Is Sigmund Freud Dead, No, Not Really?

Sigmund Freud

By M. S. Thambirajah –MAY 6, 2022

Dr. M. S. Thambirajah

Today (6th May) marks the 166th birth anniversary of Sigmund Freud

Ask anyone to name the most famous psychologist in history, you can be certain that their choice would be none other than Sigmund Freud. Freud was in fact a neurologist who became interested in the working of the human mind. He is the founding father of psychoanalysis, a model of the mind as well as a type of psychotherapy, who created an entirely new approach to the understanding of the human mind. He is regarded as one of the most influential – and controversial – minds of the 20th century.

But modern psychology has developed along different lines and Freud’s works have become almost footnotes in current books on psychology. Freud was idealised in the 1950s and 1960s but in the 1970s and 1980s psychoanalysis – both the theory and the treatment method – was challenged and found to be not ‘evidence based’. However, he remains the most quoted psychologist of all times and the most searched psychologists on Google. Terms such as Freudian slip, the unconscious mind and Oedipus complex are now in common usage. What explains his popularity?

Freud’s works rest of four pillars: his model of the mind and associated processes; his method of treatment of mental disorder, i.e. psychoanalysis; his theory of psychosexual development; and his views on how social groups and civilization. Thus, his works are wide ranging and cover amongst others general psychology, developmental psychology, social psychology and psychotherapy.

The central theme that underpins all his theories is the unconscious mind – that part of the mind that we are not aware of but one that shapes our thinking, feeling and behaviour. “The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water”, says Freud. The Id, the part of the unconscious mind, is the seat of aggressive and sexual impulses tamed by the ego and supervised by the superego says Freud. But, modern day science holds that the unconscious by definition cannot be known and, therefore be subjected to research. Freud postulated that unconscious wishes surface in dreams. According to him dreams are ‘the royal road to the unconscious’ and are ‘wish fulfilments. But modern research carried out in sophisticated sleep laboratories on tens of thousands of dreams have found no evidence for this assertion. Current theories of dreams hold that they are the manifestations of organisation of information and memories formed during daytime very much like a filing system.

For Freud, his sexual theory was his most important work. He explained almost all unusual psychological phenomena with references to sex and came to be known as the ‘sex doctor’. Most neuroses, he claimed, were the result of repressed sexual impulses. His hypotheses about psychosexual development that incudes the oral, anal, phallic, latent, and genital stages, and the erogenous zones have now been shown to be defunct. The much-flaunted Oedipal complex – a child’s feelings of desire for his or her opposite-sex parent and jealousy and anger toward his or her same-sex parent – has been shown to be developmentally insignificant. It is now believed that sexual development begins after puberty.

Psychoanalytic treatment pioneered by Freud involved many years of frequent psychotherapeutic sessions often lasting years in which the patient ‘free associated’, i.e. spoke out anything ang and everything that came into his mind. It has now been proven to be ineffective.

So, of his postulates the unconscious cannot be researched; his dream theory had turned out to be a dream, even his ardent followers have given up interpreting dreams; his theory of infantile sexuality and Oedipus complex is now considered farcical; psychoanalysis had been shown to ineffective in the treatment of various neurotic condition. Is it, then. time for us to say the last rites and bid farewell to Freud?

Certainly not! He may have been wrong in details, but the generality of his theories and treatment approaches are enduring and should not be underestimated. Disregard the details of psychoanalytic treatment and look at the approach. He was the first to demonstrate that by opening up your mind to a trained therapist (he called this ‘free association’), you could be relieved of your ‘neurosis’. Talking of hysteria, the most common neuroses at that time, he

says, “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways”. No psychologist or psychiatrist would fault this assertion. Thus, he is the father of all ‘talking therapies’ practised today ranging from formal psychotherapy to counselling and many more.

His insights on the interaction between the therapist and the client has been of enormous value for those in the helping professions: psychologists, psychiatrist, counsellors and doctors. He talks of resistance, the block that some people have when discussing their problems with those trying to help them and analyses their origins. He goes on to analyse the relationship between the therapist and the client, the so-called transference: who does the therapist remind him/her: the authoritative father, the caring mother or the abuser? What are its implications for the therapeutic relationship? More importantly, he helps scrutinise the emotional effect on the therapist. What emotional impact does the client have on the therapist? Freud called it countertransference. Does the therapist go home with a headache after seeing the client? Does he/she detests seeing the client, even hate him? If so, why? Freud held that these emotional reactions held the answer to the problems that both the therapist and the client had. He observes, “The unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another without passing through the conscious”. No one since the time of Freud has analysed the nuances of therapist’s relationship with the client in such great depth.

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