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Explore an introduction to Freud an his theories

Freud, Sigmund (1856 - 1939) Freud developed the theory and practice of psycho-analysis, one of the most influential schools of psychology and psychotherapy of the twentieth century. He established with his patients a relationship which maximized information relevant to the interpretation of their behaviour, and this enabled him to find explanations of dreams, symptoms, and many other phenomena not previously related to desire. In consequence he was able radically to extend our commonsense psychology of motive. On Freud's account the significance of everyday actions is determined by motives which are far more numerous and complex than people are aware, or than commonsense understanding takes into account. The most basic and constant motives which influence our actions are unconscious, that is, difficult to acknowledge or avow. Such motives are residues of encounters with significant persons and situations from the past, often reaching back to early childhood; and they operate not to achieve realistic satisfaction, but rather to secure a form of pacification through representation, discussed below. This understanding of the mind enabled Freud to give psychological accounts of neurosis and psychosis, and to explicate how the past gives significance to the present in normal mental functioning. This entry sketches some of Freud's main hypotheses. References to Freud (1958) are by volume and page, and further information about italicized terms can be found in Laplanche and Pontalis (1973). Some of the main extensions and revisions which later analysts have made to Freud's hypotheses are described in PSYCHOANALYSIS, DOCTRINES. 1. Early life and research. 2. Collaboration with Breuer. 3. Investigation of sexual abuse. 4. Dreams and wishfulfilment. 5. Transference, childhood conflict, and sexuality. 6. Phantasy and primary process. 7. Psychology and the brain. 8. Psychic structure and function. y9. Social psychology. 1. Early life and research. Freud was born in Freiburg, Moravia, in 1856, the first son of the third wife of a travelling wool merchant. In 1861, the year after Austria abolished legal restrictions on Jews, the family settled in Vienna, where Freud remained until the Nazi occupation. As a student at the Medical School of the University of Vienna he attended lectures by the physiologist Ernst Bruke, which set out the Darwinian and physicalistic approach to nature associated with the school of Helmholtz. Shortly afterwards Freud began research in Bruke's laboratory, and within a year published the first of many articles on the nervous system. On becoming engaged Freud found that he could not support a family through neurological research. He prepared for medical practice at the General Hospital of Vienna, working also in Meynert's Institute of Cerebral Anatomy. His publications on disorders of the nervous system led to an appointment as Lecturer in Neuropathology, and in 1885 he was awarded funds to study in Paris under Charcot (I, 5), whose work on hysteria included the use of hypnosis for producing and removing symptoms. Here Freud made his first characteristic psychological observation, noting that the regions of the body liable to hysterical paralysis or anaesthesia did not correspond to real functional demarcations. Hysteria, as it seemed, knew nothing of anatomy (I, 49). 2. Collaboration with Breuer. Freud's psychoanalytic work was based on a discovery by his seniorcolleague Joseph Breuer. Breuer's patient Anna O., diagnosed as hysterical, was an exceptionally intelligent and articulate woman, who enquired with him into her symptoms in great detail. They found that each symptom had meaningful connections with significant but forgotten events, related to feelings which she had neither expressed nor mastered. When she recovered these her symptoms were eased. Thus one symptom was an aversion to drinking: despite 'tormenting thirst', she would push away a glass of water 'like someone suffering from hydrophobia' (II, 34). Under hypnosis she traced this to an episode in which she had remained silent while a companion let a dog, a 'horrid creature', drink water from a glass. After reliving this and expressing her disgust she drank without difficulty. Again, a range of symptoms -- hallucinations, paralyses, and disturbances of speech -- were similarly related to experiences which had distressed her while she nursed her father in his fatal illness; when she went through these with Breuer the symptoms were relieved. The research of Charcot and others had indicated that hysterical symptoms could be understood in psychological terms, and that they were sometimes related to emotional trauma. Although Breuer's patient relapsed before finally recovering, his observations suggested two further more specific hypotheses. First, that symptoms expressed memories and feelings associated with significant forgotten events; and secondly, that symptoms could be relieved by a cathartic therapy, which enabled patients to relive these events, thereby working through feelings connected with them. So Freud followed Breuer's example, and began questioning his patients about their lives and feelings in great detail. In this he abandoned hypnotism, and for a time substituted a technique, derived from Bernheim, of pressing patients to remember significant events (II, 109ff). His experience corroborated Breuer's sufficiently for them to publish a series of case reports arguing that 'hysterics suffer mainly from [unconscious] reminiscences' (II, 7). 