Freud – Hysterical Paralysis as a proof of the unconscious mind (Part 3)

Do you know what paralysis is? 
Some of you might watch a TV show called Glee.  You might recognise this character Artie.  Artie is in a wheelchair.  He is paralysed from the waist down.Artie the character was born this way.
Something went wrong when he was still developing in his mother’s womb and the part of his spine that would have made him able to walk didn’t develop properly.


If you like old movies you might remember this guy – Christopher Reeve.  He was famous for playing Superman.  In 1995, while competing in a Horse Riding competition, he was thrown from his horse and he broke his spine.  Because of that injury, he became paralysed from the neck down.  

Sometimes people contract a bacterial or viral infection that leads to a condition called meningitis.  The membranes surrounding the brain become infected and this may stop the blood flow to the brain.  In some instances the lack of blood causes damage to the part of the brain that controls walking and movement and people become paralysed.

As we can see in these cases above – the paralysis was caused by a physical or observable reason – either a genetic deformity, physical injury or a disease.  In ordinary paralysis we can pin point exactly what has caused the paralysis.

However in some cases of paralysis – there are no observable or physical reasons why the person seems to be paralysed.  The person is not faking the paralysis – in some instances doctors have held a burning candle under a woman’s "paralysed" arm and she didn’t flinch at all.  Neither has the person been injured in some way, nor has the person contracted or show any signs of disease.  Freud called that kind of paralysis – HYSTERICAL PARALYSIS.

But why would a person with no injury, no sign of disease and who was born with the ability of movement suddenly become paralysed out of the blue?  How can we possibly explain that?
Take a look at this peculiar case.  

The 19th Century was an uncomfortable time in history for women.  Woman were not as free as they are today, women were not allowed to vote in most places and couldn’t do things like open bank accounts in their own name or have control over their own finances.  In fact, if you were born a woman in the 19th century, your chance of survival largely depended on finding a husband to support you.  In exchange for that support, it was generally expected that a woman would “earn her keep” by providing sexual services and and bearing children for the husband so that his family line could continue.  If a woman was not able to bear children – her life might have been very sad.  No one wanted a woman who couldn’t provide that.  Those kinds of women were left homeless, loveless and unfulfilled.  In truth, if a woman ever found herself in a position like that, it was possible that those would be grounds for divorce – if she couldn’t bear children, her worth as a wife would be nought and the husband could legally divorce her and not be expected to support her.  People would have looked down on her, she could easily find herself in the position of being an outcast, penniless and emotionally broken.  In that time women were also not given the same kind of consideration as men had – a woman’s happiness may not have been as important as it is today.  

  Sometime in the 19th  century, a young woman in her twenties, mother of one child, is brought to Dr Freud.  She seems to be paralysed from the waist down.  The only reason she is referred to Dr Freud is because all the other doctors have no idea what the cause of her paralysis is.  They have done every test imaginable to check whether her paralysis is organic, that means - to see whether she is paralysed because of damage to her spinal cord, or injury to her brain.  She was not paralysed until a few months ago.

Before that she had walked, moved as normally as any other woman or man.  The other doctors were confused – what was causing the paralysis?  The other doctors had heard that in addition to Dr Freud being neuroscientist that was really successful at treating patients for whom other doctors could not find the physical cause for their illness, so finally after trying everything, they asked Dr Freud if he would come and examine the patient and see if there was anything that he could do.

Dr Freud agreed to see the young lady.  He began to talk to her and ask her questions.  He asked whether she had had a fall, whether she had been ill, whether she had problems walking when she was a child, whether prior to her paralysis whether she felt any numbness in her limbs, or whether she had experienced any headaches or pain in her limbs?  To all of his questions, the young lady answered that nothing of the sort had happened.  Dr Freud then began to ask her about general things in her life.  She started to tell him that her parents were dead, and that the only family she had was the family she married into.  She told him she was married to a handsome young man that all the girls admired.  She spoke proudly about her child and how after the child had been born she loved taking care of the child and how happy her husband had been.  She told him that her husband often told her after that child was born, that he wanted her to have more children.  She told Dr Freud that she knew that nothing would make her husband happier than if she were to have more children.  Dr Freud asked her if there was anything unusual about her life before she became paralysed, whether something had disturbed her during her last doctors visit.  She told Doctor Freud that it was strange but that she remembered going to the doctors office but she couldn’t remember anything about the visit so it must have been unremarkable.  She remembered going home and going to bed but nothing more than that, about that day.  After talking for a little while longer, Dr Freud said goodbye and that he would see her again in a few days time.

