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Freud and Modern Psychology: The Emotional Basis of Human Behavior PDF

244 Pages·1984·4.528 MB·English
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FREUD AND MODERN PSYCHOLOGY VOLUME 2: THE EMOTIONAL BASIS OF HUMAN BEHA VIOR EMOTIONS, PERSONALITY, AND PSYCHOTHERAPY Series Editors Carroll E. Izard, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware and Jerome L. Singer, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut HUMAN EMOTIONS Carroll E. Izard THE PERSONAL EXPERIENCE OF TIME Bernard S. Gorman and Alden E. Wessman THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS: Scientific Investigation into the Flow of Human Experience Kenneth S. Pope and Jerome L. Singer, eds. THE POWER OF HUMAN IMAGINATION: New Methods in Psychotherapy Jerome L. Singer and Kenneth S. Pope, eds. EMOTIONS IN PERSONALITY AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY Carroll E. Izard, ed. FREUD AND MODERN PSYCHOLOGY, Volume 1: The Emotional Basis of Mental Illness Helen Block Lewis FREUD AND MODERN PSYCHOLOGY, Volume 2: The Emotional Basis of Human Behavior Helen Block Lewis GUIDED AFFECTIVE IMAGERY WITH CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS Hanscarl Leuner, Gunther Horn, and Edda Klessmann A Continuation Order Plan is available for this series. A continuation order will bring delivery of each new volume immediately upon publication. Volumes are billed only upon actual ship ment. For further information please contact the publisher. FREUD AND MODERN PSYCHOLOGY VOLUME 2: THE EMOTIONAL BASIS OF HUMAN BEHA VIOR HELEN BLOCK LEWIS Yale University New Haven, Connecticut PLENUM PRESS' NEW YORK AND LONDON Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Lewis, Helen B. Freud and modern psychology. (Emotions, personality, and psychotherapy) Includes bibliographies and indexes. Contents: v. 1. The emotional basis of mental illness-v. 2. The emotional basis of human behavior. 1. Psychology, Pathological. 2. Emotions. 3. Interpersonal relations. 4. Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939.5. Psychoanalysis. I. Title. II. Series. RC454.L48 6]6.89/00]/9 80-20937 ISBN-13: 978-1-4684-4534-3 e-ISBN -13: 978-1-4684-4532-9 DOl: 10.1007/978-1-4684-4532-9 ©1983 Plenum Press, New York Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1983 A Division of Plenum Publishing Corporation 233 Spring Street, New York, N.Y. 10013 All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical. photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher Preface Freud's discovery of an emotional basis for mental illness led him to pursue the emotional basis of human behavior in general. This pursuit led him to undertake observational studies of dreams (1900), everyday mistakes (1901), sexuality (1905b), character formation (1908, 1931), jokes (1905a), and the origin of guilt (1913). Volume 2 of Freud and Modern Psychology examines the texts of each of these major writings in general psychology, continuing to explore the contradiction between Freud's observations about the power of emotions and his narrow the oretical formulations about human behavior. Volume 2 also reviews the remarkable power of the uniquely moral emotions of shame and guilt not only to create psychiatric symptoms, as discussed in Volume 1, but to infiltrate our nightly dreams, create everyday parapraxes, influence the development of sexuality, specify the emotional release in jokes, shape personality, and "create" human culture. As we saw in Volume 1, we shall see again in Volume 2 that Freud's theoretical difficulties arose from the absence of a viable theory of human nature as cultural, that is, social by biological origin. In a the oretical framework based on the cultural nature of human nature, the emotions and the social cohesion are reciprocally related to each other. The emotions are the means of the social cohesion which, in turn, is the means by which the emotions, including shame and guilt, are formed in infancy. Volume 2 also shows clearly how (still) prevailing androcentric attitudes influenced Freud's neglect of the infant-caretaker affectional system in his theorizing, as contrasted to his observations. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the assistance of the Behavioral Science Publications Fund of Yale University in the preparation of the manuscript of Volume 2. Carroll Izard has again been a very helpful v vi PREFACE editor. Frances DeGrenier has my gratitude for her patience and skill with the word processor. As always, my husband, Naphtali Lewis, has been an unfailing source of support. Contents Chapter 1. THE INTERPRET AT ION OF DREAMS: The Problem of Emotions in Dreaming 1 Chapter 2. THE DISCOVERY OF THE REMS: The Problem of Freud's Theory 24 Chapter 3. REMS STUDIES: The Problem of Tracing Emotions in Dream Content 44 Chapter 4. THREE ESSAYS ON THE THEORY OF SEXUALITY: The Problem of Sex as Instinct 67 Chapter 5. ANATOMY IS DESTINY: The Problem