3. Investigation of sexual abuse. As his research progressed, Freud found that an important range of the memories connected with symptoms were sexual, and went back in time. Under the pressure of his technique, indeed, a number of his patients recovered apparent memories of sexual abuse from early childhood. And as he pressed further, in a series of female patients, the role of abuser was consistently assigned to the father. (This experience has been repeated by a number of therapists in the United States.) In considering these scenes of seduction, however, Freud finally concluded that while parental abuse could be a factor in causing neurosis, it was not as widespread as the readiness of patients to recollect it might suggest. For, as he noted, there seemed to be 'no indications of reality in the unconscious', so that 'one cannot distinguish between truth and [emotionally charged] fiction', where this could include 'sexual fantasy [which] seizes on the theme of the parents.' (I, 260; see also Masson 1985, p. 265). Hence, it seemed, the primary cause of symptoms might be found in activity of the imagination. These events also led Freud to change his therapeutic technique. It had became apparent both that he had to guard against effects of suggestion, and also that the most relevant and reliable material tended to emerge not when patients were pressed for memories, but rather when they expressed their thoughts and feelings spontaneously. So he began asking his patients simply to communicate each idea or thought which occurred to them as fully as possible, and without regard to whether it seemed significant, sensible, or morally acceptable. This kind of immediate and unconstrained self-description, which Freud called free association, led both to the topics previously found important by questioning, and to others not yet investigated. Since this procedure maximized the data relevant to understanding his patients, Freud made it the fundamental rule of psychoanalytic treatment. 4. Dreams and wishfulfilment. During this period Freud observed that dreams, like symptoms, could be understood as related to memories and motives which emerged in free association. In investigating dreams, moreover, he could make use of his own case. He thus began his self-analysis, applying to himself the interpretive techniques he applied to his patients. As this progressed, Freud saw that his and Breuer's findings about symptoms were better understood on the model he was developing for dreams. In consequence he was able to frame an account of both dreams and symptoms which was relatively simple and unified, and which he published in The Interpretation of Dreams (IV, V). Further, as he soon saw, this account could be extended to other products of the mind, including slips and errors (VI), jokes (VIII), and works of art (I, 263ff; IX). Freud's discussion of dreams thus constituted a paradigm by which he consolidated his first phase of psychoanalytic research. We can see some main features of this by considering the first dream he analysed, his own dream of Irma's injection (IV, 106). In this dream Freud met Irma, a family friend whose pains he had diagnosed as hysterical and treated by analysis. He told her that if she still felt pains, this was her own fault, for not accepting his 'solution' to her problems. He became alarmed, however, that he had failed to diagnose an organic cause of her suffering, and this turned out to be so. A senior colleague M examined Irma, and found that she was organically ill. The cause of her illness also became manifest: another of Freud's colleagues, his family doctor Otto, had given her a toxic injection. As the dream ended Freud censured Otto firmly, saying that 'Injections of that kind ought not to be made so thoughtlessly' and 'probably the syringe had not been clean.' On the surface this dream dealt with topics which were unpleasant to Freud, such as the continued suffering of a friend and patient, and the possibility that he had misdiagnosed an organic illness, which he described as 'a constant anxiety' to a doctor offering psychological therapy. Freud's associations, however, made clear that the dream represented these things in a way which was actually in accord with various of his desires or wishes. For Freud remembered that the day before the dream he had discussed Irma with Otto, who had recently visited Irma's family. Otto had been called away to give an injection while at Irma's, and had told Freud that Irma was looking 'better, but not yet well'. Freud imagined that he detected a professional reproof in this remark, considered it thoughtless, and felt vaguely annoyed. That night, in order to justify his treatment of Irma, he had started to write up her case to show to M, who was respected by both himself and Otto, and who appeared in the dream as diagnosing Irma's illness and realising that it was Otto's fault. (Also, as it happened, Freud had just had news indicating that another of his female patients had been given a careless injection by some other doctor, and had been contemplating how safe his own practice with injections was.) In considering this dream Freud noted that his desire to justify himself in respect of Irma's case -- and in particular not to be responsible for her continued suffering -- was apparent from the beginning, in which he told Irma that her pains were now her own fault. Also, he felt that his alarm at her illness in the dream was not entirely genuine. So, as he realised, it seemed that the dream-situation, in which Irma was organically ill, actually served to fulfil a wish on his account: for as he undertook to treat only psychological complaints, this would mean that despite what he had taken Otto thoughtlessly to imply, he and his mode of treatment could not be held responsible for Irma's continued illness. This theme, moreover, seemed carried further in the rest of the dream, in which M found