Freudian Slips: All the Psychology You Need to Know

ADLER AND THE INFERIORITY COMPLEX

ALFRED ADLER (1870–1937) was a doctor with an interest in psychology and education, who was invited by Freud to join the Vienna circle of psychoanalysts and for a time was designated as the heir apparent for psychoanalysis. However, Adler’s theories rapidly evolved away from Freud’s insistence on sex as the psyche’s dominant drive, and the concomitant model of human psychology as primarily a product of past experiences, mainly those of early infancy. Adler believed that power was the true engine of the human psyche, particularly the power relations between people. For instance, he argued that sibling birth order is an important factor governing personality, a theory rapidly appropriated by folk psychology. The same fate befell many of Adler’s concepts, none more so than the inferiority complex.

Everyone inevitably experiences some feelings of inferiority; Adler’s insight was that such feelings could be the primary driver behind much of human psychology and behaviour, especially in the formative childhood years, as the psyche attempts to compensate for, adapt to, or overcome the feelings. A child who feels physically inferior, for instance, might pursue sports to overcome his feelings, or might turn away from physical activities altogether and become bookish. Adler cited the classical tale of Demosthenes, the great Athenian orator who overcame a childhood speech impediment by training himself to speak with stones in his mouth.

If the emotions and thoughts arising from normal inferiority feelings are suppressed and driven into the unconscious mind, the result may be an inferiority complex. A complex, in psychoanalytic terms, is a system of unconscious desires, thoughts and feelings that acts on the conscious mind, often in an unhealthy or unhelpful fashion. Adler was careful to draw a distinction between normal inferiority feelings and the maladaptive inferiority complex, but this distinction has been lost in the popular appropriation.

Freud took a dim view of Adler’s focus on the psychology of power and inferiority, dismissing his developmental model as an ‘infantile scuffle’, amounting to little more than vulgar clichés such as ‘wanting to be on top’ and ‘covering one’s rear’. The relationship between the two men played out Adler’s own theory, with Adler lamenting that he was always ‘forced to work in [Freud’s] shadow’. Their split turned into a vicious feud, and in 1911 Adler set up his own school of psychoanalysis, which came to be known as Individual Psychology. For a time he became a world-famous intellectual figure and bestselling author, but his time as the ‘rock star’ of psychoanalysis passed and he died a lonely death in Aberdeen while on a lecture tour. Although his name is little known today, his legacy is widespread in modern psychotherapy and his theories and terms have infiltrated many aspects of popular psychology.

ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

In Jungian psychoanalysis, archetypes are embodiments of beliefs/concepts/experiences, which are common to all human psyches and may even be aspects of the underlying nature of reality. Although each individual experiences/encounters an archetype in different forms, the basic seed/scaffold of the archetype is located in the unconscious. Jung believed that since these archetypes are common to the unconscious of all humans they constitute a sort of collective inheritance, which he termed the collective unconscious.

THE CONCEPT OF THE ARCHETYPE grew out of the research and personal life experiences of Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), a Swiss psychoanalyst who was the anointed heir to Freud’s kingdom before their relationship descended into feuding and bitterness, as with so many of Freud’s associates (see Adler, here). An important bone of contention between the two was Jung’s interest in mystical aspects of the psyche, and it is easy to dismiss, as Freud did, archetypes and the collective unconscious as anti-scientific mumbo-jumbo and mere mysticism. But Jung’s conception and discussion of archetypes leaves much room for debate. Did he conceive of the collective unconscious as some sort of world mind or psychic astral plane, or is it simply shorthand for hard-wired, innate aspects of human neurology, which evolved early in our evolutionary history and are therefore encoded in our genes?

Jung certainly compared archetypes to instincts. Like instincts, he believed, archetypes are inherited and hard-wired, but where instincts govern behaviour, archetypes govern thoughts, feelings and perceptions: specifically what Jungians describe as ‘psychic apprehensions’. Cognitive psychology, the school of psychology that deals with the mind in terms analogous to computer science, postulates mental modules and programmes that filter and process perceptions, experiences and thoughts, and archetypes can be seen in this light. To put it another way, archetypes are like centres of gravity in the psychic universe, attracting and animating related concepts and imagery.

Jung became ‘aware’ of archetypes partly through his practice, partly through his reading in world literature and cultures, and partly through his own psychic journey. As an analyst he was forcibly struck by the way in which patients he considered relatively simple and uneducated related imagery replete with symbolism from arcane and cross-cultural sources. If they could not have encountered such symbols in their own lives, where could they be coming from? His own experience supplied a telling example: only after a series of dreams in which he saw a four-fold radiating pattern did he discover that this symbol had a name – the mandala – and was a common theme in Eastern cultures. If such concepts had not arisen from personal experience, Jung reasoned, they must be innate, reflecting ‘psychic apprehensions’ that lay at the root of humanity itself, springing from a shared or collective unconscious.

