Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory

Appreciation of the importance of Freudian theory to the understanding of human behavior must include awareness of the intellectual culture in which that theory emerged. Nineteenth-century Europe saw the full flowering, so to speak, of industrial capitalism and concomitant urbanization of great masses of people, as well as the triumph of bourgeois social values and modes of social organization. In his examination of the intellectual currents of modern European thought, Baumer (1977, p. 27) distinguishes between the intellectualism of the Renaissance and Reformation, which looked to classical models for "inspiration and guidance," and that of the Enlightenment and the Romanticists, which "looked more to the future and present." Baumer cites the "scientific revolution" as the decisive marker that drove the Enlightenment intelligentsia and their progeny toward modernism. The scientific method that informed Newton's late-17th-century cosmology--despite the nature mysticism of the Romantics--achieved permanent resonance with Darwin's Origin of Species, published in 1859. Mid-19th

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n] painful day-residues, has lent them support, and has thus made them capable of being dreamed" (p. 411). It could be also said that the wish has made the day residue capable only of being dreamed. This is because the "sleep ego," a powerful psychological agent, "reacts with violent resentment to the accomplished satisfaction of the repressed wish" by inducing anxiety (Freud, 1978, p. 412). The symbolic content of the dream becomes a coping strategy available to the Cs mind for suppressing the latent content of the busy Ucs. The Pcs, however, is also busy with what Freud calls the "work of condensation" (p. 175) into symbols. This encounter of mind states almost assures that the [reported] dream will be confusing and illogical to the waking state. In fact, however, the dream has an internal logic that symbolically expresses Ucs infantile wish-fulfillment: "the child with all his impulses [suppressed in waking life] survives in the dream" (Freud, 1978, p. 94). Significantly and centrally in Freud's work, these impulses are fundamentally sexual, expressing repressed anxieties though mediated and stimulated by day residue. That implies that in addition to being symbolic and surreal, dream experience is equated with neurotic experien
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Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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