the Freudian legacy
Introduction
Freudian theory is something about which beginning psychology students often expect to hear a great deal, given the great impact it has had on west- ern psychology and its popular image. However, they may find Freud's work given only a minor place in psychology curricula that emphasize the scientific method and evidence-based psychology practice. Freud's ideas were indeed developed in the absence of scientific support, during the first part of the twentieth century. Despite - and possibly because of- this lack of scientific support, Freud's concepts had a great influence upon social science and the practice of psychiatry at the time. Freud may have tapped into ongoing desires to study subjective experience, which was being rejected by psychologists at the time as being inappropriate for scientific study (Fisher and Greenberg, 1996). More recently, too, Freudian ideas have been said to have 'penetrated into the matrix of modern psychology and continue to exert formidable influence' (Fisher and Greenberg, 1996: 6-7).
With the benefit of hindsight, we can say today that Freud's psycho- sexual theory of child development, derived from his reflections on the early childhood recollections of his adult psychiatric patients, has to be seriously questioned. Nevertheless, empirical support has been found for some aspects of Freudian theory, and his thinking was inspirational to others who have in turn greatly influenced our understanding of children's development, especially in infancy. Such workers include Melanie Klein, Erik Erikson, John Bowlby, Rene Spitz, Mary Ainsworth and Michael Rutter. They were in no way Freud's disciples, but reflected upon certain of his key insights and developed them in their own ways. In this chapter, we provide a brief reminder of Freud's Oedipal theory of child develop- ment, examine the scientific evidence for it and describe some of the later work in child development theory that built upon the Freudian tradition.
instincts to survive and reproduce. These basic drives constituted the aspect of the psyche that he called the id. The ego was the part of the psyche in touch with reality, mediating between the id and the superego, or conscience. We noted in Chapter 1 that Darwinian theory has been taken as a common influence on several schools of thought in developmental psychology, although the directness and strength of this influence has been questioned (see Chapter 2). A continuity of Freud with earlier Darwinian theory can be observed in that Freud applied notions of phylogenetic evo- lution to intrapsychic development (ontogeny) (Emde, 1992). He pro- posed that the functions of current actions could be understood in terms of past history, placing great emphasis on early experience as laying the foundations for a series of developmental stages - a notion later developed much further by Piaget.
The stages of development delineated by Freud were the oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital. His theory is psychosexual, in that each stage is defined by the zone of the body that is the focus of pleasure for the child (the exception being the latency stage, when sexual instincts lie dormant):
'A child has its sexual instincts and activities from the first; it comes into the world with them; and after an important course of development pass- ing through many stages, they lead to what is known as the normal sexual- ity of the adult' (Freud, 1974: 71). His emphasis upon the sexual nature of children was considered outrageous at the time. Although one of Freud's most enduring legacies is the recognition of the importance of early experi- ences for later development, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that Freud was a medical man who also emphasized the importance of heredi- tary and constitutional factors in development. It should be noted, how- ever, that the word 'genetic' as used by Freud means ontogenetic or epigenetic rather than gene-controlled (Hilgard, 1962).
Although there are various aspects of Freudian theory with implications for child development, the one we will concentrate on here is the Oedipal theory, which has been described as 'the skeleton of the psychoanalytic model' (Fisher and Greenberg, 1996: 118). In fact, Fisher and Greenberg conceive of Oedipal theory itself (like other aspects of Freudian theory) as a collection of mini-theories about a range of developmental issues, such as family dynamics, identification with parents, moral development and sexual development. Freud doubtless saw his theory as a 'grand theory', and the tendency to look back on it as a collection of mini-theories is perhaps reflective of the modern trend towards mini-theories rather than grand sys- tems. (In Chapter 11 we note the beginnings of a reversal of this trend.)
From the vantage point of today's scientific psychology, it seems remark- able that a man who proposed a theory of child development undertook very little research or clinical work with children. Rather, he built his theory on the basis of the recollections of his (mainly female) middle-class patients, diagnosed with psychological disorders such as hysteria.
Descriptions of childhood sexual experiences by such women were ori- ginally taken at face value by Freud, and he initially attributed their adult psychological symptoms to repressed sexual trauma. However, Freud veered away from his original ('seduction theory') interpretation that these women had suffered early abuse. He renounced his seduction theory in 1897, and came to see these women as expressing childhood sexual fan- tasies. Although he worked mainly with women, Freud took the develop- ment of male children as the prototype for development (a reflection of his historical times), although we know today that, biologically speaking, the reverse is actually the case (Emde, 1992).
