criticised these days as ‘unscientific’ and ‘overly fanciful’, it is clear many aspects
are still relevant and have much to offer in developing our understanding of Integrated
SocioPsychology.
Erikson: a Post-Freudian Psychodynamic Approach
No other psychological theorist has yet come up with an explanation - or linked series
of explanations - of the ‘human condition’ anything like as comprehensive as Freud’s
Psychoanalytic Theory, the first of the Psychodynamic theories. Yet, from the earliest
days of Freud’s theorising, it was obvious there were certain inconsistencies and
claims that were very unlikely ever to be verifiable. Consequently Freud’s insistence
on unwavering adherence to his theories - presumably the work of his own RED vMEME!
- led to a series of one-time ‘disciples’ breaking away and founding their own Psychodynamic
schools. These included such ‘giant’ thinkers as Carl Gustav Jung, Alfred Adler and
Karen Horney.
Erik Erikson was more of an amender of Freud’s ideas than an outright breakaway,
the development of his ideas coming into the public domain way after Freud’s death
in 1939 and being far less divergent than, say, Jung or Adler. Introduced to the
Freuds by Dorothy Burlingham, he trained with Freud in Vienna and was mentored (and
psychoanalysed) by Freud’s daughter, Anna, before moving to the United States to
escape the Nazi persecution of the Jews.
Where Erikson did differ significantly from Sigmund Freud was in proposing that psychosocial
development was more important than psychosexual development. The interactions of
the child/teenager/adult with parents, siblings, friends and peers and other significant
people were considered by Erikson to be the most important influences in shaping
someone’s development. In this respect, Erikson at least partly reflects Graves’
observations into the relationship between the external Life Conditions and the development
of mental coping mechanisms (vMEMES).However, given the significance that
Freud’s Oedipus Complex
Sigmund Freud’s Oedipus Complex is arguably the most controversial element of his
comprehensive, interweaved set of theories.
This takes place during the 3rd (Phallic) psychosexual stage of development (3-6
years) when awareness of gender and the concentration of libido (life energy) on
the genitals coincides with the child's growing awareness of being left out of some
aspects of their parents' relationship. Eg: parents may be less inclined to have
their child join them in bed for a cuddle/reassurance. According to Freud, every
little boy in this stage wants physical intimacy with his mother. (It’s highly debatable
the boy actually wants sex with his mother since children of that age usually don’t
understand the mechanics of intercourse.)
This makes the father a love rival to the boy whom the boy wants to get rid of. However,
the boy dreads his father finding out and castrating him (castration anxiety - around
this age, according to Freud, boys realise their mothers and sister(s) do not have
penises and come to the conclusion that his father has already cut their penises
off.) This fear may be reinforced by the parents telling the boy off for masturbating.
The anxiety is resolved by the boy identifying with his father, to get close to him
and, thus, neutralise the threat. By modelling his father, the boy not only reduces
the threat of punishment (castration) but, by 'becoming him', he can now possess
his mother. However, as the boy becomes closer to his father, he represses his desire
for his mother into his Unconscious. The process of internalising the father's values
and norms is known as introjection. - and the result is the formation of the Superego.
The Electra Complex
Freud’s theorising on how girls experienced the Phallic Stage was somewhat less developed.
The term ‘Electra Complex’ was coined by Carl Gustav Jung (1912) and and Freud initially
used it. However, Jung simplified Freud's theory into simply an inverse of the Oedipus
Complex - ie: girls have sexual desires for their father and, therefore, resent their
mother. Freud objected strongly to this, feeling it was misleading to imply that
the experiences of boys and girls are similar. This was one of the causes of the
bitter fall-out between Freud and Jung. Freud preferred terms such as the ‘the Feminine
Oedipus Complex’.