that Otto, not Freud, bore responsibility for Irma's suffering. It thus emerged that the dream could be seen as a deeply wishful response to Otto's remark. For as the dream represented matters, Freud bore no responsibility whatever for Irma's condition. Rather, indeed, Otto was the sole cause of her suffering; and this was the result of Otto's thoughtless practice with injections, a matter about which Freud himself, as he had been considering, was particularly conscientious and careful. The dream thus repaid what Freud felt to be Otto's professional reproof with a charge of serious malpractice on Otto's part. So Freud concluded that the dream was a wishfulfilment, that is, that it was caused by certain of his desires (or irresponsible wishes derived from these desires) and expressed these by representing them as fulfilled. We can bring out the nature of Freud's proposal here by contrasting the way his desire to be clear of responsibility for Irma's suffering operated in his dream as opposed to his intentional action. Schematically, the role of a desire that P in intentional action is to bring about (cause) a situation that P, which both satisfies the desire and pacifies it, that is, causes the desire to cease to operate. Action on a desire that P (that one be cleared of responsibility) should ideally satisfy the desire, that is, should bring it about that P (that one is cleared of responsibility). This, in turn, should cause one to experience and believe that P (that one has been cleared...); and this, perhaps acting together with the satisfying situation, should pacify the desire that P, so that it ceases to govern action. This is roughly the sequence of results which Freud was seeking to produce, in accord with standard medical practice, in writing up Irma's case history on the night of the dream to discuss with M, his respected senior colleague. M would be able to offer an independent and authoritative opinion on Freud's treatment of Irma; so his judgement could partly serve to put Freud, and his mode of therapy, in the clear. In Freud's dream the same motive was apparently also at work, but in a quite different way. There it produced no rational action, but rather gave rise to a (dreamt) representation of a situation in which Freud was cleared of responsibility, and by M. This representation, moreover, was extravagantly wishful -- Irma was made physically ill, Freud was cleared in a great number of ways, Otto was elaborately blamed, and so on. So we can contrast the causal role of desire, as between intentional action and what Freud called wishfulfilment, as follows. In intentional action a desire that P serves to bring about a situation that P, and this a (justified and true) belief that P, so that the desire is pacified. In Freudian wishfulfilment, by contrast, the desire that P causes a wishful representation that P which, although perhaps exaggerated and unrealistic, is experience- or belief-like, so that it serves to pacify the desire directly, at least temporarily. So in rational action we find both the real satisfaction and also the pacification of desire, with the latter a rational and causal consequence of the former; whereas in wishfulfilment we find only imaginary satisfaction, and the pacification which is consequent on this. It seems intelligible that the mind (or brain) should operate in accord with both these patterns, for in both desire is ultimately pacified by the representation of satisfaction. On reflection, indeed, the latter pattern seems almost as familiar as the former. We are aware that our response to a desire or lack is often simply to imagine it satisfied; and this process seems clearly to have other forms. Children, for example, often pacify desires which arise from their being small and immature by representing themselves as various sorts of admired or impressive figures in play. Also it seems clear that many books, films, video games, etc., enable people to imagine gratifying desires which they could not (and often would not) otherwise satisfy. In such cases we speak of make-believe, suspension of disbelief, virtual reality, etc., thereby indicating the way the kind of representation involved is comparable to experience or belief in serving to pacify desire. These patterns of satisfaction and pacification, in turn, play a double role in our understanding of others. When we interpret what others say and do we apply these patterns to explain their behaviour; and insofar as we succeed in understanding others in this way we support the patterns as a kind of empirical generalization. While we recognise that pacification consequent on genuine satisfaction is deeper and more lasting than that effected by representation alone, we also know that human desire so far outruns opportunities for satisfaction that pacification via imagination is common. This is a view which psychoanalysis radically extends. 5. Transference, childhood conflict, and sexuality. Freud found that the motives expressed in dreams and symptoms could be traced back into the past. Also he noted that in the course of analysis his patients were liable to experience towards himself versions of motives and feelings which they had felt towards earlier objects of love and hate, in particular the parents. Freud called this phenomenon transference. Thus a main symptom of his patient the Rat Man (X, 153ff) was involuntarily to imagine his father being punished, by being eaten into from behind by hungry rats. This caused him anxiety and depression, from which he protected himself by the rituals of an obsessional neurosis. He insisted that this symptom did not show hostility towards his father, with whom he had been the best of friends. He could not remember his father having punished him; but as