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Sigmund Freud’s Impact on Psychology

Sean Byars

Section 6

            Previously I discussed Sigmund Freud’s philosophical impact that he left with the world.  Now I am going to analyze the repercussions his ideas had on the psychological world, the one he intended on changing.  As previously discussed, Freud was the father of psychoanalysis and the founder of the unconscious mind.  These two theories would drastically change the world he was living in as we could better understand our actions.  However, this post will delve into his theories of defense mechanisms and his theory on the human psyche, two of his lesser known ideas.

            Freud was a revolutionary for his time and advanced his field of study vastly.  One of many theories that is discussed but not always attributed to Freud, is his theory on defense mechanisms.  He postulated that the human mind will react six different ways to cope with a difficult situation.  The first reaction is for the mind to repress the difficult situation and prevent the memory from being in the conscious mind.  The next reaction is for the mind to go into a state of denial, where the mind refuses to accept an external situation.  An example of this would be a smoker denying the fact that smoking is bad for their health.  The third reaction is projection.  Here we assign our bad thoughts or feelings onto another person.  An example of this could be if you hated someone, which is against our conscious, you could get away with this by convincing yourself that they hate you.  The fourth reaction we could have is called displacement; meaning that we satisfy an impulse with a substituted object.  Regression is the next reaction we might experience.  This reaction is explained as a movement back to a previous psychological state, one in which the person experienced stress.  The final reaction is sublimation, which is almost identical to the displacement reaction with only one key difference: the person takes their feelings out in a socially acceptable way, such as sports.  People will refer to one of these reactions and have no idea they were first postulated by Freud, one of his many less known but still important theories.  These reactions have been generally accepted as the truth by many psychologists, despite the relative difficulty accruing hard evidence to some of these defense mechanisms.

            Freud further explained his theory of the unconscious mind in his idea of the human psyche.  He established that the mind was divided into three sections the id, the ego, and the superego.  The id is part of the unconscious mind as it is supposedly our instincts as humans.  Inside the id is two subsections, Eros and Thanatos.  Eros, otherwise known as the life instincts, helps individuals survive, even in difficult situations.  While the Eros is helpful, Thanatos, or death instincts, is about our self-destructive human instincts.  Another portion of the unconscious is the superego.  While some of this section is a part of our conscious mind, it is also the largest section in the brain and mostly subconscious according to Freud’s theory.  He describes the superego as our sense of morality.  The final section is the ego, which is the reality in which we live.  He sought to study the mind and did so for over thirty years.  His impact on psychology is arguably the most significant to the field in history as so many of his theories were not even remotely conceived prior to his revelations.
Link to my previous post http://cophilosophy.blogspot.com/2016/04/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-zh-tw.html#comment-form