In describing the phallic stage of development, Freud drew upon the Greek myth of King Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother. Freud theorized that the young boy, around the age of four or five, harbours sexual impulses toward his mother. This places him in direct competition with his father for her affections, and he fears that his father will castrate him as a punishment. To overcome this Oedipal con- flict, the boy identifies with his father, in the course of which he internal- izes his father's moral values and develops his own superego. Freud postulated that, for girls, a parallel but necessarily somewhat different process occurs (Electra complex), with the girl believing she has already been castrated by her mother and moving towards her father as a love object; he has the potential to give her a baby in compensation for the presumed loss of her penis (the 'penis-baby equation'). Freud was less clear about how the female's conflict is resolved, but maintained that it is more gradual and results in a weaker superego for girls than boys. Freud saw normal adult psychological development as dependent upon the resolution of these early psychosexual conflicts, and theorized that adult neuroses and sexual dysfunctions result from a failure to resolve them adequately.
As we have noted, this theory was based on Freud's assumption that when his female patients described early sexual encounters with adult men, they were fantasies. John Bowlby later placed the emphasis back on reality, rather than fantasy, in early childhood experiences (Andrews and Brewin, 2000), and writers increasingly began to suggest that Freud's earlier interpretations of his patients' recollections as actual abuse were correct (e.g. Masson, 1984). With today's understanding of the prevalence and impact of sexual abuse of children, many agree with this assessment, even though debates continue to rage about the accuracy of memories of childhood recovered in adult therapy.
Putting aside the point that the Oedipal theory was probably based upon a false premise, it is nevertheless possible to examine how it stands up to scientific scrutiny. Fisher and Greenberg (1996) undertook two very detailed reviews of the scientific literature (first in 1977 and again in 1996) to determine how much empirical support there was for various aspects
of Freudian theory. They addressed the issue of whether it is in fact appropriate to apply scientific standards to test Freudian theories or whether, as some have argued, it is more appropriate to apply alternative methods of inquiry such as those in a more relativist-subjectivist vein.
Freud, as a scientist himself, was ambivalent about this issue; he was pleased when science seemed to support his theories, but did not apply sci- entific principles to his clinical data collection. Fisher and Greenberg adopted the position that it is appropriate to evaluate support for Freud's theories from a scientific perspective, but to avoid trivial critique of studies and look instead for overall trends across multiple studies.
Many studies were, in fact, undertaken by experimental psychologists during the twentieth century to directly test propositions derived from Freudian theory. For example, the very basic proposition that infant ex- periences have enduring effects on adult behaviour was examined and sup- ported by experiments during the 1940s and 1950s, demonstrating that adult rats' food-hoarding behaviour is influenced by early food deprivation (e.g. Albino and Long, 1951). With specific regard to Oedipal theory, Fisher and Greenberg concluded that there is a considerable body of evi- dence supporting the basic notion of the 'Oedipal triangle' (the child favouring the opposite-sex over the same-sex parent). They also found evi- dence for children's concern about body experiences around the age at which Freud identified castration anxiety as occurring. They even found evidence supporting predictions derived from the controversial penis-baby equation theory - for example, an increase in phallic imagery during preg- nancy. However, they found no evidence for the proposition that a boy identifies with his father and adopts his values as a result of fearing him.
On the contrary, boys identify most strongly with fathers who are warm and nurturing. Evidence linking later sexual functioning with Oedipal notions is also lacking. Neither is there any evidence for the Freudian notion that boys develop a stronger superego than do girls (in this respect, Freudian ideas of morality development can be seen as male-centric, as was also the case with Piaget and Kohlberg - see Chapter 10); also, moral development has been found to be influenced by a range of factors other than the father-child relationship.
Although they found support for particular aspects of the Oedipal theory, Fisher and Greenberg concluded overall that the empirical evi- dence for Freud's attempt to produce a grand theory of children's sexual and moral development was not strong. In a similar vein, Emde (1992) has pointed out that both gender identity and moral development can be observed well before the time when Freud saw the Oedipus complex as becoming resolved; also, rather than having an attachment to one parent disrupted later by the other, children usually develop ties of affection with both parents from an early age. Emde also makes the more general theoretical point that Freud, in keeping with understandings of physics at
the time, saw mental processes in terms of entropy (tending towards lower levels of organization, as in drive reduction), which contrasts with modern notions that development tends towards greater levels of complexity (see Chapter 11).
Despite its shortcomings, the influence of Freudian theory upon more recent developmental theories can easily be detected. A range of observa- tions by Freud is echoed in later developmental theories (or, perhaps more appropriately, mini-theories), such as mirror play in a young child (devel- opment of self-awareness), peek-a-boo games (maternal 'scaffolding' of development - see Chapter 7) and ego development through separation from caregivers (attachment theory, as discussed below) (Emde, 1992).
Such ideas were reflected in the work of later major developmental the- orists such as Spitz, Bowlby and Ainsworth (attachment and loss), and in the development of the psychoanalytic approach to child therapy (e.g.
Klein, Winnicott and the object relations school). Also, Piaget learned from Freud's open-ended approach to inquiry and, in particular, his attention to what an individual's errors can reveal about their cognitions, as Freud dis- cussed in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1914/1940). We will now consider a number of important twentieth-century child development theorists upon whom Freudian ideas had a particular influence.