Re-reading the “Introductory Lectures”

Sigmund Freud, 1936, oil on canvas. Painting by Wilhelm Viktor Krausz (1878-1959).

Although psychodynamic counseling is still widely used, citations of Freud are rare these days in the scientific literature. In the original paper on Two Minds Theory, I noted a connection between the idea of the Narrative and Intuitive Mind, and Freud's theory of the ego and the id. The conscious Narrative mind is what Freud called “das ich” in the original German, translated as “ego” in English but simply meaning “I,” the part of me that I call myself. By contrast, the Intuitive mind is at least in part what Freud called “das es,” translated as “id” but meaning “the it,” the part of myself that I don’t recognize or acknowledge, the mysterious drives that lead me to actions I don’t understand. All of this is very much in line with TMT. I recently went back to Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (IL) looking for other possible connections. Here's what else I found:

Freud was looking for broad explanations of behavior. It can be easy to forget how intelligent and well-read Freud was, because he has become a kind of cultural joke. He cleverly started his lecture series at the University of Vienna in the winter of 1915 by raising two major objections to his own ideas, refuting them, and then demonstrating his theories with reference to his audience members’ own experiences. He focused first on phenomena that we all live with but don't understand, like slips of the tongue, forgetting, unexpected humor, dreams, and existential dread. He then proposed explanations for these phenomena, drawing in further examples from history, literature, and religion. As I have argued myself, a general theory of mind should relate to all of human experience, not just thinking within a narrowly defined sphere. TMT purports to be an explanation for the way people in general think, and therefore also should explain experiences that people have but don't understand (including these same examples).

A lot of what happens in the mind is outside consciousness. Freud's theory was the first to declare that "mental processes are in themselves unconscious and that of all mental life it is only certain individual acts and portions that are conscious" (IL, p. 25). Freud says that this idea is "an insult to the entire world and [has] earned its dislike," because it "offends against an intellectual prejudice" (IL, p. 25) that conscious experience is the only suitable explanation for people's behavior. From 100 years' remove it is easy to see that conscious thought is not the only influence on behavior -- we are now all vigilant to the ways in which we may be subtly manipulated by advertisers, salespeople, and politicians. But Freud is still audacious in proposing how much of mental activity is unconscious: Not just a thin margin in which we are vulnerable to mistakes when rational thinking breaks down, but in fact most of mental activity with just a thin veneer of consciousness on top. This is similar to the idea in TMT of the Intuitive Mind, which is vast, multifunctional, and massively parallel in its information processing. Beyond identifying the unconscious as a source of negative feelings, drives, and behaviors (what we usually mean when we say "the id"), Freud also identified positive unconscious forces that move us toward civilized behavior and self-transcendence. These he called "the superego," which bridges and negotiates between the drives of the id and the thoughts of the conscious mind. TMT, too, says that Intuitive thinking has both strengths and weaknesses, and goes slightly beyond Freud to say that it generates all behavior.

People aren't really the way they present themselves. Of course, Freud talked a lot about sex. Freud summarized the second major objection to psychoanalysis as a moral one, because people don't like to think about the sexual drive as an influence on behavior. That was maybe more true in Victorian times than it is today, when it sometimes seems like we hear about nothing else. But in general, Freud is right that we have to be willing to consider multiple influences on behavior, and that it is not valid to make "what is disagreeable into what is untrue" (IL, p. 28). This may be why many people are still drawn to psychoanalytic theory: It offers a look behind the curtain, a way to see beneath appearances. Freud argues that society "disputes the truths of psycho-analysis with logical and factual arguments; but these arise from emotional sources and [society thus] maintains these objections as prejudices, against every attempt to counter them" (IL, p. 28). Freud therefore argued that his critics were doing the very thing he is so often accused of: Deciding on a conclusion in advance and being unwilling to accept any evidence to the contrary. Freud argued that not only are people dishonest, we aren't even honest with ourselves. In his view our outward persona is really self-deceptive. TMT’s greatest challenge to traditional ideas may be in the proposition that consciousness does not control behavior. It’s tempting to water down or distort this idea because we identify so strongly with our conscious, Narrative minds. If TMT is true, the most important question is not “how can we increase conscious control over our behavior,” but instead “are there any circumstances where consciousness makes a difference?” and “how can we achieve good outcomes in the absence of conscious control?”