Freud (1933) contended that girls suffer from penis envy, being "mortified by the
comparison with boys' far superior equipment", and would blame their mother for their
'castrated state'. Having their father's child then becomes a compensation strategy
for not having a penis. Despite Freud’s rejection of Jung’s ideas, this still makes
the mother a ‘love rival’ for the father’s attentions. Freud was far less definitive
in how the girl’s conflict with her mother was resolved, talking only of an anaclitic
identification in which the girl models her mother’s values and behaviours.
Freud argued that fear/acute anxiety drove the boy's identification with his father
whereas there was no equivalent fear to drive the girl's identification with her
mother. Therefore, the girl models her mother with less intensity and the resultant
Superego is not as strong as it is in boys. This contention is, to say the least,
controversial! (See Gender Bias.)
Beginnings of the Oedipus Complex
In the early days of Psychoanalysis, the uncovering of pathogenic material related
to the client's infantile sex life led Freud to suspect sexual assault by the opposite
sex parent. In 1895 he gave a lecture, 'The Aetiology of Hysteria', to the Society
for Psychiatry & Neurology in Vienna in which he stated that, in 18 cases of previously-unexplained
hysteria he had investigated, the client had been sexually abused - either by an
adult or an older sibling. He claimed that repressed memories of childhood sexual
abuse were the primary causal factor in the development of hysteria and other forms
of neurosis. This was Freud’s so-called 'Seduction Theory'.
However, the number of clients who, in analysis, revealed troubling sexual material
from their childhoods, eventually led Freud to doubt parental sexual abuse could
be the cause of it. It was recalling himself (during self-analysis) being aroused
by his mother's nudity that led Freud to suspect there was an alternative explanation
for the sexual material in his clients' repressed thoughts. He concluded that memories
of child sexual abuse were often fantasies derived from repressed remnants of incestuous
desires for the opposite sex parent. Accordingly, Freud (1905) effectively abandoned
the Seduction Theory in favour of developing a set of theories based on the concept
of infantile sexuality, with 5 psychosexual stages to pass through and the Oedipus
Complex as a key experience.
Seymour Fisher & Roger Greenberg (1977) did find evidence to support some elements
of the Oedipus Complex - in particular that children do have to cope with erotic
feelings towards their opposite-sex parent and hostile feelings towards their same-sex
parent. Amongst males they also reported fear of physical injury, fear of death and
fear of bodily harm or attack - all of which Fisher & Greenberg interpreted as
indirect fear of castration. Interestingly, these fears intensified when they were
exposed to heterosexual stimulation. Females appeared to be more motivated by fear
of the loss of love. While they amassed some not-insignificant evidence, Fisher &
Greenberg’s conclusions were based only on correlational studies - therefore cause-and-effect
cannot be assumed.
Although periodic case studies do indeed suggest childhood Oedipal desires and occasionally
there is disturbing evidence of a child having initiated a fully-fledged incestuous
relationship with the opposite-sex parent, a truly-sound empirical base for the Oedipus
Complex has never yet been established - nor ever looks likely to be. (Freud’s counter
to this criticism was that the ego defence mechanism of repression - see Selfplex
Defence Mechanisms - made access to such memories impossible except under therapy.)
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1984) has suggested that the invention of the Oedipus
Complex actually did many of Freud’s clients the disservice of masking the harsh
reality that they were in fact sexually abused as children. Based on letters from
Freud to his friend Wilhelm Fleiss which Anna Freud had held back from publication,
Masson (1990) also suggests that Freud was forced to develop the Oedipus Complex
as an alternative explanation for the pathogenic material because the Seduction Theory
met with such strong resistance from his influential peers. Masson (1990) asserts
that one letter to Fleiss indicates Freud continued to believe in the Seduction Theory
even after its effective abandonment. However, Allen Esterson (1998) contends that,
apart from a couple of Freud’s cases where the evidence for child sex abuse does
seem incontrovertible, the sexual material ‘uncovered’ by Freud was mostly his interpreting
(meta-stating) of fragmentary sounds and images recalled under duress. Apparently
an example of researcher bias!
