Freud’s Best Theory
While Freud mooted various bizarre theories that haven’t stood the test of time, the best of his thinking can help us better understand ourselves, others, and our world.
Few thinkers have had a global impact comparable to Sigmund Freud’s. His theories continue to influence mental health care, as well as the arts, literature, philosophy, and nearly every subject in the humanities and social sciences. Despite this impact, his work is a tough sell. He’s tied to bizarre theories about childhood sexuality, attacks on religion, judgmental and crazy psychoanalysts, and grandiose claims that haven’t stood the test of time. This has made him countless enemies, often rightfully so.
Unfortunately, many of his insights have been thrown out with everything else. This is a mistake. If the past decade has taught us anything, it’s that we need theories to explain irrational and counterintuitive human behaviour. As society gets crazier, rationalistic models are seeming less and less adequate. The political commentariat across the spectrum is reaching for concepts like repression and projection to explain culture. So, this might be a good time to look back at the best of Freud’s thinking, keeping in mind how it can help us better understand ourselves, others, and our world.
Because Freud’s theories have been hotly debated for over a century, most people have a passing familiarity with ideas like the Oedipus Complex or the claim that dreams reveal something about the unconscious. Still, Freud’s most powerful and compelling theory remains obscure. It’s a theory that dominates his work, but it was never thoroughly explicated. It lurks behind almost everything he wrote, but the details are unclear. It doesn’t really make sense, but it’s immensely useful.
To understand it, you have to go back to the 19th century. In the mid-1800s, when Freud began his career as a neurologist, scientists didn’t yet know what nerves were. We now know that nerves are actually strings of cells called neurons that are linked together in the brain and throughout the body. But Freud, like many others in the 1800s, first thought of nerves as tiny pipes. He and his contemporaries thought that these pipes carried a material, a kind of psychic energy, just as steam pipes carry steam. When someone hits your shoulder, they knock this energy through these pipes up to your brain, which then leads you to feel a punch. If you burn your hand in a fire, the fire is actually boiling this psychic fluid and sending it up your spine. When you move your arm, you’re directing “steam” down to start the contraction of muscles. In other words, the brain is like a complex steam engine, and human beings are like giant steampunk contraptions. Many in the 19th century thought this was the process behind everything we think, feel, perceive, and do.
A better understanding of neurons emerged around the turn of the century, and so the steam engine model of the brain left medicine forever. But Freud never fully let go of the steam pipe metaphor. He used it in almost everything he wrote. In this model, the nervous system holds a quantity of this psychic substance (the “steam”) that builds up, is discharged, and then builds up again. We feel it in our bodies, and it animates our thoughts. And Freud thought that people could shift this psychic energy around, consciously or unconsciously. People might think about one thing to avoid thinking about another. They might feel one emotion to avoid feeling another emotion. Or they might act one way to avoid a different behaviour.
There are an almost endless number of ways this psychic energy can be manoeuvred. People might think excessively to avoid feeling an emotion or act compulsively to avoid thinking about a topic. Two different desires could combine to produce a behaviour, or an unconscious desire might derail a conscious intention and lead to a slip. Shutting down one area of the psyche might shut down other related areas of the psyche. So, to avoid a memory or a feeling, a limb might become numb or paralysed or one could lose the ability to see or speak. Similarly, a concentration of the “steam” in one area of the psyche might deprive other areas of the energy they need to function—a kind of depletion. Or an excessive buildup of overall psychic energy could explode in the form of anxious panics or hysterical fits. Sometimes, certain desires could be concentrated into a symbolically charged image (e.g., a red hat could symbolise infidelity, a violin case could symbolise a coffin, and sexual desire could be shifted from the sexual organs and toward an object like a shoe). In short, all behaviours and all psychiatric symptoms were the result of the overall distribution and flow of this psychic energy in the nervous system. With his characteristic looseness, Freud sometimes described psychic energy as functioning like pressurised steam or fluid, but at other times he wrote about it as like an electromagnetic charge. And there are times when he described it in almost Newtonian terms, as physics-style forces with momentums and trajectories seeking equilibrium.
Why is this model compelling? Well, it explains a lot of important experiences people actually do have. A lot of people report experiencing things that feel like this and report witnessing them in others. These experiences are especially salient in psychotherapy. People in therapy often wonder why they’re stuck on one particular feeling or behaviour, and this way of looking at things sometimes offers explanations that help them change. People might get stuck feeling excessive anger because they can’t tolerate feeling sadness. Or they might become depressed because they can’t tolerate feeling anger. If they can connect to the avoided emotion or memory, process it, and let it go, the symptoms could dissipate. This schematic doesn’t simplistically predict a cause for every disorder per se, but it can open up lines of inquiry that facilitate healing.
Lisa Marchiano
Freud’s model implies that there’s a harmonious way to process psychic energy. If people experience a tragic loss, they’ll experience grief, which they have to let themselves experience for a time and then let go of. If people try to avoid the grief, it could lead to angry outbursts, relationship problems, panic attacks, or the numbing and cordoning off of important parts of the psyche. On the other hand, if people can’t let go of grief when it’s done, it could linger in the form of a malignant depression, chronic pain, or other symptoms. People have to let feelings arise for a period of time, respond to them as needed, and then let them go when it’s time to do so. The same is true of every emotional process. Minor frustrations should dissipate relatively quickly, while deep conflicts in more meaningful relationships require more time and attention.
When people get stuck psychologically, they usually need to reflect on why and address it. Sometimes it makes sense (a bad relationship experience led to distrust of others), while at other times it doesn’t (a trivial incident is far more upsetting than it seems as if it should be). But once the issue has been addressed and responded to appropriately, people can usually let it go and the distress related to it can decrease.
