How Might 'The Id' Have Been Conceptualized Differently If Freud Had Created It Before 1897?

Has anyone ever given any thought as to what might have happened if Freud had invented the concept of 'the id' much earlier in his career -- like 1894, as opposed to 1923?

The concept might have been totally different -- subscribing to Freud's pre-1897 traumacy-seduction assumptions as opposed to his later post-1896 instinctual demand, childhood sexuality, and Oedipal fantasy assumptions.

With my being an integrative dialectic theorist, I look at the period of roughly 1895 to 1905 -- the period when Freud was creating the main philoosphical and psychological assumptions connected with what was going to be called 'Classical' Psychoanalysis -- as being a period when Freud also created an 'isolative-dissociative chamber or container' in which at the same time that he was bringing in Classical Psychoanalysis, he was also throwing out 'Pre-Classical' (Traumacy-Seduction Theory) Psychoanalysis.

This was, to me -- like it has been for a significantly 'split' number of academics and professionals studying this period of the history and evolution of psychoanalysis -- a big theoretical and clinical mistake in that it dissociated Classical Psychoanalysis of a theory (traumacy-seduction theory) that had been working very well up to 1896, and which showed the potential for continued promise, indeed is still probably being employed in some fashion by most different schools of psychotherapy today.


What is psychotherapy without the psychological unfolding and healing in the context of individual and/or group psychotherapy -- of psychological 'trauma', whether it be physical or emotional, an assault, a death, a sickness, a loss, an abandonment, a betrayal, a rejection, a failure, an exclusion, a criticism, a chastisement, an 'ego-slight'...?


All of these factors which were being built up in Breuer's and then Freud's clinical caseload starting from 1880 (with Breuer's Anna O. case) -- and leading onwards to their combined clinical work, 'Studies on Hysteria' (1895), and then a year later, Freud's 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' (1896) in which Freud focused more specifically on the common factor of 'childhood sexual seduction/assault/abuse' -- all of this 'Pre-Classical' traumacy and childhood sexual abuse work remains a critical part of most viable psychotherapies today...


Yet Freud, for whatever reason and/or combination of reasons (and we will certainly talk about this momentous period of Psychoanalysis in greater detail later, as I have already written about it in numerous essays over the last several years), essentially turned his back on this driving force of his early psychotherapy and instead started to develop his now 'Classical Instinct and, to a lesser extent, Ego Theory' which he would basically spend the rest of his life developing (til his death in 1939).


Freud did some great psychoanalytic work after 1896 as well as before but his post-1896 psychoanalytic work became definitively one-sided, reductionistic, and -- sorely lacking the foundational basis of his earlier traumacy theory.

In essence, Psychoanalysis became an institutional example of a 'psycho-neurosis' -- complete with an 'Shadow-Id-Group' or 'Secret-Interest-Group (SIG) Chamber' in which 'bad or threatening ideas' -- whether 'historically traumatic', 'simply unwanted', and/or 'instinctually impulsive' -- are locked away from the rest of the personality/organism/institution.


What I am saying here is that Freud should have integrated his traumacy-seduction, instinct, ego, and ego-defense theory all together -- not dissociated them apart from each other, and then basically, after 1896, he started to bury his traumacy-seduction theory.


Impulses and traumacies often go hand and hand. A person takes a risk -- and then metaphorically, gets his or her neck cut off for taking this risk. The traumatic result of the risk often leads to less risk-taking in future similar circumstances -- 'ego-defensive' adjustments or 'defensive compensations' are taken to guard against future similar traumacy.


Back in 1894-95, the formula for neurosis including 'hysteria', including therapy, was pretty simple.

1. Noxious stimuli/memory; 2. 'an associative (neurotic) false connection'; 3. 'repression of the noxius memory that is being held as a warning sign relative to future similar events'; 4. a 'neurotic symptom' that reflects the false connection; 5. Therapy-Awareness: 'Recover' the repressed/suppressed memory; 6. Therapy-Contact-Abreaction-Catharsis: 'Let the client 're-live' the memory after it has been 'recovered'; 7. Therapy-Conclusion: No more neurotic/hysterical symptom.


An example from the Anna O. case: 1. Noxious stimuli/memory: She saw a dog drinking water out of a human glass; 2. Compensatory defensive self-warning sign and behavior: She would stop drinking; 3 She 'represses' the memory of the dog drinking out of the glass; 4. Neurotic symptom based on 'false associative connection': She won't drink any fluids, only eat fruit; 5. Therapy-Awareness: Hunt down the 'neurotic, repressed memory'; 6. Therapy-Contact-Abreaction-Catharsis: Let the client -- in this case, Anna O. -- 're-live the memory, including all the affect/emotion attached to it; 7. Therapy-Conclusion: No more fear of drinking water -- Anna O. takes a drink of water after her 'memory-catharsis'.


These Victorian 'hysterical ladies' (and some men) were very creative in their 'false connections' to repressed memories. Was it their 'prudent/repressive' sexual family and cultural upbringing? Probably at least partly. The more events -- particularly 'sexual events' -- that are repressed, suppressed, isolated, dissociated from the conscious personality, the greater the likelihood of these 'unconcious dissociations' coming back to 'haunt' the client in the form of 'crazy, creative, neurotic symptoms'.

Freud's main 'character weaknesses' were also his main 'character strengths'. (That is the same with all of us -- our 'extremes' define us, both positively and negatively.) In Freud's case, Freud was overly 'reductionistic' in his theories, highly speculative in some of his memory/dream/phantasy interpretations, very righteously dogmatic and inflexible in his own thinking and/or other people's thinking...

You go back to those old clinical cases and you can pretty easily see that both 'impulses' and/or 'traumacies' were 'neurotically operative' in the form of 'non-remembered memories', and 'bad/false associative connections' relative to these unremembered memories'.