Evolutionary Psychology has come to place on sex - especially with Sexual Selection
- Erikson may have ‘thrown the [proverbial] baby out with the bathwater’ in so demoting
the prominence of sexual motivations. Erikson didn’t exactly dismiss Freud’s Oedipus
Complex completely out of hand but he certainly downplayed its importance notably
when compared to the critical status Freud attached to it.
Erikson built up his theory over some 30 years. He gathered evidence for his theory
while working as a practising therapist. According to M Cole & S R Cole (1989),
one of Erikson's favourite methods for testing his theory was - like Abraham Maslow
in developing the Hierarchy of Needs - the biographical case study, studying such
famous men as Martin Luther and Mahatma Gandhi (1963). Erikson also studied child-rearing
practices of the Sioux and Yurok Indians of North America who were experiencing great
social change. His findings supported his ideas.
The differences in Erikson’s approach, compared to Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory
can be summarised as...
- While Freud’s main focus was on the unconscious effects of the Id’s sex and death
drives - Eros and Thanatos, respectively - Erikson was concerned with relationships
- Erikson looks at what can strengthen and weaken the Ego while Freud is concerned
with the conflicts the Ego has to resolve between the Id and the Superego
- In contrast to Freud’s view of people locked in perpetual inner conflict, Erikson
presented a more positive and optimistic view of human nature
Erikson saw development of personality as taking place over an entire lifespan whereas
Freud saw personality as complete by the early-mid teens - as a result of which Erikson
attributed 8 stages of development taking place over a lifetime in contrast to Freud’s
5 stages from birth to post-puberty
Mapping Graves and Erikson
Graves, who professed to know little about the development of children and tended
to deflect enquiries about such to the work of correspondents O J Harvey, David E
Hunt & H M Schroeder (1961) and Hunt (1966) - see Comparison Map - was notoriously
reluctant to attach time frames to the emergence of what we now call vMEMES. Instead
of chronological time, Gaves preferred to talk about ‘psychological time’ - see the
graphic left. In the original Graves Model, letter pairs were used to denote the
life conditions (A-M) being matched by the motivating system (N-Z) for psychological
health.
The benefit of relating the emergence of vMEMES to Erikson’s lifespan theory is that
it provides a possible/likely timeframe for that emergence. It’s important that,
in doing so, we respect Graves’ reasons for being reluctant to assign chronological
timeframes to emergence - one of which was that vMEMES tend to emerge as the Life
Conditions demand, not just on a rigid timeframe as predetermined by purely maturational
(internal/biological) forces.
It’s also important that, in mapping Graves to Erikson - and Freud, for that matter
- that we bear in mind the somewhat problematic nature of mapping development in
terms of stages.The theory implies that the stages are discreet, with boundaries
over which you pass from one stage to the next. However, in ‘real life’ it is rather
rare for someone to be totally in
one stage one day and in a totally different stage the next. While a stage theory,
of necessity, requires boundaries to delineate the stages, the drawing of such boundaries
inevitably carries a decidedly arbitrary element in it. The fallacy of adhering too
rigidly to a sequential stage theory is illustrated by Erikson’s Peer Relationships
stage being followed by the Love Relationships stage. Many mid-teens achieve a significant
degree of emotionally intimacy in romantic relationships while still forming both
friendships and their own sense of identity. The messiness of real life means any
stage theory needs to have a certain flexibility in how the stages are laid down
and there may need at times to be a blurring of the boundaries between them.
Graves’ concept of systems that develop within us, rather than stages we pass through,
overcomes the rigidity of stage theories problem. However, if taken as periods of
time when a particular vMEME or harmonic of vMEMES is likely to dominate, a loose
mapping to stages not only gives us a probable rough timeframe for vMEME emergence
but it also enables us to apply the potent observations of such commentators as Erikson
and Freud.
