Freud: Consequences of Repression

1. Freud: Consequences of Repression Psychological Disorders

2. 1. Civilization • The result of our transformation/sublimation of unconscious desires.

3. Psychological reactions & disorders • Fixation, Regression • Sexual deviance & Perversion • Neurosis • Psychosis

4. Fixation and regression • The psychic reversion to childhood desires. When normally functioning desire meets with powerful external obstacles, which prevent satisfaction of those desires, the subject sometimes regresses to an earlier phase in normal psychosexual development. (source) • Fixation-- can be a cause for regression. “The stronger one's fixations on earlier sexual objects (eg. the mouth, the anus), the more likely that, when a subject is confronted with obstacles to heterosexual satisfaction, that subject will respond by way of regression to an earlier phase.”

5. Perversion: 5 forms • Freud: The pursuit of "abnormal" sexual objects without repression. • five forms of perversion • disregarding the barrier of species (the gulf between men and animals), • secondly, by overstepping the barrier against disgust, • against incest (the prohibition against seeking sexual satisfaction from near blood-relations),

6. Perversion: 4. That against members of one's own sex 5. the transferring of the part played by the genitals to other organs and areas of the body" (Introductory Lectures 15.208) • He makes clear that a young child will not recognize any of these five points as abnormal—and only does so through the process of education. For this reason, he calls children "polymorphously perverse" (Introductory Lectures15.209). (Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. 24 vols. London: Hogarth, 1953-74. )

7. Fetishism • An erotic attachment to an inanimate object or an ordinarily asexual part of the human body. • "The fetishist is the adult who, because of his attachment to the fetish, is 'saved‘ from psychosis (which is the more typical consequence of disavowal in • adults). . . . (Elizabeth Grosz Jacque Lacan: A Feminist Introduction p. 118)

8. Fetishism (2) • from Lacan Ecrit p. 197-98 • The whole problem of the perversions consists in conceiving how the child, in his relation to the mother, in his relation to the mother, a relation constituted in analysis not by his vital dependence on her but by his dependence on her love, that is to say, by the desire for her • desire,. . .identifies himself with the imaginary object of this desire in so far as the mother herself symbolizes it in the phallus.

9. Neurosis • Definition: an exaggeration of normal patterns of behaviour and may become incapacitated. For example they may feel the need to constantly check the time or that doors are locked. • e.g. anxiety disorder  phobia; hysteria (now called conversion disorder) • e.g. the neurotic begins over-eating; the pervert gives up men and becomes a lesbian. (an idea of Freud’s which is later criticized. source)

10. Psychosis • The inability of a person to distinguish between what is real and what is imaginary. • Symptoms: hallucination, self-delusions • E.g. schizophrenia and manic depression.