The Instinct
Our motivations are unconscious and never consciously formulated. Our thoughts are not our own, but are either inherited biologically, or borrowed from others.
We have an instinct to overcome our deficiencies and overcompensate for them.
We have two basic drives, one is to live (Eros) and the other is to die (Thanatos) and they are in an eternal battle until the latter inevitably prevails.
Many of the neuroses and pathologies that we have come from early childhood experiences.
The Originators
Philosophers like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer were the precursors to psychoanalysis. In fact, Nietzsche’s understanding of human psychology was uncanny, almost all the schools of psychoanalyses are founded on his ideas in one way or another.
These main schools belonged to Freud, Adler, and Jung, but there is another name that precedes all of them, Pierre Janet, who truly believed in the adage, “idle hands are the devil’s plaything.”
Different kinds of people are attracted to different kinds of psychoanalytic approaches in the same way that different kinds of people are attracted to the ancient philosophical schools of the past, including Stoicism, Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Epicureanism. There is no one-size-fits-all solution in psychology.
Individuation
Individuation is a process by which a person becomes more attuned to his unconscious, which is really the collective unconscious that he shares with all of humanity, and this process is gradual and takes place over a lifetime. There are ways of speeding it up that include writing down your dreams and drawing pictures.
The risk of not individuating is that you remain attached to your persona (the social mask that you wear to conform to society), and thus remaining a puppet that never truly becomes autonomous.
Each person has a shadow, an unconscious element which they repress. It is usually ugly and violent, but making friends with your shadow is essential to individuation.
Crowd Psychology
The more we subscribe to groups, the more we lose our individuality, and instead adopt the soul of the group.
What unites organic groups is a common hatred for something.
What unites artificial groups(the army) is a common love for something.
At the root of all of our behavior are the sexual, aggressive, and acquisitive impulses. These are tamed by laws and tradition in favor of a well-functioning society.
The only thing keeping people in concerts from tearing each other apart is their common love for the musician on the stage.
The Oedipal Complex
The Oedipal Complex describes a situation where man repressed his instinct to sleep with his mother, because he fears castration from the father, and this is a secret he has to live with for the rest of his life, but in his dreams, this impulse shows up every night.
Freud believed that the Oedipus Complex was real, but Freud’s relationship to his own mother was very different from Jung’s relationship with his. Jung didn’t buy the whole idea of the Oedipal Complex.
Subjectivity
It turns out the psychoanalysts of the past were not very objective about things. They claimed to be scientific, but their theories were more informed by their own lives and philosophical influences than anything concrete.
There was quite a bit of criticism against the psychoanalytic movement when it first started, particularly by religious men who refused to assign the psychoanalyst the role of “keeper of secrets.”
Given how little we know about our minds, even with the advance of science, the use of subjective analysis to characterize the human mind may not have been an accident.
Unmasking
Behavior that is marked by exaggerated empathy for mankind is disguised resentment.
The human mind is made up of the id, the ego, and the superego. The id is immoral, the ego tries to be moral, and the superego is hyper-moral and can be as cruel as the id.
Part of the job of psychoanalysis is the strengthen the ego and to weaken the superego.