We can discover intuitive processes through observation. Freud spent a great deal of time studying slips of the tongue (“parapraxes”), forgetting, jokes, and dreams, because these are areas where the conscious mind seems less in control. For example, a woman who refers to a married friend by her maiden name inadvertently reveals that she doesn’t approve of the friend’s husband (IL, p. 64). Other examples involve instances of forgetting that show a “counter-will” or competing agenda, like the man who says he will speak to a colleague on his employee’s behalf but then “forgets” to do so because he dislikes interacting with the colleague (IL, p. 89). Freud’s insight in all of these situations is that from the point of view of the person performing the behavior, it really was a mistake, but that the astute observer can learn something from these mistakes about what’s going on below the surface of the mind. The existence of “transference” in which a patient responds to an analyst as though he or she was a parent or another important person in the patient’s life is another example of an observable behavior that can be used to understand mental processes going on beneath the level of consciousness (IL, p. 548). Freud also proposed that psychological symptoms like anxiety and depression can also be understood to have a “meaning,” that they represent something hidden beneath the surface of the mind rather than just a chemical malfunction of the brain (IL, p. 318). TMT suggests using technology to study unconscious aspects of thinking, for example via heart rate or movement sensors, but the goal is the same: to reveal aspects of behavior that are hidden even from the person who exhibits them. 

Intuitive experiences can be changed by putting people in a new environment. Psychoanalysis uses strange procedures, like people talking without looking at each other, non-responsive communication by the therapist, and the patient lying down or reporting dreams. "Nothing takes place in a psycho-analytic treatment but an interchange of words between the patient and the analyst" (IL, p. 19). Even the framework for treatment is odd: "When we take a neurotic patient into psycho-analytic treatment, we … point out the difficulties of the method to him, its long duration, the efforts and sacrifices it calls for; and as regards its success, we tell him we cannot promise it with certainty, that it depends on his own conduct, his understanding, his adaptability and his perseverance" (IL, pp. 17-18). In this way psychotherapy has more in common with religious practices or traditional moral education than with medical treatment. One of the goals of treatment is symptom relief, which is accomplished through nonspecific aspects of treatment: a caring interaction with another human being, a sense of hope, and another person to whom one can be accountable, to name a few. The rituals of psychodynamic treatment provide these elements. Yet Freud argued that symptom relief was not the main goal of psychoanalysis.

Narratives also matter. The form of treatment that Freud developed, talk therapy, is thriving today in myriad forms and is a testament to the power of words. Freud wrote that "words were originally magic and to this day have retained much of their ancient magical power. By words one person can make another blissfully happy or drive him to despair, by words the teacher conveys his knowledge to his pupils, by words the orator carries his audience with him and determines their judgments and decisions. Words provoke affects and are in general the means of mutual influence among men" (IL, p. 20). The ultimate goal of psychodynamic treatment is often described as including insight in addition to symptom relief. To Freud’s thinking unhappiness often results from a “flight into illness” (IL, p. 475), but he argued that actual happiness would only result from definite action in the real world. According to Freud's view, the best treatment to achieve the goal of happiness would be to give the patient some money and send him on a vacation. Insight means changing one's narrative about one's own experiences and behavior, which might actually make the patient less happy in the short run. But the hope of psychodynamic therapists is that once this narrative has been altered, different future life experiences will inevitably follow. The well-known psychoanalytic method of dream interpretation is a way to achieve narrative change, for instance in the case of a man who dreamed of his brother being in a cupboard and gained the insight that his brother actually wasn’t thinking broadly enough about a problem (i.e., he was “boxing himself in”). In another example a man dreamed of standing on top of a mountain surveying the land around him, and came to the insight that he wished he had the same passion for his work as a friend, who happened to be a surveyor (both examples on IL p. 148). Many people have found this type of insight to be among the most beneficial aspects of psychoanalytic treatment, and the “aha!” nature of the new idea may be part of what makes it transformative.

Whether the theory is true might be beside the point. Freud's theory has been roundly criticized as unverifiable (e.g., you don't think your dreams matter, but that's because you are repressing their truth). Freud addresses this critique: "If there is no objective verification of psycho-analysis, and no possibility of demonstrating it, how can one learn psycho-analysis at all, and convince oneself of the truth of its assertions? It is true that psycho-analysis cannot easily be learnt and there are not many people who have learnt it properly. But of course there is a practicable method none the less. One learns psycho-analysis on oneself, by studying one's own personality" (IL, p. 22). We may certainly come to different conclusions in studying our own thinking, and in fact Freud's "hydraulic" neural mechanisms of repression and transferrence have been shown by subsequent science to be utter nonsense. Yet the method of introspection pioneered by Freud remains valuable to many people today — a continued form of evidence from experience, just as Freud encouraged his listeners to seek in 1915. One of the major criticisms of psychoanalysis is of course that many different interpretations can be applied to any given dream or behavior (IL, p. 283), but this may not matter to those who receive treatment. Instead, the opportunity simply to look for and try out some plausible new narratives may be of value, and new narratives can have an emotional truth independent of whether they can be objectively verified. From TMT’s perspective, no narrative may be “really” the cause of our behavior, which originates in the Intuitive System. Instead, those narratives that fit our observations and lead to better outcomes are more desirable than those that do not. This may be what Freud meant by “insight,” and seems to be the primary value of psychoanalysis.