Introduction to Freudian Psychoanalysis, Topographic
and Structural Models. Now there’s an intimidating
title for you, so let me try to break it down a little bit. First let’s
talk about the word psychoanalysis. Sounds like a scary word, but when
you break it down into its component parts, it’s really not. There’s
two words here, right? There’s psyche, which you could translate
most simply as the mind, and analysis, which is just the process of breaking
things down into their component parts for the purpose of studying them.
The way I’m breaking down the word psychoanalysis iteself.
So, you might say that psychoanalysis is the analysis or study of the mind.
Though of course it’s a particular tradition in the study of the mind
that needs to be differentiated from other forms of psychology, right?
For example behaviorism or cognitive psychology. Um, 
psychology is also composed of the word psyche, you know, mind and
the study of: ology, right? Psychoanalysis is a particular form 
of psychology, a subset of psychology that traces its origins
to Sigmund Freud. Now, why do we call it Freudian
psychoanalysis? Why not just psychoanalysis? Because since Freud
introduced the term back at the end of the 19th century, psychoanalysis
has evolved and changed, and today there are many branches of psychoanalysis. There’s
Jungian psychoanalysis, and relational psychoanalysis, and Lacanean 
psychoanalysis. But for the purposes of this powerpoint and this class,
we’re going to focus on the original forms of psychoanalysis as developed
by Freud. Now of course, all this is complicated by the fact that
even Freudian theory evolved and changed from when Sigmund Freud first
introduced it in 1899 to when he died in 1939.
n this presentation however, we’re gonna focus on two of his earliest
and most influential ways of understanding the human mind. The so-called
topographical and structural models. We’re gonna deal with
the topographical first. It’s the earlier model and it’s called topographical
because it treats the mind as a kind of landscape to be mapped,
as you’ll soon see. In the topographical model,
the mind or the psyche has divided its territories or 
layers, each serving a different function. From top to bottom,
we have the conscious mind, the 
preconscious mind, and the unconscious mind.
In the next few slides, we’ll take a closer look at each.
You might think of the conscious as
the mind’s eye. That is to say, it refers to the part
of your mind of your psyche that you can picture or hear or 
smell or taste, to use other sensory analogies. I suppose it’s not
just your mind’s eye. It’s your mind’s ear, and your mind’s tongue,
and your mind’s nose, right? It’s the contents of 
your mind of which you are aware. Your thoughts, for instance
the voice that you’re hearing right now is in your consciousness.
Right? So if we use the analogy of say, a computer,
you might think of consciousness as what’s most easily accessible.
That is to say what’s actually visible on the computer screen.
Most people are familiar with the term conscious. 
But the term preconscious is not as well known. Preconscious
refers to the part of your mind that’s just outside of awareness, but is easily
accessible. These are memories, thoughts, ideas, 
sensations. Anything that you can call easily into your consciousness, but
isn’t residing there in the immediate present. Right?
If we continue with the computer analogy, then you might think of the preconscious
as um- computer memory. RAM memory, or maybe information stored
on your hard drive. Any- any memories or ideas that you have that you can
easily call into consciousness, those are in your preconscious, right?
It’s not right on the screen, but you can access is quickly and easily
Freud’s notion of the unconscious was arguably his greatest 
contribution, not only to psychoanalysis proper, but to psychology generally,
and even to western culture. The unconscious is the deepest
layer of the mind, and the least accessible to the individual. In fact,
we’re not even aware that we have an unconscious, or at least
we weren’t aware of it before Freud. You can’t get
access to the unconscious easily, but sometimes contents from
our unconscious find their way into consciousness through dreams, through
mistakes in our language, so-called Freudian slips. You know,
you’ve seen the sort of thing on television. A man walks up to a woman that
he’s attracted to right? And uh, he says uh, “Oh, you’re wearing a nice pair
of uh- of boobs. I mean- I meant boots!” Right? Uh, the slip is
indicating that he’s really more interested in- in her body than what she’s wearing, right?
