Freud's psychoanalytic theories

Sigmund Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) is considered to be the founder of the psychodynamic approach to psychology, which looks to unconscious drives to explain human behavior.

Freud believed that the mind is responsible for both conscious and unconscious decisions that it makes on the basis of psychological drives.

Freud believed people are "simply actors in the drama of [their] own minds, pushed by desire, pulled by coincidence.

Groups are necessary, according to Freud in order to decrease the narcissism in all people, by creating libidinal ties with others by placing everyone at an equal level.

According to Freud's many theories of religion, the Oedipus complex is utilized in the understanding and mastery of religious beliefs.

The boy strives to possess his mother and ultimately replace his father as a means of no longer having to fight for her undivided attention and affection.

Freud believed that people could be cured by making their unconscious a conscious thought and motivations, and by that gaining "insight".

The Id is made up of two biological instincts, Eros which In order for people to maintain a realistic sense here on earth, the Ego is responsible for creating a balance between pleasure and pain.

The Ego takes into account ethical and cultural ideals in order to balance out the desires originating in the Id.

If we wish to find an anatomical analogy for it we can best identify it with the ‘cortical homunculus’ of the anatomists, which stands on its head in the cortex, sticks up its heels, faces backward and, as we know, has its speech-area on the left-hand side.

Without the Superego, Freud believed people would act out with aggression and other immoral behaviors because the mind would have no way of understanding the difference between right and wrong.

The conscience contains ideals and morals that exist within a society that prevent people from acting out based on their internal desires.

Freud believed that the answers to what controlled daily actions resided in the unconscious mind despite alternative views that all our behaviors were conscious.

He felt that religion is an illusion based on human values that are created by the mind to overcome inner psychological conflict.

When anxiety occurs, the mind's first response is to seek rational ways of escaping the situation by increasing problem-solving efforts and a range of defense mechanisms may be triggered.

When the distortion of reality occurs, there is a change in perception which allows for a lessening in anxiety resulting in a reduction of tension one experiences.

The defense mechanisms are as follows: 1) Denial is believing that what is true is actually false 2) Displacement is taking out impulses on a less threatening target 3) Intellectualization is avoiding unacceptable emotions by focusing on the intellectual aspects 4) Projection is attributing uncomfortable feelings to others 5) Rationalization is creating false but believable justifications 6) Reaction Formation is taking the opposite belief because the true belief causes anxiety 7) Regression is going back to a previous stage of development 8) Repression is pushing uncomfortable thoughts out of conscious awareness 9) Suppression is consciously forcing unwanted thoughts out of our awareness 10) Sublimation is redirecting ‘wrong’ urges into socially acceptable actions.

Freud desired to understand religion and spirituality and deals with the nature of religious beliefs in many of his books and essays.

In some of his writing, he suggested that religion is an attempt to control the Oedipal complex, as he goes on to discuss in his book Totem and Taboo.

This book is about how the Oedipus complex, which is when an infant develops an attachment for the mother early on in life, and incest taboo came into being and why they are present in all human societies.

Totemism originates from the memory of an event in pre-history where the male group members eat the father figure due to a desire for the females.

Freud believes that civilization makes people unhappy because it contradicts the desire for progress, freedom, happiness, and wealth.

According to Freud, religion originated in pre-historic collective experiences that became repressed and ritualized as totems and taboos.

The book contains twelve chapters on forgetting things such as names, childhood memories, mistakes, clumsiness, slips of the tongue, and determinism of the unconscious.

He also believed that mistakes in speech, now referred to as a Freudian Slip, were not accidents but instead the "dynamic unconscious" revealing something meaningful.

Freud believed all of these acts to have an important significance; the most trivial slips of the tongue or pen may reveal people's secret feelings and fantasies.

Freud explained how the forgetting of multiple events in our everyday life can be consequences of repression, suppression, denial, displacement, and identification.

Defense mechanisms occur to protects one's ego so in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud stated, "painful memories merge into motivated forgetting which special ease".

The psychosexual stages are the steps a child must take in order to continue having sexual urges once adulthood is reached.

In order to remain in a state of sleep, the unconscious mind has to detain negative thoughts and represent them in any edited form.