HD 3700 1st Edition Lecture 2 Outline of Last Lecture I The strange case of Dr Z II Considering Dr Z most broadly III Who are we Outline of Current Lecture I Freud s Time and Place Fin de Siecle Vienna II Freud s Intellectual Context a The rise of the scientific method b Marx Darwin Helmholtz and Freud III Freud s Story treating the untreatable patients IV Parapraxes slips of the tongue and why they were so important to Freud s research Current Lecture I Freud s Time and Place Fin de Siecle Vienna A time of great intellectual and scientific discovery a challenge to class structure established religion culture norms o Radical innovations in politics philosophy the arts and sciences o Cultural ferment ethnic tensions and class conflicts but also a time of intense sexual and aggressive repression II Freud s Intellectual Context At this time the establishment of the scientific method was beginning to increase the rigor of the sciences o Human behavior experience studied scientifically These notes represent a detailed interpretation of the professor s lecture GradeBuddy is best used as a supplement to your own notes not as a substitute Marx Darwin Helmholtz and Freud All looked at contemporary reality and gave it a backstory challenging the current dominant ideas o Marx Marx challenged the notion that social reality is fixed Marx examined the economic systems throughout history and claimed that because you can see how they have changed economic systems are not fixed Argued for economic revolution in his opinion people could change their social standing e g a maid could become a lady Key idea Social Reality is seen as governed by economic political and cultural forces which have evolved uniquely for each society o Darwin Darwin presented the idea that evolution is the backstory to the natural world Thus the natural world is not a given but is constantly changing and is a result of years of evolution Key idea Plant and animal species have evolved over time through mutations rewarded by competition and advantage in ecological niches o Helmholtz Helmholtz argued that like matter energy cannot be created or destroyed Key idea Forces within nature magnetism gravity heat electricity are all expression of energy a measurable force which like matter can neither be created nor destroyed o Freud Freud argued that we have an unconscious Key idea Individual moments of consciousness are not random nor are they under our control They are an expression of the preceding moments of consciousness and they contribute to the following moments of consciousness III Freud s Story treating the untreatable patients The untreatable patients were suffering from hysteria o They had real physical symptoms without a physical cause o These symptoms could be created or removed in a hypnotic trance but they soon returned Psychotherapy started with the bedside manner o The bedside manner led Freud to ask his patients to reflect on their illness leading them first to the onset of the symptoms then to a traumatic event symbolized by the illness Asked patients to tell him when their symptoms occurred then had them free associate to the symptoms and found that when they free associated they often began talking about traumas in childhood He found that when they started talking about their traumas their symptoms went away He concluded that the traumas were being expressed through the symptoms rather than being expressed through consciousness As they expressed the traumas through consciousness talking about them their symptoms ceased This led to the psychoanalytic method lying on a couch associating freely during the hour resolving symptoms discovering underlying thoughts and feelings which led to Psychoanalytic theories to explain the phenomena Freud and later his colleagues observed during their psychoanalytic sessions IV Parapraxes slips of the tongue and why they were so important to Freud s research Slips of the tongue are common experiences We tend to dismiss them as mental errors But if we look closely at them almost none of them are random or incomprehensible they make sense and convey an idea somehow relevant to the sentence Thus Freud makes this claim He is the first psychologist to take the slip seriously that is to look at the content of the mistake Degrees of awareness on the part of the person who slips o The speaker slips but is not surprised by the slip he is conscious of what he wanted to say even though he didn t mean to say it o The speaker slips it surprises him but he knows immediately why he slipped Example man calls his present wife by his ex wife s name while they are quarrelling immediately knows it is because his ex wife was argumentative o The speaker slips but doesn t know afterward why The main point of parapraxes o The slip is always the result of a conflict between competing ideas in which the intended sentence the disturbed content is replaced at the last second by the slip the disturbing content Usually the first is reversed by the second But in any case they are connected by the train of thought underlying the speaker s ideas Tip of the Iceberg o Slips of the tongue are but one instance of an intrusion of unconscious wishes fears thoughts or feelings o Forgetting a name a memory an appointment these are intrusions too o Writing the wrong thing down sending an email to the wrong person hitting reply all by mistake also intrusions o Most important Freud insists that we have a built in resistance to considering these errors as having any meaning We are unconsciously motivated to dismiss them as random errors