Decoding Freud: The Father of Psychoanalysis & His Lasting Impact

Welcome back to Woe to Woe! In this episode, I'm diving deep into the world of Sigmund Freud, one of psychology’s most controversial yet influential figures. Whether you admire him or find his theories questionable, there’s no denying Freud's impact on modern therapy and everyday psychology.

Join me, Savanna, as I take you along on my journey as a master's student in mental health counseling. I'll break down Freud’s fundamental ideas, from the id, ego, and superego to his more debated psychosexual development theory. I’ll explore how Freud’s work laid the foundation for later psychological theories, the therapeutic techniques he pioneered, and why his legacy continues to spark discussion today.

Key Topics Covered:

• Freud’s early life and personal experiences that shaped his theories
• The basics of psychoanalysis and key psychological structures (id, ego, superego)
• How unconscious thoughts influence behavior
• The controversial psychosexual development theory
• Freud’s Blank Screen Approach and transference in therapy
• Why Freud’s work remains relevant despite its limitations
• How later theorists like Carl Jung and Erik Erikson adapted or rejected his ideas

Resources I Mentioned:

• My Theories in Counseling class materials (textbook: Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy)
• Other psychology podcasts: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7lYZaH27WIM05aVSko7FX4?si=HqaHZqeiQgO0Fvt4HQ82gA

Join the Conversation!
Do you have a Freud fun fact or a personal take on his theories? Drop a comment or reach out to me on social media! Let's keep the discussion going.

🔗 Follow & Subscribe: Don’t miss future deep dives into mental health theories! Subscribe to Woe to Woe and follow me on social media for updates.

Transcript

 You know him, you love him, or you hate him, depending on your perspective. Like it or not, Freud is central to the development of early therapy, and without even realizing it, he has probably infiltrated your daily life with the adages and the terms he coined. And even the ways of thinking he brought forward.

 Welcome friends, and thank you for joining WO to wo. I am so happy you are here and ready to jump into the world of mental health with me in case you are new. Once again, I am your host, Savannah. I am currently in my master's in mental health counseling and I am taking you along for the ride with me as I begin to understand anything and everything, mental health.

 To kind of lay out the context of how and why I am learning about Freud in my program. a lot of this information that I'm going to chat about today comes from the resources from my Theories in Counseling class. Um, so my book, my lectures, my supplemental readings, and even some podcasts that They have on there for us to listen to, too.

all of this I will list in my show notes. So as we are learning about a theory in class, we focus on the creator of the theory, what key philosophy or ideas were brought forth.

we learn about like the pioneers of the theory, um, the ideas they brought forth, what that looks like in the context of therapy, and who this theory would be applicable to. So these are some of the key things we focus on in class as we're learning about each theory.

I think this season of Woe to Woe is probably going to be a little bit heavy on theories because it is so interesting. First of all, and honestly, it lays this groundwork for who you become later as a therapist.

We are encouraged to pick a couple of theories that we feel drawn to. Freud's theories are not necessarily ones I'm drawn to, but He is undoubtedly one of the biggest players in psychology. and has many later theorists that separated from him but still use some of his philosophy as a foundation for their own work.

First, let's get some Freud basics down. So he was born in 1856. He was the son of a wool merchant. His mother was a lot younger than his father. Um, he was raised in the Jewish belief system. He later got married and had six children who notably one of his daughters, he actually did psychoanalysis on his major.

practice, which is, I just find interesting. That's so interesting to me. Like, why would you do, give therapy to your kid? Um, and now we definitely wouldn't do that, but back then, you know, it was the wild west. So Freud had a turbulent relationship with his father and his relationship with his parents was a key influence on his work and his theories.

Freud's view of development was very deterministic. He felt your childhood experiences determined who you are later in life and that this is fixed. He believed behavior is driven by our most innate drives, so your sex drive, aggression, love, and death. And these are things that we are born with. and we're going to struggle with throughout our lives.

We respond to stimulus in these areas, which results in our behavior. Another big influence of our behavior per Freud is our personality, which also is fixed in his view.

So this is where we kind of see Freud showing up in some terms that you may already know or have heard. Um, he believed that we had three main structures of personality. The id, which is our biological needs. This runs based on the pleasure principle. So basically, I want it, I'm gonna have it. So think about like a baby or a toddler.

That's your id. Your super ego, which is obsessed with like social standards, the morality of right and wrong, and then how we're viewed socially. And finally, ego, which plays the part of mediator between these two. The ego lives in reality and problem solves.

Its solutions are a mix between the want and the should of the id and the superego.

any imbalance between these three structures of the psyche, according to Freud, is what causes anxiety. brings about is the concept of the unconscious and the conscious. These are key in the practice of psychoanalytic therapy, which is the type of therapy Freud created and used. He believed most of how we are functioning, the things we do and feel exists in the unconscious. They exist without us knowing it. So the goal of therapy for Freud is to bring these unconscious influences to the surface to examine them and deal with them.

of these things I've talked about so far have a lot of influence on later theories, , that I may talk about later in the show.

