Beebe’s ISFP Freud and his contribution to Depth Psychology
Author: Christopher Chayban
Freud is seminal in the sense that he was essentially one of, if not the first people in the west to understand the psyche in a modular way. Janet came close with his empirical facts, but he charted out and defined elements separately and clearly but were not necessarily integrated into a cohesive whole. Interesting to think of Freud and his model in relation to his psychological type, that John Beebe has worked out to be “ISFP,” which is to say Introverted Feeling dominant with an Auxiliary Extraverted Sensation. John has done all the leg work in this regard, so I’m can’t say that this is my idea in the least. But I would like to open with this and comment on John’s discovery of Freud’s type (which has inspired me to analyze him from this lens) and provide my own interpretation to how Freud’s model “fits” aspects of his type.
It’s interesting to look at Freud’s model of the psyche from his typology because the component parts reflect a great deal of “preferences” or “intentions” that can be found. As Jung has aptly alerted to us to, that each man’s opus is really a confession of his own subjective psychology. So in Freud’s model, we see Introverted Feeling morality and Extraverted Sensation reality and sexuality, with a little bit of Introverted Intuition in the Oedipus complex (as John Beebe points out) and an inferior function of Extraverted Thinking was criticized for not being “scientific enough.”
We start with his concept of the “Super Ego” which speaks volumes about Freud in two ways. One of course, in relation to his psychological type, the Super Ego being his “Superior Function” and perhaps even an inflated aspect of Freud’s ego. A super “I” or super “Me” of Introverted Feeling. It’s Introverted Feeling because it has to do with one’s own personal morality i.e. one’s own conscience, which puts a subjective value judgment upon the criteria about how one should act or be in order for the ego to have a free and clear “conscience.” The second part to this is Freud’s Jewish background Jung said has a “Yahwistic” mythology or flavor to this conscience principle of the Super Ego.
Freud’s concept of the “censor” I presume was a protector from “naughty” thoughts. How much of this censor was clientele psychology and how much of it was Freud’s psychology? If Freud was known for fitting the facts to fit the theory, I am going to say it’s not too far off to say that it was the latter. I think this notion of “good” and “bad” creates more inhibition, which to me seems to be the opposite of “free association.” Could the free association method have been born out of the compensation to Freud’s censor concept? What I’m saying is, was Freud living vicariously through his patients? Did he want to free associate? Is that why he was so quote “bold” in writing about sexuality? Freud himself like wanted to be finally free of a morally inhibited world, the world of the uber ich (Super Ego) is the realm of free dissociation and repression. Uber means “over” in German. The “Over I,” lords over you, watching you, judging you. It is the censor of consciousness that intervenes like the censor of the dream. But still, I see it as part of Freud’s psychology. Freud himself was a censor despite the feeling of freedom from societal norms and religion. Freud tried to inhibit Jung and other followers, who all eventually broke away. Freud had psychized himself into a concept of the censor in his model. Thought he knew it not. Perhaps the censor represented Freud’s attempt also to control himself. His cocaine addiction is not to go unnoticed. The constant dance between being free and being regulated pervaded Freud and seemed to be a core of his personality.
So why did Freud emphasize guilt, censorship and feelings, and Jung emphasized things like alchemy, active imagination and the Self? I think it’s a matter of typology. Guilt is an issue of morality. You feel guilty by way of your conscience and morality is subjective to you and your values. What is that Freud felt guilty about? Did the alleged story of seeing his parents shape his whole model of psychology? Are we always at the mercy of other’s trauma that indeed too, forms our experiences and guides that we follow? My morality tells me to feel bad for Freud. He actually seemed like a gentle man who took blows and didn’t fight back. He looks crippled and insecure in his pictures but nevertheless keeps chugging on with his work that is contributed to the work we are studying now with Jung.
