Welcome back to Know Thyself, the value and limits of self-knowledge. This course is on the unconscious, and today we'll be talking about psychoanalysis after Sigmund Freud. First, a very brief overview of the period of 1920s and 1940s. In the 1930's, and particularly 1938, after the Nazis has seized power in Germany and made their way into Austria. Freud in order to avoid persecution because of his Jewish background, moved himself and his family to England, in 1938 in particular, in order to establish himself in a freer place. Numerous new strands started to grow from Freud's own work, developed by other people, other newcomers, as well as people who had long been familiar with his thinking. Among the prominent new thinkers were his daughter Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. Both these thinkers emphasized the importance of child development, and pioneered new techniques for clinical work with children. Further, both theorists and others continued to make heavy use of the notion of the unconscious, but started to move away from an exclusive focus on sexuality and aggression and more toward other needs, such as the need for attachment with others. So let me talk more about Anna Freud in Particular. Her dates were 1895-1982. She developed her father's views along many dimensions including an emphasis on clinical work with children. She articulated his notion of a defense mechanism. Although based in England and a major figure there, she ended up being one of the most influential sources of psychoanalysis in North America as well. In London, England, one can now find the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families as a legacy of her life's work. Her 1936 book, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, developed her father, Sigmund Freud's, notion of a defense mechanism in a greater detail. A defense mechanism, in her understanding, was a coping strategy that our unconscious minds have for reconciling impulses with social pressures or at least what we take to be social pressures. Often these impulses do or are conceived of as clashing with those pressures. The concept of a defense mechanism has wide currency in many areas of everyday life and even now. If it's not quite part of common sense, it's close to having that status. Some well known types and very important types of defense mechanism are, repression, regression, projection, reaction formation, and sublimation. First, let me develop the notion of repression. This is a situation in which a feeling is forced from consciousness and thereby hidden in the unconscious because it is seen as unacceptable, as socially unacceptable in particular. Or unacceptable to the person's own self image, or both. A feeling of anger, for example, that you harbored toward a parent might be repressed for fear of the retribution or rejection that expressing that anger might cause. This might happen even if the fear of such rejection is unfounded, is baseless. Or someone with homosexual impulses might repress them and remain quote, unquote, in the closet, even to himself, if the anxiety produced by acknowledging a sexual attraction to other men is too upsetting for him to take. Many people hold that repressing emotions can be harmful. And that, for example, repressed and unresolved anger can turn into anxiety or depression. But I should note that this is yet another empirical claim that needs further experimental validation. For the above reasons, it's often held that repression as defense mechanism, is a relatively unhealthy way of dealing with problematic emotions. If in fact it's true that repressed emotions, such as anger can result to anxiety or depression, Then that would seem to be a good reason to think that repression is not a particularly healthy way of coping with the incompatibility or perceived incompatibility between emotions and pressures that we take ourselves to be under. [MUSIC]