Let us take the 'black snake hallucination' in an Anna O. memory.

She had fallen asleep while nursing her sick father, sitting in a chair beside his bed. She dreamed/hallucinated of a 'black snake' coming from the wall to bite her dad and she tried to 'fend off the snake with her right arm but the arm had 'fallen asleep' on the back of the chair and effectively was 'paralyzed', wouldn't move, as she tried to defend her father but couldn't. In therapy wih Breuer around 1881-82, Anna O's right arm was still 'paralyzed' even though nothing was organically wrong with it. The memory was 'discovered' and 'recovered' under hypnosis, emotionally re-lived, and Anna. O upon waking, moved her right arm.

There is a lot that can still be said about this particular episode with the 'black snake hallucination' alone. To the extent that it 'solved' her paralysis problem, the hypnosis was enough. But Anna O. could create new symptoms faster than Breuer could 'solve' or 'resolve' them. She was a very smart but not a very happy young lady. And getting the 'lion's share' of the nursing responsibility for her father's needs was not likely a responsibility that any young lady would relish -- regardless of how much she loved her father.

Anna O's 'neurotic, hysterical symptoms' could be viewed both individually and collectively as 'compromise-formations' between her 'impulse-traumicy complexes' and the 'repression-isolation-dissociation' of these same impulse-traumacy complexes.


Freud, looking back at this particular Anna O. episode years later (The Five Lectures), was amazingly 'rational-empirical' in stating that Anna O. had probably actually seen a snake around her property which then provided 'fuel' for the dream. This was a lot more 'down to earth' than Freud's later interpretions in the Dora case, The 'Wolf-Man', little Hans, and The 'Rat-Man'.


A therapist should always be extremely careful about his or her interpretations and/or 'reconstructions' -- and always opt for the clients' 'associations' as opposed to imposing his or her own associations on a dream-phantasy interpretation. All else being equal, a simpler interpretation is usually more likely to be on the mark than a highly convoluted one.


Anna O. herself -- who after assorted relapses and trips into a psychiatric institution after her father's death, became a feminist and a social worker later in her life. In the 1920s, she came up with a quotation that is one of the best psychoanalytic quotations that I have ever heard.

Anna O., the woman who partly created and labelled 'the talking cure' and 'chimney sweeping' -- Bertha Pappenheim was her real name -- was quoted some 30 years after her therapeutic work with Breuer in the 1920s as saying:


'Psychoanalysis is in the hand of the physician what the the confessional is in the hand of the Catholic clergyman; it depends upon the person applying it and the (specific) application whether it is a good instrument or a double-edged sword' (Frank Sulloway, Freud: Biologist of The Mind, 1979, 1992).

This having been said, as a dream interpreter -- and I don't profess to be a very experienced one -- you can look either in a person's 'external' and/or 'internal' world for the particular 'stimulus' that might ignite the contents and essence of a dream.

My initial interpretation of the 'black snake' in Anna O's phantasy would be to speculate -- in a more far-reaching fashion than Freud did when he looked back at the phantasy and said that maybe Anna O was frightened by a real snake that she saw on another occasion -- and then 'transferred' it into her dream -- in contrast, my first reaction on the black snake is that it came from her 'mythological' or 'collective' (Jungian) unconscious, and that perhaps it reflected an unconscious/subconscious 'death wish' towards her father --the primary reason for her 'lifeless existence'. While other young women were dating and getting married, she was 'stuck' nursing her father. (God only knows what her mother was doing.)

Whether a therapist -- Breuer at the time of the episode -- would want to share this type of interpretation with Anna O. at that time and place is another question based largely on trust, the client's cognitive-affective capabilities, and timing. Or better still, in a 'Gestalt hotseat', the client could actually 'role play the black snake' and see what awarenesses came out of the role-playing. In Gestalt Therapy -- and I believe in both Freudian and Jungian Psychoanalysis as well, 'every part of the dream reflects a different part of yourself' -- and oftentimes, 'existential splits or conflicts in the personality, in consciousness, and/or between different 'ego-states' -- like between the loving, nursing Anna, and Anna's 'alter-ego' -- the part of her that may have actually been wishing her dad to die so that she could get on with living her life. Also, there is no indication in the case description of Anna O. what Anna's relationship was like with her dad when she was growing up at a younger age when he was not sick -- and whether or not there might have actually been a case of 'childhood (sexual?) abuse between her and her father. That we will never know -- but again, the 'black snake' symbol again throws a possible element of 'evil intent' -- from Anna O. towards her dad, and/or from her dad towards Anna at a younger, healthier age, which might have precipitated angry, reactionary evil intent from Anna towards her dad at the later date. Or it may have been simply anger directed at the fact that she was 'being controlled by her dad's sickness', and then lo and behold, by becoming 'hysterical', she could turn the tables on a 'transference figure of her dad', and 'control her therapist's time and energy by generating new 'hysterical symptoms' faster than Breuer could help her get rid of them. That is what I call 'identification with the sick person in order to gain control of a situation' or alternatively -- 'transference-reversal' with Anna O. playing the role of her 'sick dad' in her 'reverse relationship' with her 'male therapist'. 'What goes around, comes around' -- might be the operative philosophical and psychological piece of wisdom that is most relevant here -- in the style and content of one of the oldest Greek philosophers -- Anaximander. 'You give what you get' -- is just as common as -- 'you get what you give'.




You can see how traumacy, impulse, and the restraint -- repression, isolation, dissociation...-- of threatening ideas impulse all can collectively weave themselves into the same 'transference-complex'. We will develop this complex of ideas as we move along...

Enough for today.


-- dgb, March 18th-19th, 2011,

-- David Gordon Bain