The ego for Freud served as what he called “reality” testing. Jung tells us that sensation tell us that something “is,” which is also to say that something “is there or isn’t there,” or “Is real or isn’t real. Freud was not a fan of religion or spirituality, despite using some of those aspects for his psychology. Perhaps it didn’t pass the “reality testing” of his ego. Like a concerned elder, he didn’t want Jung to go down the path of the “mystic.” Jung didn’t see himself as a mystic, nor was he going to let Freud tell him what to do. Nevertheless, Freud still enforced this reality principle and tried elucidating this principle by explaining it through the sexual instinct/principle to show that unconscious was nothing but neurotic sexual frustration (Discovery of the Unconscious pg.487) and stages of maturity.
That “Libido” or psychological energy was sexual energy that would become blocked during different stages. Freud before Jung had his own typology that was aimed differentiating the different stages of sexual maturity. He mapped out four types, the Oral, Anal, Phallic and Genital Personality types based on blocked Libido.
The Oral Personality was fixated (as you might imagine) on fulfilling the pleasure principle through the mouth, i.e. eating, drinking, smoking etc. (Psychoanalysis in Theory and Practice pg.112). It is as if the infant had lacked a “good breast” from the mother, so it seeks surrogate breasts to get the nourishment it lacked.
The Anal personalities like to control situations and have order. Freud thought that the withholding and releasing of feces in childhood produced this type of personality. If they released their “grip” so to speak, it would be a gift to you or the parent and if they didn’t, then you weren’t worthy enough for them to give up the control. (Psychoanalysis in Theory and Practice pg.113).
The Phallic Personalities tended to be more narcissistic or egotistical and tending towards homosexuality. (Psychoanalysis in Theory and Practice pg.114) I imagine Freud’s thinking on this is that narcissism, is being in love with one’s self and that relationships with the same gender would further enforce or be a reflection of that. Now, these theories and personality types have been discredited and the last one, the “Genital Personality” was the only one in which he thought had reached sexual maturity enough to have a monogamous relationship. (Psychoanalysis in Theory and Practice pg.114). This seems to be part of the spirit of the times, where heterosexual relationships were the highest ideal. The strive to be “normal” to which it seems like something that no one ever truly ever attains.
I haven’t talked much about Freud’s concept of the unconscious. The “Id’ or the pleasure principle for him, is part of an unconscious wish fulfillment that is censored by the Ego (especially in the dream) which causes certain contents to be repressed. These repressions are based on “morality” or an aspect “introverted feeling” that turns in to what the Jungian’s like to call the “shadow.” Where all our bad parts go and the “good” parts remain up there in the light with the ego, and Super Ego. Some contents, like a person’s name, were considered to be “pre-conscious” or readily available to use upon command. Freud’s theory of the unconscious, like Janet, remained mostly at the level of the personal unconscious, to which Jung exploded it further to a much wider collective unconscious. Adler added a power drive to Freud’s sexual drives. Jung stripped libido from Freud’s insistence on the neurosis of sexuality.
Lastly, I would like to mention how Freud viewed neurosis. Freud saw neurosis as mainly sexual in nature and as a conflict between the ego and the id.
(Psychoanalysis in Theory and Practice pg.117). The ego has “defenses” or “resistances” to protect against being swallowed up by the id. This neurosis could be analyzed through what Freud called the “transference” where the analysand transfers to the analyst emotions experienced in childhood toward parents or other important figures. (Psychoanalysis in Theory and Practice pg.115-116). This would evolve into what Jung called the father-imago (Psychoanalysis in Theory and Practice pg.120) or mother imago, which later would become the images of the Father and Mother archetypes.
Freud, even though his theories couldn’t hold up scientifically, they still bore the seed concepts psychologically that would be later evolved and elaborated into the empirical psychologies that we use now.
I can’t believe how Freudian Jung is, from his model of the psyche, to his typology, to even the idea of Libido. Jung’s originality is slowly being stripped away; he clearly drew from his predecessors.
Resources:
Beebe, J. (n.d.). A New Model in Psychological Types. Lecture presented at A New Model of Psychological Types in The C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.
Ellenberger, H. (2006). The discovery of the unconscious: The history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry. New York: Basic Books.
Psychoanalysis in Theory and Practice. Chapter 5.
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