of Freud's Sexism 94 Chapter 6. MISTAKES AND JOKES: "Primary Process": The Problem of the Relation between Cognition and Affect 118 Chapter 7. PSYCHOANAL YTIC CHARACTEROLOGY: The Problem of Cognitive Styles 141 Chapter 8. TOTEM AND TABOO: The Problem of the Origins of Guilt and Civilization 171 Chapter 9. PSYCHOANAL YSIS IN CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE: The Problem of Human Nature 190 VII viii CONTENTS 207 EPILOGUE 217 BIBLIOGRAPHY 229 INDEX 1 CHAPTER The Interpretation of Dreams The Problem of Emotions in Dreaming Freud's main point about dreams was expressed in the title of his book: Dreams can be interpreted in a way that makes emotional sense even though they may appear to be meaningless and to be about trivial events. Nowhere in Freud's work, however, is the contradiction be tween his insights about the power of emotions and his theoretical ne glect of them clearer than in his work on dreams. As Richard Jones (1974) points out, there are, for example, really two distinct books in Freud's The interpretation of Dreams (1900). One book, in six chapters, is about the interpretation of dreams into their emotional content. The last chapter (Chapter 7) of The interpretation of Dreams is another book on the theory of dreams, in which emotions are hardly mentioned. The discrepancy between Freud's clinical insights and his theory has also become apparent as a result of the almost accidental discovery, in 1953, of the hitherto unknown rapid eye movement state (REMS) in which dreaming takes place (Aserinsky & Kleitman, 1953). The phys iologists' discovery that dreaming occurs roughly four times a night regardless of a person's emotional state was a blow to the specifics of Freud's theory of dream instigation. It was also, however, a roundabout confirmation of his clinical insight that dreaming, mental illness, and emotional life are somehow closely connected. The biochemical triggers that have been implicated in the functioning of the REMS are the very same substances implicated in the biochemistry of mental illness: 1 2 CHAPTER 1 serotonin, acetylcholine, norepinephrine, to name a few of the promi nent substances. The new biology and psychology of dreaming during the REMS is one of the most important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century because it allows new hope that knowledge of the REMS will somehow unravel the connection between emotional states and mental illness. Eye movements during sleep and dreams had been observed as early as 1867 by a psychiatrist named Griesinger (cited by Snyder, 1967). Although these and similar observations were reported several times by different observers over the next decades, they were never systemat ically pursued. But in 1953, because of Freud's intervening work, the finding that eye movements occur during regularly recurring intervals of natural sleep and that they signal dreaming, was the start of an enor mously productive era of dream research, thus illustrating once again the zigzag course of the history of ideas. Freud always regarded The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) as his most important book. In the preface of the third edition of it, he wrote that "insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime." Although interest in Freud's interpretation of dreaming was slow in developing only 351 copies of the book were sold during the first 6 years after publication-its impact when it finally gained attention was enormous. For example, the "stream of consciousness" (a phrase actually coined by William James) entered the modern novel. Mann, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Faulkner, and Dreiser are a few of the twentieth-century novelists whose art was deepened by Freud's insight into dreams. In his tribute to Freud, Mann (cited by Puner, 1978) put it this way: "A blithe scepticism has come into the world, a mistrust which unmasks all the schemes and subterfuges of our own souls." Dreiser, similarly, spoke of the "light that he has thrown on the human mind ... at once colossal and beautiful!" One example will illustrate the relation between the Freudian study of dreams and the study of the modern psychological novel. Some years ago my colleagues and I obtained the hypnagogic reveries and dreams of people who had seen an emotionally charged film before going to sleep (Bertini, Lewis, & Witkin, 1964). One film in the series shows a mother monkey trying to revive her dead baby and then beginning to eat it. In the course of reverie (right before the sounds of snoring were recorded on the tape), one subject's horror thoughts about the cannibal mother and her dead baby changed into thoughts and images of a frog-a "blue-green frog with dark gray spots" in a surrounding scene that was quite idyllic: "stones at the bottom of a clear blue poo!," "a blue water fall," and "a pattern of leaves and then it disappears." In his discussion

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