This isn’t a model for perfect fulfilment. All emotions come and go: happiness and sadness, pleasure and pain, pride and shame, as well as anger, anxiety, desire, fatigue, and stress. Each feeling is built into the human nervous system, so we should all expect to feel each of these throughout our lives. But if emotions come and go in a balanced way, there’s a harmony that leads to a life with more vitality and depth, and a more grounded and complete experience of the world—something we could call maturity or even wisdom. And this kind of balance can help people avoid the more severe impairments and suffering related to mental illness.
Clearly, this model underlies Freud’s approach to therapy. Patients are encouraged to feel what they feel, think what they think, and talk through it, with the understanding that much of it might initially seem illogical, shameful, or strange. Over time, they don’t become enlightened or always-happy, but more insightful and more balanced—with the ability to tolerate and reflect on the full range of human feelings and experiences. Eventually, life can become more rewarding and stable.
The details of how Freud conceptualised his model are fascinating too. For Freud, people experience the pressure of the “steam” primarily as desires—a push to act in a particular way, a motivating force, or a wish that literally drives the machinery of the psyche. And for Freud, the devoted Darwinian, the primary motivations of all living organisms are to survive and reproduce, expressed as hunger and love, or what he called the life drive.
In keeping with this, Freud’s thinking fixates on the concept of wish fulfilment—especially of the Darwinian stripe. Dreams are symbolically disguised wish fulfilments. Slips and accidents are unconsciously driven wish fulfilments. Even jokes are ultimately driven by wishes (we laugh because of the joy of expressing a repressed desire that the art of the joke enables us to release). One critique here is that, in overemphasising wish fulfilment, Freud frames psychic life as a struggle to gratify desires that are ultimately frustrated. Freud’s model has other problems, too. For example, Freud was puzzled as to why people have nightmares, or why patients might want to talk about their pain. If the psyche is driven by wish fulfilment, shouldn’t all dreams be about desires and longings and shouldn’t patients want to talk about things that are gratifying as opposed to painful? And why don’t hedonistic gratifications of desire lead to fulfilment and inner peace? Aggression doesn’t usually lead to contentment, and neither does extreme sexual indulgence. This is born out in empirical studies, as well as in most people’s personal experience.
To answer each of these questions Freud posited numerous theoretical innovations, such as the “death drive” and the “repetition compulsion.” But each new addition to his model raised more questions, often without entirely resolving the initial issue. Taken together, Freud’s body of work is an ever-changing patchwork of theories that are often ambiguous, sometimes complement each other, and sometimes conflict. Many tensions are never fully resolved.
Carl Jung conceived of psychic energy in a broader, more general way. Psychic energy wasn’t necessarily just about desire or wishes (and it certainly wasn’t just about sex). It was about the full range of human experiences. This framing avoids a fixation on desire and frustration, and it could serve as a more positive and helpful framework for therapists. Jung’s formulation also enabled him to move away from some of Freud’s strange sexual preoccupations. But there are problems with both Freud’s and Jung’s models. What generates psychic energy? Where does it go when it’s discharged? How exactly does one direct it from one place to another, and how does one make some things conscious and others unconscious. These questions were never settled.
Still, Freud’s applications of his model were often fascinating and insightful. For example, Freud had an interesting take on grief: He saw relationships as involving two people giving affection to each other and receiving support from each other—processes that use psychic energy. So, when one partner passes away, the other continues to give love without receiving it in return. Then, the survivor has to redirect energy away from the deceased and toward others who are alive. All of this involves an enormous loss of psychic energy, so it leads to the type of depletion that characterises grief.
Or take depression. In Freud’s model, people sometimes feel angry at others but can’t tolerate feeling their anger or expressing it assertively. So, the anger gets turned inward, leading to feelings of guilt or inadequacy, and eventually depression. The psychic energy that was feeding anger is redirected toward self in the form of intense self-criticism or even self-hatred, which then turns into depression.
To take another example: For Freud, most forms of paranoia were the result of unmet needs for love. The sequence of events follows a trajectory from “I love her” to “I hate her” to “she hates me.” In extreme cases, the paranoia can escalate to “they hate me,” “they’re out to get me,” or even “the world is going to be annihilated.” Unmet needs for love get turned into hatred and then into persecutory anxiety.
Freud’s steam-pipe model is central to all defence mechanisms. “Repression” is a defence mechanism that pushes the steam down, below consciousness, and holds it back as best it can. “Reaction formation” is a defence mechanism that turns feelings into their opposites (e.g., turning love into hate or hate into love). “Isolation” allows someone to acknowledge a fact while repressing the emotion related to it. And so on. But as fascinating as these details are, they’re actually less interesting than Freud’s overall thought process. There’s something about how he conceptualises psychic energy that enables him to see things others might miss—sometimes in ways that set up possibilities for therapeutic change.
There’s clearly plenty to dispute about Freud’s theories. But the unconscious is a chaotic and irrational thing—maybe no entirely rational psychological model could do it justice. To really reflect what we experience, we need models that have an emotional resonance, even if they have some errors, contradictions, or paradoxes. Much of psychotherapy is an attempt to help people find words that capture what they’re experiencing. Freud’s model does this, often with emotionally resonant concepts.
This model is most useful when we encounter behaviour that’s puzzling. It’s useful when we’re asking, “Why would someone act that way, or believe that thing, or have that emotional reaction?” The stranger the behaviour, the more useful alternate models of the psyche become—not only for therapists, but for everyone else trying to make sense of confusing times.