the treatment progressed, he developed a fear that Freud would punish him -- would beat him and throw him out because of the dreadful things he said in his free associations. In discussing these matters with Freud the patient went down to the end of the room, saying that he did so from delicacy of feeling for Freud, to whom he was saying such dreadful things. Freud interpreted, however, that he had moved away because, as he had previously been saying, he was afraid that Freud would beat him. To this he responded like 'a man in desperation and one who was trying to save himself from blows of desperate violence; he buried his head in his hands, rushed away, covered his face with his arms, etc.' (X, 284). He was reliving an episode from his childhood, in which he had lain between his parents in bed and urinated, and his father had beaten and thrown him out. He thus recovered a buried image of his father as a terrifying punishing figure in relation to whom he felt helpless and hostile (X, 209). This in turn made it possible to understand his involuntary imaginings, in which his father suffered such cruel punishments, as wishfulfilments fitting the same pattern as Freud's dream above. Just as Freud's dream could be seen as a wishful and extravagant reversal of the feelings of responsibility prompted by Otto's remark, so this patient's symptom of imagining his father cruelly punished could be seen as a wishful and extravagant reversal of his own feelings as a punished child. But these childhood feelings were re-experienced towards Freud in the transference before being consciously remembered as relating to his father. The childhood motives revealed by analysis characteristically included sensual love for one parent combined with rivalry and jealous hatred for the other, a constellation Freud called the Oedipus Complex. It now appeared that little children were liable to intense psychical conflict, as between desires to harm or displace each parent, envied and hated as a rival for the love of the other, and desires to preserve and protect that same parent, loved sensually and also as a caretaker, helper, and model. Also children apparently attached great emotional significance to their interactions with their parents in such basics of disciplined and co-operative activity as feeding and the expulsion and management of waste. These activities also involved the first use, and hence the first stimulation, of bodily organs or zones -- particularly the mouth, genitals, and anus -- which would later figure in the emotionally significant activities of normal and abnormal sexuality. Analysis indicated that the feelings related to the early uses of these organs had significant continuity with those aroused by their later uses; and on this basis Freud framed an account which systematically linked normal and abnormal sexual phenomena in the development of the individual (VII). In normal development weaker and less acceptable childhood feelings were subjected to a process of repression, which removed them from conscious thinking and planning, so that they could achieve pacification only indirectly. Apart from causing dreams or symptoms, such motives could undergo a process of sublimation, whereby they provided symbolic significance for everyday activities, and could thus be pacified in the course of them (IX, 187, 189). This achievement can be illustrated by a relatively successful teacher and writer, who had been surprised when one of his pupils -- who had made a special effort to be taught by him, and was trying hard to master his ideas -- had unexpectedly offered to suck his penis. He had not accepted this offer, but that night had dreamed that a lamb had come to suck milk from his finger.... On waking he realised that the lamb represented the pupil who had come to imbibe his ideas, and his milk-giving finger the penis his pupil had wanted to suck. So the dream could be seen as representing the fulfilment, in a more acceptable and symbolic form, of a sexual wish which had arisen on the day before. The symbolism, however, went deeper, for the dreamer also represented himself as a mother nursing a child. In this he represented his finger/penis in the role of a feeding breast, and his writing and teaching as the production of milk as well as semen. He thus represented himself as enjoying a combination of feminine nurturance and masculine potency which was impossible in real life, and his desires for which had been repressed in early childhood. Still, these same desires could to some degree be pacified in his adult work, owing to the symbolic significance which he attached to it. In writing or teaching he could with some justice see himself -- to use more familiar metaphors -- as potent and seminal, and at the same time as giving others food for thought. 6. Phantasy and primary process. Psychoanalysts now commonly describe the kind of imaginative representational activity which serves to pacify unconscious desire as phantasy. Phantasies can be shown not only in dreams or symptoms, but any form of activity which has representational significance; and phantasies characteristically realize the psychological mechanisms and processes described in psychoanalytic theory. Thus the phantasy of Freud's patient above -- that Freud was about to give him a beating-- simultaneously implemented his transference onto Freud of emotions originally felt towards his father; the repression of his memory of an episode in which his father had punished and terrified him; and the projection into Freud his own desire to punish, which was apparently related to the episode with his father, and otherwise expressed in his symptom of imagining his father punished. Again, persons form permanent life-shaping phantasies of themselves