That’s a Freudian slip, and according to Freud that- that comes
up from the unconscious. He didn’t mean to say that, but his- his unconscious
um- desires are seeping through into the- into consciousness.
Another way you can um, access the unconscious
is through the process of psychoanalysis itself, that is through
psychotherapy, which is the exploration of the mind conducted by an
individual along side or along with a trained psychoanalyst.
Um, to get back to the computer analogy,
you might think of the unconscious as um- as a computer
bios system: the information programmed into the mother board.
Most of us using computers have no idea that such a system even exists,
or at least we don’t think about it unless our computer breaks down, but it’s the
motherboard that ultimately enables the computer to function. Likewise,
it’s the unconscious that drives us as human beings. Even though for the
most part we’re totally unaware of it.
Here’s an illustration that may help you visualize
Freud’s topographical concept of the psyche. The mind,
according to Freud, is like an iceberg. If you look at an iceberg from above
the water, no matter how large it may seem, the vast majority of its volume
is actually beneath the surface and out of sight. You can
think of the mind this way as well. The conscious level is 
what we see, what we’re aware of: ideas, feelings, sensory perceptions
of which we are conscious, right? But it’s actually the smallest
and in some ways the least significant portion of the mind.
Right beneath the surface, still visible, but you know, not 
immediately apparent lies the preconscious.
Somewhat larger than the conscious, it contains memories and information
that we can access if we want to, if we make an effort. But beneath
the preconscious, lies the deepest and most massive part
of the iceberg that is the psyche. Here in the deep water
inaccessible to our conscious perceptions lie the thoughts and 
feelings that are too disturbing to be tolerated by the conscious mind:
forbidden sexual desires, murderous fantasies, frightening
and shameful memories. These are all sunk deep beneath the waters.
But Freud says that they are normally unknown to us,
they actually comprise most of who we are.
Early in his career, Freud supplemented the topographic model of the mind
with what has come to be known as the structural model. It’s a different
way of dividing the mind. Not by layers or geography, but by
rolls or operations. Freud came to see personality
as something that’s divided between three separate agents with
competing interests, desires, and methods of operation. You’ve probably
heard of these. They are the id, the ego,
and the superego.
Let’s start with the id. Those of you who remember Forbidden Planet
will recall the important party this concept played in that film. 
Id is actually a translation of a German word which simply means, “the it.”
It’s the most deeply primitive and beastial
component of our psyche. It’s driven entirely by what Freud
called the pleasure principle. That means it desires only
what feels good or it desires to avoid what feels bad.
It has no other motivation than the seeking of pleasure and the avoidance
of pain. It has no morality. It’s uncivilized
and selfish. It’s also primitive in terms of it’s understanding.
Like a child, it doesn’t always know the best way
to get what it wants. It’s driven by instinct, not intelligence,
so it’s prone to aggression and sexual rapacity.
But because it runs so counter to a mature, moral system to
civilized behavior, the id is deeply hidden or repressed.
So, we hardly are even aware of its existence.
We may even deny its existence.
On the opposite end of the psychic spectrum is the superego. While the
id is an inborn component of the psyche, part of our inheritance from the 
natural world, the superego is imposed from without. 
The superego is like the psychic police officer, telling us what
is and is not right. It’s obsessed with obeying and 
enforcing rules. It’s an agent of the law.
But if the superego doesn’t arise naturally from within, where does it come from?
Well, psychoanalysis tells us it has two sources. One of course,
is society. According to Freud at least, it’s society and not
any internal instinct that tells us what’s really right and wrong,
what’s good and permissible. If it weren’t for society, right would just
mean whatever feels good and wrong would just mean whatever feels painful.
But where do we really learn the rules of social behavior?
Well, from our parents. They’re the ones who define right
and wrong first, starting with what we can and can’t eat, wear,
say, do. Right down to when and where we can poop and pee.
What the superego really is, is an internalized
parent. It’s the mommy and daddy who forever lives inside
of us, telling us, “No, no, no!”
So, what is the ego?