The place where a lot of the followers of Freud at the time really start to separate from him is his theory of psychosexual development. So he believed that neuroses, or anxiety, was directly tied to sexual conflict. This sexual conflict starts at birth and ends by 13. the desires we have and the way society punishes us for them. This theory sets forth that the reason we are developmentally or emotionally unwell is because we have failed to move past sexual fixations in our lives.

I won't say this is one I agree with, but this is a really big basis for his late work. So these fixations are in order. So from birth to basically 13, oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. I am not going to get into the details of each phase, but these phases take place from birth to, like I said, birth to 13 years old, and Basically, in this theory, Freud states that by 13 we are, we're done, we're done developing, we are who we are, and this is fixed, there is no changing this.

Freud's view of development, as I've said, is very deterministic. He felt your childhood determines who you are, and more specifically, these sexual struggles in childhood determine who you are. This specific theory is reflected for its own life in a lot of ways. He admittedly had a bad relationship with his father and he also had sexual attraction to his mother.

So, yeah, a lot of, a lot of him is seen in this, um, which as we're learning about these early theories in my class, , something I am noticing is like, of course. people are influenced by their lives. Like that's just a matter of fact. So a lot of these early theories are very much influenced by what that person has gone through.

And that's kind of why we have that little bio at the beginning where we talk about Freud in general, because it gives you some context as to where some of these theories or thoughts may have come from.

now let's refocus a bit on what therapy with Freud would have looked like for someone Freud practiced classical psychoanalysis with. This approach is still around, but very few actually practice it. Most commonly now you're going to see psychodynamic approach, which is is still based on Freud, but it focuses on relating to the past and excludes the, the psychosexual stage parts of it, uh, which is just really the part of Freud that a lot of people have beef with or disagree with because it doesn't, it doesn't quite make sense.

not a lot of people really. Agree with that, which who can blame them? Some key parts of his process was to foster transference in the therapeutic relationship. For those who don't know what transference is, it is basically the concept that clients will project or transfer emotions onto you that basically come from how they're feeling about their lives.

In a lot of other modalities, transference is meant to be monitored, but it's not used as a tool like Freud uses it. Like Freud really, this is the the root of psychoanalytical therapy, is that this client is going to transfer onto them.

Freud uses this transference to understand his client's unconscious feelings.

a big part of this is going to be Freud's Blank Screen Approach, which I found super interesting. his Blank Screen Approach basically means that he does not bring any of himself into the therapeutic relationship. He is a blank screen for which the client reflects their own life, their own unconscious feelings onto.

With Freud, someone may be talking about how they feel like he is uncaring, and for Freud, he would take that in and say, well, I think that you think that about your father, actually, not me. he didn't bring anything into the therapeutic relationship. He really just believed that he was meant to be a mirror for the client.

For this blank screen approach to really work, it requires a lot of vulnerability and just openness from the client. another key tool in psychoanalysis is going to be free association. For Freud, he may ask you just, what's on your mind? What are you thinking?

And you just have to be willing to say whatever is on your mind. And Freud uses this free association to get to the root of what the client is feeling without any like mask Through these techniques Freud sought to increase insight and self understanding. He took this free thought and interpreted it. this is the basis kind of for psychoanalytical therapy. This type of therapy would be very very long term. So these people who were seeing Freud were seeing him for years and years.

Actually, Freud did have a period of time, like three years, where he did psychoanalysis on himself, that's what he states, and that's kind of where his, um, psychosexual stages theory comes from, which I find very interesting that he created a theory kind of solely off this reflection with himself.

Freud did have in his early years, a lot of followers, like I mentioned earlier, most notably would be Carl Jung and Eric Erickson. they split off from Freud due to some differences, mostly his like deterministic view and his psychosexual stages. They just did not agree with him. And Freud was someone who was known for like, you need to follow exactly what I say.

He was not open to disagreements. He was not open to conversation. He was very much like, I am the end all be all. So, it did lead to some conflict, um, within the people who worked with him. freud's psychoanalysis and his work has a lot of limitations therapeutically. Um, Most notably is that all of his work is based off of his experiences, and he worked solely pretty much with upper class white women, and that's what all his work is based off of.

he also obviously brings a lot of himself into his work, but psychoanalysis, like I said, is still around. There's still some things that people practice and that work. And that biggest thing that. take away is, is the, the insight into the past. And we'll see, here soon. Hopefully I'm going to do an episode on Rogers that, that insight into the past is something that holds strong in a lot of other theories.

It's just the extent to which Freud brought it forth was just not necessarily conducive for a lot of other cultures as far as the populations it's useful for. leading to some obvious limitations in generalizability, which is just the ability to apply it to other people.

due to this, there's a lot of people that, like I said earlier, do the psychodynamic approach. They take into account this early childhood experience that Freud brought forth, and they do less of the, the transference or blank screen approach, well, Freud has some parts of his theories that are a little hard to get behind.  He is without a doubt one of the biggest players in early psychology, and he has obviously made a mark on society with the theories that were taken and ran with by later theorists.

So that's pretty much Freud.  I think this man is so interesting. I do think he was a little out of it with some things. but he obviously knew some of what he was talking about. he obviously had this thirst to understand why he was the way he was.

And what other people did, what they did. And it's just, it's very interesting. if you have any Freud fun facts, leave them below. Otherwise, I hope you all have a wonderful week and I will see you next time.