on the model of others, thereby establishing identifications with those persons, which process Freud took to be central to the constitution of the self. Freud held that the pattern of wishfulfilling representation, in which a desire that P produces a pacifying (and perhaps symbolic) representation that P, marks a primary process in the pacification of desire, whereas the pattern of intentional action, in which a desire that P gives rise to a real action or situation that P, marks a secondary process, to be seen both as developing from the first and occurring in the context of it. We can understand this as the claim that present action characteristically stands in a representational and pacificatory relation to desires from the past. Thus Freud's patient above consciously desired to go to the end of the room partly in response to his unconscious phantasy that Freud, representing his father, was about to beat him; and the author who dreamed of a sucking lamb consciously desired to teach and write partly because these activities unconsciously realized phantasies of taking the role of a feeding mother. That is: a person acting in the present may thereby be representing himself as satisfying, and so may thereby now actually be pacifying, desires which have remained unsatisfied from early childhood. This representational perspective on action also yields a new account of the phenomenon of desire. Frustrated desires, even those of infancy, are not psychologically lost; rather they are continually re-articulated through symbolism, so as to direct action towards their representational pacification throughout life. In this Freud provides both a radically holistic account of the causation of action and a naturalistic description of the generation of meaning in life. New goals acquire significance as representatives of the unremembered objects of our earliest and most visceral passions; and the depth of satisfaction we feel in present accomplishments flows from their unacknowledged pacification of unknown desires from the distant past. Thus, paradoxically, significant desires can remain forever flexible, renewable, and satisfiable in their expressions, precisely because they are immutable, frustrated, and unrelenting at the root. 7. Psychology and the brain. Freud's initial research was on the nervous system, and in his Project for a Scientific Psychology (I, 283ff) he sketched a version of physicalism -- an account of psychological processes as neural processes -- which could accommodate his psychological findings. He took the brain to operate by transferring excitation through networks of neurons, so that information was stored in the form of facilitations or inhibitions of the interneural links. Hence, as he put it, 'psychic acquisition generally', including memory, would be 'represented by the differences in the facilitations' of neural connections. [I, 300] In this he anticipated the contemporary conception of the brain as a computational device whose 'knowledge is in the connections' among neuronal processing units [Rumelhardt et al 1988, 75], and also the associated view of mental processes as forms of neural activation, and mental states as dispositions to these, or structures determining them. [See Glymour 1992; and also CONNECTIONISM] In Freud's model the signalling of a bodily need -- say for nutrition in an infant -- causes a disequilibrium in neural excitation. This at first results in crying and uncoordinated bodily movements, which have at best a fleeting tendency to stabilise it. Better and more lasting equilibration requires satisfaction, e.g. by feeding; and this causes the facilitation of the neural connections involved in the satisfying events. The brain thus constantly lays down neural records, or prototypes, of the sequences of perceptions, internal changes, bodily movements, and so on, involved in the restoration of equilibrium by satisfaction. Then when disequilibrium again occurs -- e.g. when the infant is again hungry -- the input signals engage previously facilitated pathways, so that the records of the best past attempts to cope with comparable situations are naturally reactivated. This, Freud hypothesised, constitutes early wishfulfilment. Freud thus identified the wishfulfilling pacification of infantile proto-desire with a form of neural prototype activation. [For a recent account of this notion see Churchland 1995]. He took it that this served to stabilize and organise the infant's responses to need, by reproducing those previously associated with satisfaction. Then as the infant continued to lay down prototype upon prototype, the original wishful stabilizations evolved towards a system of thought, while also coming to govern a growing range of behaviour, increasingly co-ordinated to the securing of satisfaction. This, however, required the brain to learn to delay the activation of prototypes of past satisfactions until present circumstances were perceptually appropriate -- that is, to come into accord with what Freud called the reality principle. This in turn depended upon a tolerance of frustration, and the absence of a satisfying object, which permitted reality testing, and hence the binding of the neural connections involved in the securing of satisfaction to perceptual information about the object, and later to rational thought. This benign development could, however, be blighted, if frustration (or intolerance of it) led to the overactivation of inappropriate prototypes, and this to greater frustration. Such a process could render the mind/brain increasingly vulnerable to disequilibrium and delusion, and hence increasingly reliant on wishfulfilling modes of stabilisation, in a vicious circle constitutive of mental illness. 