusion. This was possible because the young woman was able to remember the occasion when the symptoms first appeared. She herself discovered the cause of her problem when she had a strong emotional reaction, expressing her pent-up anger. However, a forgotten memory could not be recalled voluntarily since that fact was no longer in her conscious mind, but rather in her unconscious, requiring the psychoanalytic technique.

In the author’s words, “the cure occurred simply because the patient was able to bring back to consciousness the event that had caused trauma to her psyche; the outburst of anger that accompanied the memory was an emotional discharge of energy that was pent up and struggling to come to light. The patient was cured when she released the anger that had not been able to manifest itself at the time because the censorship had not been able to completely repress the instinctive impulse, nor to allow it to manifest itself completely. If the impulse had been completely repressed or if it had been able to manifest itself completely, it is likely that the symptoms would not have appeared. Symptoms are formed by the return of the repressed impulse that tries in every way to force its way out.”

Freud used to say that the neurotic takes refuge in his illness. In short, the essence of healing through psychoanalysis is awareness, allowing the possibility of choice, breaking the unhealthy automatism: awareness destroys morbid habits by reducing them to the memory of the events that gave rise to them. In other words, psychoanalysis cures by transforming the unconscious into the conscious.

The hysteria

Hysteria is a form of neurosis that manifests itself in a variety of ways. Before Freud, when a person behaved hysterically, repeating the same gesture over and over, having outbursts, paralysis, blindness, deafness, etc., it was thought that he or she was pretending to be ill. Freud observed that hysteria is not a pretense, nor is it an organic disease, but rather a mental disorder caused by psychological factors.

Take the example of Arlete, a 34-year-old woman who suffered from nervous breakdowns of the type that manifested as a feeling of suffocation, body contractions, paralysis of the limbs and loss of consciousness. Doctors and family members were certain that the causes were organic. She was given medication, underwent surgery, underwent hypnosis and went to rest clinics, all to no avail. To prove that the paralysis of the arm was nothing more than a pretense, the doctor used tricks to make the patient move the arm, proving that there was no paralysis, in which case there would be no movement. Seeing that the arm moved, the hysteric became convinced and stopped feeling that symptom. Days later, however, another symptom appeared. And so on, countless variations in the symptoms occurred.

In the author's words: “For Freud, they were just pulling out the leaves of a weed, and not the root of the evil itself. For him, at the origin of hysteria there must have been some psychological conflict that ended up being resolved incompletely by an act of repression, that is, some unconscious psychic process that repressed some painful emotional experience that occurred in the person's life. The cause is repressed in the unconscious and the hysteric only sees the symptoms, which often bring them a certain satisfaction, as they end up being a kind of fulfillment of a repressed desire. The complexes that produce these symptoms are deeply rooted in the psyche and it is these that must be combated.”

Studying hysteria, Freud identified what he called the mechanism of conversion, one of his main contributions to the theory of hysteria. Repressed affective energy does not remain only psychic energy all the time, since it undergoes a transformation that occurs when it becomes a physical symptom such as paralysis, tremors, contractions, etc. The psychic processes repressed in the unconscious find an outlet in the body.

Returning to Arlete's case, and having validated the idea that her illness was caused by psychological factors, there would be no other option than to use psychoanalytic techniques, such as free association and dream interpretation, which allow us to discover the patient's past. In her case, the psychoanalyst ended up discovering that she suffered a profound emotional shock when she was only seven years old. She was raped by a man who held her by the neck with both hands, as if he were strangling her.

The family, unaware of anything, confirmed that at the age of seven she had a high fever and delirium. Arlete felt that she had lost her body and that the only thing she had left was her head. Arlete began to associate her father with the man on the beach in her dreams. The symptoms were linked to the intense psychological conflicts that had been with her since childhood and did not leave her until she was 34 years old, when she overcame the consequences of the trauma.

Psychoses are more serious and complicated mental disorders than neuroses. In the study of psychosis, treatment cannot be restricted to mental processes, since organic processes are also extremely important.

Freud himself did not study psychosis in depth and did not specialize in the subject.

Freud's life

Freud was born on May 6, 1856, in Freiberg, Moravia. His family, of Jewish origin, emigrated to the Austrian capital when Freud was only 4 years old. In 1881, he completed his medical degree with a thesis on the central nervous system. For several years, he worked in a neurological clinic for children, where he discovered a type of cerebral palsy that later gained his name.

In 1885 he became an assistant professor at the University of Vienna. In 1902 he was appointed full professor. In 1884, a Viennese physician named Josef Breuer told Freud about the results of his experiments in curing severe symptoms of hysteria by having the patient, subjected to hypnotic sleep, remember the circumstances that gave rise to his illness and express the emotions experienced in those circumstances. These experiments, known as the cathartic method, formed the starting point for the later development of psychoanalysis.

He wrote with Breuer the book Studies on Hysteria, published in 1895.

Shortly afterwards, Freud abandoned hypnosis and replaced it with his method of free associations. It was in this way that Freud managed to formulate his discovery regarding psychic processes inaccessible to consciousness.

The unconscious has always been the object of exploration by poets and philosophers of all times. Freud had the merit of being the first to discover the instrument capable of reaching it and exploring its essence. However, his theory of infantile sexuality was strongly rejected by academia, even causing his separation from Breuer.

For ten years Freud worked alone on the development of psychoanalysis. In 1906, together with several colleagues such as Adler, Jung, Jones and Stekel, he held the first International Congress of Psychoanalysis. A few years later he founded the International Psychoanalytic Association, with branches in several countries.

Throughout his life, Freud was the victim of public hostility towards his theses and ideas, which were considered immoral and unscientific. Even so, he was tireless in promoting his scientific work.

Deep down, the hostility he received throughout most of his life came from the hypocritical side of the opinion makers on duty who did not want to admit the existence of all the mud and sordidness contained in the social unconscious.

Despite being severely persecuted by the Nazis, Freud continued to live in Austria. They burned the books in his library in a public square and tried to prohibit him from continuing his studies and research, which he never accepted.

In 1938, after repeated invitations from many countries around the world, Freud, already suffering from advanced mouth cancer, agreed to move to England. However, he had to pay a ransom demanded by the Nazis. Several international institutions from various countries raised funds to make his trip possible. However, the funds were never enough, as the amount was constantly being increased by the horrendous blackmail of the Nazis. President Roosevelt had to intervene with the German authorities to allow him to travel. He lived in England for only one year, dying on September 23, 1939.

*Marcos de Queiroz Grillo He is an economist and has a master's degree in administration from UFRJ.

Reference

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Carlos Estevam. Freud: life and work. Rio de Janeiro, Paz e Terra, 2008, 128 pages. [https://amzn.to/3BTHk0S]

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