Jung identified a handful of major archetypes (although he allowed that the total number might be unlimited), including the wise old man and his female counterpart, the magna mater, or great mother. Discussing the wise old man, for instance, Jung wrote: ‘The wise old man appears in dreams in the guise of a magician, doctor, priest, teacher, professor, grandfather, or any person possessing authority.’ Also, there were the self and the shadow, and the anima and animus (the opposing gender aspects of each individual). These and other archetypes can be spotted everywhere from popular culture (e.g. Bugs Bunny as the trickster or Gandalf as the wise old man) to the esoteric (Tarot’s Major Arcana cards influenced Jung’s thinking, as did the symbolism of alchemy and magic).

AVERSION THERAPY

A form of psychotherapy where someone is conditioned to associate specific thoughts and/or behaviours with negative consequences, supposedly with the result that the subject becomes ‘averse’ (i.e. avoids/dislikes) the target thoughts/behaviours. A typical example of aversion therapy is conditioning someone to avoid alcohol by giving them a drug that makes them sick whenever they drink alcohol.

AVERSION THERAPY is a form of behavioural modification or behaviour therapy, which works because animals (including humans) have evolved to learn quickly to avoid dangerous stimuli. Conditioned food aversion is where an association between ingesting something and being sick rapidly leads to a long-lasting and deep-seated aversion (as in the case of someone who gets sick from bad shellfish, and subsequently feels nauseous at the sight, smell or even thought of shellfish).

As a therapy it developed from work on conditioning, such as Pavlov’s dogs and the Skinner box (see here and here respectively). For instance, dogs that were trained to associate certain stimuli with electric shocks quickly grew to dislike said stimuli. If such experiments sound cruel, imagine the ethical issues surrounding aversion therapy in humans. Yet such considerations have not stopped aversion therapy from being used from the 1920s to the present day.

SHOCKTAILS

Possibly the first application of aversion therapy was in the treatment of alcohol abuse in 1925, using electric shocks. Ten years later chemical aversion therapy for alcoholism was first tried, and today it is still in use with the drug Antabuse (the proprietary name for disulfuram) prescribed to cause nausea, vomiting and palpitations when alcohol is consumed.

More controversially, aversion therapy was widely used to ‘treat’ homosexuality, seen as pathological until the late 1960s and beyond. In 1935, for instance, a man was asked to engage in homoerotic fantasies and given electric shocks. A similar experiment from 1963 involved a barefoot man standing on an electrified metal floor and given shocks while being shown pictures of naked men. After 4,000 shocks the subject reportedly became bisexual.

Aversion therapy for homosexuality lurched further into farce in the late 1950s with the development by psychiatrist Kurt Freund of chemical methods. Freund administered apomorphine to cause dangerous and distressing symptoms including nausea and vomiting while showing his victims pictures of naked men. He also developed a device where a band clamped around the penis recorded any engorgement, which was supposed to function as a sort of sexual ‘lie detector’ to ferret out irrepressible erotic responses. Perhaps inevitably, farce eventually led to tragedy in 1964 when a British man with a heart condition died as the result of chemical aversion therapy for homosexuality, after having been administered vomit-inducing drugs in conjunction with a discussion about homosexuality, followed by a dose of LSD while talking about heterosexual fantasies!

As linguist Hugh Rawson points out, ‘From the standpoint of a person who is forced to undergo it, aversion therapy is difficult to distinguish from punishment or torture.’ Yet despite this, it was still relatively common in parts of the US as late as the mid-1980s, and is probably still practised around the world.

BARNUM EFFECT

The tendency to accept generic statements as accurate personal descriptions, particularly when they are flattering.

ALSO KNOWN AS THE FALLACY of personal validation, the Barnum effect or phenomenon is named for the nineteenth-century US showman and charlatan P. T. Barnum (1810–91), for it incorporates two of his famous dictums: ‘My secret of success is always to have a little something for everyone’ and ‘There’s a sucker born every minute’. A typical Barnum-effect statement may be detailed or appear specific, but in fact will be vague, ambiguous and/or self-contradictory and thus applicable to everyone. Whether they are aware of it or not, the phenomenon is a major tool of astrologers, psychics and fortune tellers, alongside cold reading and other tricks (see here).

The effect