Dr Freud went back to his office – he thought that he had an idea of what was wrong with the young woman and that it had had nothing to do with a neurological disorder.  So Dr Freud asked her old doctors if there was anything unusual about her first pregnancy.  They told him that she had had a very difficult pregnancy, that she had to be confined to a bed for most of her pregnancy.  They said that when she went into labour she nearly died several times, the stress of childbirth had put her heart under enormous stress and that she had lost a lot of blood.  (Remember that the doctors in those days didn’t have the science, research, invention or technology to either treat those kinds of conditions or stabilise them – in fact in those days they didnt even have things like condoms or the pill to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.)
After she gave birth she was fine again, she healed and she was soon running around the house and taking care of her baby, she would often be seen taking her baby for a walk.  She went back to the doctor to see if enough time had passed for her to try for another baby. It was then that the doctors had told her that it was a very dangerous risk, a bad idea all around.  He said that in her last pregnancy she had been lucky to survive, he said that her body would not be able to take another pregnancy and if she did try to give birth to another baby – that she would die.  In fact the doctors told Doctor Freud that they had advised her that even strenuous intimate contact with her husband would put her heart at risk again and that she could die from that alone.  The Doctors told Dr Freud that it was only a few days after that her husband had asked them to come have a look at her because she couldn’t get out of the bed and that she seemed to be paralysed.
Dr Freud thought about it and suddenly realised why the young woman was paralysed.  She was not suffering from organic paralysis, she was suffering from hysterical paralysis.  Her paralysis had to do with the incredible psychological dilemma that she had to confront.  A dilemma that was too painful for her conscious mind to deal with and that her paralysis was in fact the effect of the work of her unconscious mind trying to help her out.  He proceeded to tell the other doctors exactly what he thought was wrong with this woman.
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Now imagine that you are Dr Freud –

• How would you explain to the other doctors what the function and the effect of the unconscious mind is?
• What would you think would have been the intense psychological dilemma that she faced? 
• Why would the woman be experiencing such conflict over her dilemma?
• Why did the woman not remember anything about her last Doctors visit?
• How did this young woman’s unconscious mind help her out?
• Why does the unconscious mind helo her out by making her paralysed – what purpose would it serve?

Here is the slideshow that Mrs Latecka presented in class

2013 freud and the concept of the unconscious mind from C

Do you get it?!!!!! – Mrs Austin’s Summary of the themes covered in class

This course in Philosophy is not about remembering random stuff.  There is no point to that – what is the use of being able to repeat weird, disconnected, strange things without really understanding them – you would be no smarter than a parrot in the way it randomly call outs - “Golden apples – cats are nice – 3 teabags – give me some shower gel”.  We could never accept that a parrot is smart because it can say a few random things.  Remember – things have to make sense.  If things make sense to you – studying would not be as boring a task as it has a reputation to be.  The people who do say that studying is boring may think that because they have not realised that when you understand something – you dont really have to “learn” anything – you just know it like the way you know how to ride a bicycle.  Every time you get on a bicycle – you don’t have to memorise the way to ride a bicycle do you?  You just know how to do it – there is no more effort than it takes to pedal your way to your destination.  It is the same sort of thing with understanding.  Once you understand something – there is no need for you to actually put more effort other than the effort it takes to think about it.  So before we begin today’s summary – here are some questions that should help you decide whether you have understood what we have been discussing in the last couple of lectures.  If you are unsure of whether you understand what is going on – go back and refresh your memory and then continue with this next bit.  The worst thing you could possibly do is try to make sense of something if you dont understand what come before it.
-  Our overall theme for this year is to discover the various views of what the nature of man is.  Another way of saying this is to say that we are trying to figure out what man is really like, what unique thing about man makes him different to other beings.     If another race from another planet were to abduct you and take you to their leader would you be able to explain what man is like? Different groups of people have different ideas.
- Do you know what the Rationalist Philosophers believe about the nature of man?  Does it make sense to you, why they would think that?  Can you see what it is that makes them have that belief of what man is like? 
- Do the Christian Philosophers have the same idea of what man is like as the Rationalist Philosophers?  Can you see where their belief of what man is like is different from the Rationalist belief of what man is really like?  What is that difference and how does it change the way that man might behave or live his life?
- The next idea we look at is that of the opinion of Freud.  Freud presents a more psychologically based idea of what man is like.  He wants us to accept that what humans are like, is largely determined by things that go on inside them.  In order for us to get an idea of what he means he tells us that all humans have a mind.  He says that the mind has 3 parts – the conscious mind, the preconscious mind and the unconscious mind.  Imagine that you are trying to explain this to a 12 year old child.  How would you explain what the mind is?  How would you explain what the conscious mind is?  How would you explain what the unconscious mind is?
-  To explain this to a child, you might want to make an analogy.  Do you know what an analogy is?  Can you make an analogy for this idea - “John is very ,very strong” ……. you could say:  “John is an ox”  or “John is like a rock” or “John is ……………………..”
- Sometimes the memory of an experience makes its way from conscious awareness to the unconscious mind.  What is the word we use to describe that moving from the conscious mind to the unconscious mind?  Why would a thing like that happen in the first place?
-  Why does Freud talk about funny things that happen like momentary amnesia and Freudian Slips?  What are they?  What is he trying to show us?