8. Psychic structure and function. Freud allocated the task of fostering the sense of reality to a hypothetical neural structure, or functional part of the mind, which he called the 'das Ich', or the ego. (The literal meaning of Freud's phrase is 'the I'; but the Latin pronoun used in the English translation has now acquired a life of its own.) In his final conceptualisations he linked this structure with two others, the super-ego, which judged or criticised the ego, and which included the ego-ideal, representing the ideals or standards by which the ego was judged; and the primitive 'it', or id, the natural matrix of basic and potentially conflicting instincts or drives -- that is, structures which would yield basic emotions and motives for action -- out of which these others developed (XXI, 3ff; XXIII, 144ff). His late discussions of these notions are particularly difficult, partly because they combine differing modes of explanation. Overall the ego, super-ego, and id are neural systems described in a functional way (XX, 194), that is, in terms of the goals which their operation secures and the information upon which they operate. This kind of explanation has been refined in contemporary cognitive science, in which distinct functional units are often represented by boxes, in a flow chart which describes the contribution of each boxed unit to psychological functioning overall. In his later work Freud sought to combine this mode of explanation with the empirical claim that the main functional systems of the human mind are partly constituted by the mind's internalized representations of significant persons in the environment, particularly the parents. Hence the working of these systems is partly felt, and can partly be described, via the motives, feelings, or actions of the imagos of persons which they embody. Freud took the drives constituting the id as divisible into two main categories: those which engender motives which are creative and constructive, such as affection, love, and care, which he called the life instincts; and those which yield motives linked to aggression, such as envy and hate, which he called the destructive or death instincts. The sexual drives (or motives), together with those aimed at self-preservation, were among the life instincts generally; but owing to their great plasticity they were liable to be mixed with aggression, as in the case of sadism, masochism, devaluation of the object of love, etc. His final view was thus that the primary conflicts in a person's life -- those which necessitated repression and could become constitutive of mental illness -- might involve sexuality, but were ultimately to be seen as holding between impulses to create or destroy. On Freud's account the ego and super-ego develop out of the id, mainly through the child's formative identifications with others, particularly the parents. The child ordinarily begins to advance towards self-control by laying down prototypes of the parents, in their role as regulators of socially significant primitive bodily activities, particularly, as noted, those involved in feeding and the elimination of waste. These 'earliest parental imagos' (XXII, 54) provide the basis of the super-ego. This self-critical faculty embodies the child's aggression in a projected form, and so tends to be far more punitive than the actual parents. Hence it can be a source of great anxiety or guilt, or even, in the extreme, of suicide. (Compare the material in ó5 above, which might also be described as involving projection of the patient's punitive superego.) The child further constitutes its ego by identifying with the parents as agents, that is, as desirers and satisfiers of desire. A main step in normal development is identification with the parent of the same sex, which has the consequence that sexual (and other) desires are rendered non-incestuous, heterosexual, and reproductive. For this to occur, however, the child must renounce the goal of replacing the envied parent with that of becoming like him or her. Hence the final establishment of the ego and super-ego coincides with what Freud called the dissolution of the Oedipus Complex. 9. Social Psychology. Freud held that the cohesiveness of many groups results from their members identifying with one another by putting a common idealized figure (or cause or creed) in the place of the ego-ideal (XVIII, 67ff). Groups may likewise be identified by the projection of their bad aspects -- and in particular their own hostile and destructive motives -- into some common locus, which thereby becomes a focus of collective and legitimated hate. This may be a particular figure, such as the devil, or another family, race, or nation, the leaders of which may also be denigrated or demonized. People who identify themselves with the same idealized object, or who represent a common object as hateful, can thereby feel purified, unified, and justified in co-operating in destructive activities validated by common ideals. Identification by the projection of good or bad aspects into a common locus thus serves systematically to organize persons into groups which represent themselves as unrealistically good and others as unrealistically bad; and this in turn allows aggressive and destructive motives to be entertained and satisfied with a minimum of indirectness and guilt. This pattern of good us/bad them is shared by most participants in the great variety of human conflicts which it encourages. Where groups are organized on this basis their rational disagreements tend to be underlain and exaggerated by suspicions and hatreds which can be seen to be irrational, but which remain nonetheless intractable, insofar as they are integral to group cohesion. Ginny Watkins Oct 1996

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