First, let’s distinguish this term from the word we use in
everyday language. What we’re not talking- we’re not talking about here
what we mean when we say, “That person has a big ego.” In psychoanalytic
 terms, it does not refer to one’s feelings of self worth.
Actually, what it is in Freudian psychoanalysis is a
kind of negotiator. The ego mediates 
between the powerful desires of the id, and the legalistic obsessions
of the superego. It’s the part of us that says to the id, “Yes,
you want the Cadillac,” but since the superego won’t let you steal
it, let’s work to earn enough money to buy it.
It might even say to the id, “Look we can’t afford a Cadillac, maybe we just need
to get, you know, um- a Hundai.”
You see, um, in this respect, the ego is an agent of what Freud
called the reality principle. While the id is driven
only by desire and fantasy, and the superego,
by fear of punishment. The ego looks around, takes notice
of our environment, and let’s us know what’s reasonable to expect.
Which desires we can safely satisfy, and how we might best
go about doing so. In this way, it’s the agent of the mind
 with which we’re most familiar and comfortable. It’s the closest
to what we might cal “ourself.”
You might think of the id as the bad angel that sits on your shoulder,
the one who tells you to steal from the cookie jar. And the superego
as the good angel, the one telling you you’ll get in trouble if you do.
While the ego is the part of you caught in between, the one looking
for a compromise. “Let’s ask mom if it’s okay.”
These different aspects of the self can sometimes be out of bounds.
For example, in the original Star Trek, the old Sci-Fi
show from the 1960s, there was the character of Dr. McCoy. 
You can see him to the left in this picture. He was always driven by
passion and emotion. He- he didn’t always, you know, think clearly about
things. You might say he was dominated by his id.
On the other hand, Mr. Spock, who you see on the right, was strictly bound
by the rules of his culture, the Vulcans, who emphasized a
suppression of emotion as a way of promoting civilized behavior.
In the middle, we see Captain Kirk, who of the three of them, 
really had the strongest ego, and in that sense I don’t mean
that he had the greatest sense of self worth, that he was conceited, though he 
kind of was, but that he had a more balanced psyche.
He’s the one who always often comes between Spock and McCoy
and forces them to see what’s really reasonable and right for the circumstance.
In this last slide, we see the two
models, topographical and structural, combined. Once again,
using the iceberg analogy. Notice that the id
is buried in the unconscious. We’re not generally aware of its 
existence unless it’s revealed to us through dreams of slips of the tongue,
or through the process of psychoanalysis. The ego
is mostly a function of the conscious and the preconscious, though it dips
into levels of the unconscious. While the superego is pretty
evenly divided between the three levels. Some of
our moral imperatives are so deeply ingrained, we aren’t even aware
of them. For example, little children don’t have an aversion to
feces. They- they even play with it. But as adults, we’re repelled 
and disgusted by it, and this seems natural to us. But really
it’s a moral impulse implanted deep into our unconscious 
during potty training, a period that we don’t remember anymore, that’s submerged 
in our unconscious, so it’s actually a part of our superego
you know, part of the unconscious, where we have that aversion.
Other parts of the superego are fully conscious, which is why we can say
of a mature or sane person, you know, he knows the different between
right and wrong. Notice too, how this diagram suggests
that all psychic energy originates in the unconscious.
That’s the most disturbing aspect of the entire 
psychoanalytic theory. This idea that all our hopes and 
dreams and ambitions are really the product of a part of ourselves
that’s largely instinctual, primitive, and not only out of our
awareness, but totally unavailable to direct inspection.
This is why Freud said his theory
of psychoanalysis was one of the three great blows to human
pride. To what we could call in everyday language, the
ego. The first, you’ll remember, was Copernicus’s
revelation that the earth was not the center of the universe. The second
was Darwin’s theory of evolution, which asserted that man was just a highly 
evolved animal, a cousin of the great apes. Freud, who
comes less than 50 years after Darwin, delivers the third blow, when he
suggests that human consciousness is only the smallest and least important
part of the human psyche. That we’re driven by forces of which we
are almost totally unaware.