Freud: Proving that the Unconscious Mind exists! (Part 2) - Mrs Austin’s summary of the themes covered in class.

Like we discussed in the previous summary – it seems to be quite difficult to prove that a mind exists since we cant see it, touch it or even smell or taste it.  The existence of the conscious mind is relatively easy to prove because we have instant and direct awareness of everything that we are paying attention to or we can directly experience the things that are happening around us in the moment.
The preconscious mind is also easy to prove because we know that there are things stored in our minds that we are not thinking of right now, but if we wanted to – we could bring that thought immediately from the part of the mind that stores it (the preconscious mind) to the part of the mind where we can have direct experience of that thought in the moment (the conscious mind).  For example right now I am not thinking about all the clothes I have in my closet.  But if I wanted to choose something to wear to work tomorrow – I could go quickly to the part of my mind that stores the memory information of which or what kinds of clothes I have in my closet, and when I start thinking about that – that information comes into my conscious mind.
We have access to both the conscious mind and the preconscious mind.  We can directly experience it so we know that is there.  As far as the unconscious mind is concerned though – Freud’s assertion that this big part of the mind that is that part that we are unaware of – makes it’s existence difficult to prove.
So Freud tries to prove that it exists by giving us examples of things in human behaviour that happen that seem to be odd or for which we can’t find directly accessible causes for.
One of the ways he uses to prove that the unconscious mind exists is by explaining the phenomenon of “Freudian slips”.  A Freudian slip is a verbal or memory mistake that you dont mean to make, you have no observable reason to make such a mistake, and even you might not realise that you have made it or are going to make it until after the mistake has been made.  That sounds complicated – so let us look at a few examples of what Freudian slip might sound like:
I once was doing some clerical work at a school I was working at.  Myself, an average looking male teacher and a young, very attractive and sexy teacher were organising school supplies into sets.  The male teacher was responsible for calling out the name of the set and what was in it.  The pretty female teacher was responsible for writing down the items in the set in the inventory logbook.  So it would go something like this – Male Teacher:  “Set B – chalkboard ruler, chalkboard duster, box of chalk….” etc.  The male teacher however kept saying “SEXY – chalkboard ruler, chalkboard duster, box of chalk….”  Once he said it he would get really embarrassed and blush and apologise profusely.  Freud would say that the male teacher saying “Sexy” instead of “Set B” was a Freudian Slip.  Freud would argue that the male teacher obviously found the pretty teacher very attractive and sexy, but at the same time regarded it inappropriate to either act or draw attention to his private thoughts or he might even be nervous that if he expresses his feelings she might reject him.  To deal with the conflict of having feelings and at the same time trying to not acknowledge them, the young man carries on with his work not trying to actively draw attention or concentrate on his feelings.  BUT THOSE FEELINGS ARE THERE and the unconscious mind knows it.  The man is struggling to contain his feelings of attraction so the unconscious mind tries to help out.  Like we talked about in the last summary – the unconscious mind is like your own inner champion, defender, protector and “wingman” – so when he wants to say “Set B” what comes out is actually “sexy” because that is what is in his unconscious mind, and that is the unconscious mind’s childish or irrational way of relieving the tension of having those feelings but not acting on it.
As you can see it can be shown from that example that beyond the explanation of the unconscious mind’s influence on that mistake, there is no real reason why the male teacher should’ve said “sexy” instead of “set B” – they are two different words, with two different meanings and neither of which have anything to do with each other.  So for Freud – the fact that we make “Freudian Slips” in everyday life and that the only way we can explain that is through the effect or influence of the unconscious mind – proves that there must be something like the unconscious mind.  Otherwise how would you explain such a strange mistake?
Another way Freud uses to prove that the unconscious mind exists is through what is known as momentary amnesia.  We will talk about that in Part 3 in the next post.

