Shamil Mariya’s Reviews > Knowledge in a Nutshell: Sigmund Freud > Status Update

• According to Masson, Freud's attachment to patriarchal thinking was so strong that he was prepared to say that children were mistaken in their accounts of being sexually abused in order to have his theory accepted. These criticisms and others resulted in the 'Freud Wars' of the 1980s and '90s. Today these controversies are still un-resolved, with battle lines firmly entrenched and positions staunchly defended.

• The feminist critiques of psychoanalysis are, in effect, also critiques of the scientific status of psychoanalysis since they argue that Freud, with his discovery of the Oedipus complex and his difficulty of conceptualizing the psychosexual development of females, was simply repeating in his theorizing the patriarchal social organization of the late 19th-century society to which he belonged.

• Hans Eysenck's work on evaluating the effectiveness of psychoanalysis has been influential, setting clinical psychology down a road which has been, on the whole, anti-psychoanalytic.

• The theory of psychoanalysis was refined and elaborated by Freud, who was firmly in control of any conceptual developments and jealously guarded the central concepts of the Oedipus complex and infantile sexuality. Any deviation resulted in expulsion from the psychoanalysis societies.

• In a matter of 20 years, Freud became a world figure and his small circle of friends and colleagues developed into an institution with associations all over Europe and the United States.
• Psychoanalysis, which had been introduced in The Interpretation of Dreams, had become a recognized therapy delivered by trained professional practitioners.

• In the essays, he defined five phases of psychosexual development and the Oedipus complex, where the child loves the mother and feels jealousy and hostility towards the father.

• Freud argued that the first step to understanding psychosexual development is to recognize that the whole of the human body is capable of becoming sexually excited. He used the term libido' to refer to a specifically sexual energy that was linked to the instinct for reproduction.

• Freud presented Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in which he addressed sexual aber-rations, infantile sexuality, the body as a site for sexual excitation and the shift from sexual excitation from ones own autoerotic excitement to another person and adult sexuality.

Having distinguished repression, resistance and transference, Freud began to understand the structure of the psyche in terms of the id, ego and superego.

• The analyst must pay attention to everything the patient says, following the same fundamental rules that governed the patient's free association.
• Patients might apparently not want to be cured.
Their resistance might take the form of repres-sion, transference and countertransference.