Freud and the Unconscious Mind – Mrs Austin’s summary of the themes covered in class. (Part 1)

 

We have been talking about different ideas of what the nature of man is.  So far we have looked at what the Rationalist’s view is and what the Christian philosophers view of human nature is.  Now we are looking at what the Freudian view of human nature is.  To begin to understand Freud’s view of human nature is, he starts by telling us that our mind - what it is and how it works gives us a clue to human nature?  Freud says that the mind is made up of three parts that work together – the conscious mind, the preconscious mind and the unconscious mind.  But how do we know that the mind even exists?

• The conscious mind is easily provable, the very fact that we are aware of things around us and are able to interact ,process and respond to information “right here –right now” show us that there is something like a conscious mind that allows us to do that. 

•The existence of the unconscious mind is little more tricky to prove – according to Freud we are unaware of it, for the most part we don’t even know that it is there.

•To prove that the unconscious mind does indeed exist Freud provides us with a model of the mind. We need a model to give us an idea of what the mind is like. Since the mind cannot be seen or touched – the best Freud can do to give us a model of what his idea of what the mind is like is to give us an analogy.

•An analogy is like an example – it is not exactly the same as the thing we want to describe but it is very similar. An analogy is a mental picture that we use to make a difficult thing more understandable or make a concept or an idea clearer.

Examples of other analogies are like this

“I love you- like a hot, burning fire” or “My heart is on fire”

-to communicate the idea of what his love like, the romantic creates a mental picture of how  fiercely and passionately a fire burns. Obviously , neither his heart or his love is an actual fiery inferno. However when he compares it to a hot burning fire, his girlfriend gets an idea of just how intense his love is.

-A popular Nike Advertisement featuring the now infamous Oscar Pistorious – double amputee Olympic sprinter had a picture of Oscar in a sprinting stance – the caption below read: “I am the bullet in the chamber”. If we can imagine how fast a bullet fires from a gun, we can get an idea of how fast Oscar Pistorius can run.

 

-Freud paints a mental picture (makes an analogy) of the mind being like an Iceberg.

-An Iceberg sits in the ocean – only its tip pokes out of the water – this is the part you can see – you have direct awareness of it – it is undeniably there. This part of the Iceberg is like the Conscious  mind. Just like the tip of the Iceberg is the smallest part of the Iceberg, the conscious mind is the smallest part of the mind. You can only concentrate on things happening in the moment with this part of the mind, and it usually is limited to a small amount of things.

The preconscious mind is like the part of the mind that sits just under the water. Some of this part of the Iceberg is visible but it is a little murky. This part of the Iceberg is like the preconscious mind. When the letters “Pre” are at the beginning of a word – it usually means that something comes before – like the word “predict” – to predict something is to know something before it actually happens. So the Preconscious mind contains things that are stored in memory, that are there just before the conscious state of mind. You can access it if you want to - but it is not in your conscious mind yet. When someone asks you what is 2+2? Before they asked you that – the answer to that question was stored in your preconscious mind waiting, when they ask you and you “think” about it – you move the stored memory of the answer to your conscious mind (as mentioned earlier – it becomes something that you are concentrating on right now, and right here)

The biggest part of the iceberg sits deep underwater. If you were in a boat sailing toward it, you wouldn’t know that it was there, but it is there and it is big and it has the power to damage that boat if you would happen to sail over it thinking that because you couldn’t see anything, there was nothing there. This part of the iceberg is like the unconscious mind. It is the biggest part of the mind. It stores a record of everything you have ever seen, done, said or experienced in you life. It has a particular job though – and that job is to store memories of incidents or events in your life that have caused you mental pain, psychological conflict or things that you cannot consciously bear to deal with.

Freud says that certain events can cause mental conflict or dilemma.  When the event causes so much mental distress and conflict that the individual experiencing it might seemingly feel like there is no way to escape or consciously get around the conflict, the unconscious mind in steps in to help the person out.  Right now it might be hard to imagine what kinds of experiences or events would  make the unconscious “freak out” like that.  Perhaps you would be able to understand it better if we made a few examples -

Imagine a situation like this.  Imagine a child is at home one day when she hears a noise that is  frightening – she peeps around the door to see why and what she sees is her father stabbing her mother to death.  The little girl loves her mother, but the little girl also loves her father.  In her mind this might create a mental conflict – on the one hand she loves her father, and trusts him completely and trusts him to love and care for her, on the other hand she has just seen her father do a terrible thing to her mother that she loves and cares about as well.  Her father is good, loving and caring but her father is also a murdering monster.  In her mind this is mental conflict, her conscious mind cannot even begin to deal with the two opposing, contradicting concepts of her father.  In this case the unconscious mind might jump in to help the little girl solve her mental dilemma.

  Here is another less serious example.  A little boy is playing outside his house at night when suddenly he hears a strange noise behind him – when he turns around he sees a grey alien.  The Grey alien reaches out and touches him.  Then the alien turns around and disappears.  The little boy runs into the house and tells everyone what he saw.  But no one believes him and everybody tells him that there are no such creatures, aliens do not exist and in fact they accuse of him of being a liar and a terrible person for trying to get attention with such a story.  They also say that he must be crazy or mad if he belives that that did happen.

The little boy is now in a terrible mental conflict – on the one hand he knows what he saw, he knows what he felt when the alien touched him.  He knows that he had that experience, on the other had everyone around him, including his parents, teachers, older siblings – basically everyone he trusts in the world is telling him that he is wrong, that this didn’t happen, that he is either imagining it or making up a lie.  Such a situation would cause a dilemma or a mental conflict – how can the boy stop himself from knowing what happened to him because everyone is saying that such a thing is impossible.  Even though he feels that he has had that experience – everyone in the world is telling that he has not.  Can you see how that would cause a “mental dilemma”?  Which should he feel – what he thinks happened to him or what everyone else is  telling him – that there is absolutely no way that could have happened to him because aliens do not exist.  In such a case the unconscious mind might jump in to help the boy just so that the boy does not have to deal with the conflict in his mind.   

Lets look at another real life example – a young woman confronted her mother on an episode of a popular reality talk TV show.  The young woman was really upset and resented her mother.  She claimed that she had been abused by her mother’s boyfriend and she told her mother at the time, expecting that her mother would protect her and make the abuse stop.  She had expected her mother to believe her and acknowledge her story as the truth.  She claims that the mother didnt do anything about it and in fact the abuse continued for many years afterward.  The mother on the hand who was also a guest on the show claims that she doesnt remember her child telling her that, that she has no memory of the incident and she didnt know that the abuse was going on.  As the show went on Dr Phil was able to ascertain that the mother faced an impossible dilemma – she too was scared and was being abused by the abuser. The abuser had on previous occassions, made threats to the effect that if the mother had ever ever tried to leave or get him into trouble in any way – that he would torture and kill the daughter and the mother.  The mother was placed in an impossible dilemma – on the one hand she wanted to protect her child from the sexual abuse, on the other hand if she tried to report the abuser, or kick him out, the abuser would torture and kill her daughter.  She did not know consciously how to deal with this.  For Freud it is possible that in the light of such a mental dilemma, that the unconscious mind would step in and try to help the mother out.  The mother’s inability to remember the daughter’s cry for help, or even the mother’s claim that she had no knowledge of the abuse could have been the effect of the mother’s own unconscious mind trying to help her solve an impossible dilemma.

When the unconscious mind “helps the person out” what it effectively does is sort of swallow up and lock away the memory of the dilemma that is causing the mental conflict.  The act of swallowing up and locking away is what Freud calls “repression”.  When we are talking about that happening – we say “the memory is repressed” or “the unconscious mind represses the memory”

The Unconscious mind is like a big vault that keeps the things that are in it securely locked away.  Once something is stored in the unconscious mind you will have no idea that it is there or that you have even had that dilemma.  As we said earlier, the unconscious mind is like a little inner helper or protector.  The unconscious mind thinks that you will no be able to cope or deal with the mental dilemma that is causing conflict so it tries its best to keep you shielded from knowing about it.

Sometimes the way the unconscious mind tries to help you is very irrational.  It is not as rational as the conscious mind which is able to come up with fairly reasonable solutions to problems.  We often say that the unconscious mind is childish.  Stopping someone from remembering that abuse is or has taken place is not a rational solution to the problem.  Sometimes when a child is abused by his or her father, the child loses the ability to speak, there is nothing physically wrong with the child’s vocal cords or her hearing or her tongue.  The loss of speech is usually related to the effect of the unconscious mind trying to protect the child from having to recount or remember the horrible incident.  Its an irrational way of trying to protect the child from reliving the trauma of the incident.  The unconscious mind probably reasons that if the child “talks” about it, the child will be reminded of the trauma and be hurt again.  So to protect the child from re-experiencing the trauma, it will make the child believe that she is mute.  Obviously this is not the best or rational way to help the child, but it tries any way to solve the problem in whatever way it can – which we have now seen to be quite irrational or childishly. 

Mrs Latecka's lecture on Freud and the Unconscious

2013 freud and the concept of the unconscious mind from C

Rationalism and Human Nature

Revised edition of Slideshow shown in class.

The Rationalist and Christian Philosophers perspective on human nature from C

Why are women at a higher risk of contracting HIV?

Here are the slides shown in the APHI112-2012 class today.  Click on the play, forward and back buttons on the slideshow below to go through the slides.

Biovulnerability hiv from C