Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud was born to a middle class jewish family in 1856. His professional life at first wasn't a success at first. As a medical student he did things such as dissect eels to try and find their reproductive organs (unsuccessfully) and even promoted cocaine as a medical drug but that turned out to be a dangerous and addictive idea. Years later after this he founded the discipline that would make his name; the psychological medicine that he called psychoanalysis. This landmark study was his 1900 book "the interpretation of dreams" and was followed by many more afterwards.

Despite his success however he himself was often unhappy himself; even recording in some of his most strenuous research "the chief patient I am pre-occupied with, is myself". He suffered with anxieties and paranoia particularly about the year he would die. It has been led to believe that through his own frustrations, Freud achieved a series of great insights to the sources of human unhappiness. He proposed that humans are all driven by something called the pleasure principle; which inclines us towards easy,psychical and emotional rewards.

As infants humans are mostly driven by the pleasure principle as argued by freud. but if left to wander without any restraints it can lead to things such as eating too much or not doing any work or even go to such extremes as trying to sleep with members of your own family. Humans are supposed to adapt to something that freud called the reality principle; the ability of the mind to assess the reality of the external world, and to act upon it accordingly, as opposed to acting on the pleasure principle. Though humans have to bow to the reality principle, Freud believed there were better or worst kind of adaptions. He called the troublesome ones neuroses.

Neuroses are the results of faulty negotiatians (or repression of) the pleasure principle. Freud described a conflict between 3 parts of the mind. The Id-driven by the pleasure principle, The superego;driven by the desire to follow the rules and do the right think according to society and the ego; which somehow has to accommodate between the other two. To understand more, freud advised to think back to the origins of neuroses in childhood.

When growing up humans go through something called the oral phase; where humans deal with feelings toward ingestion of eating.
 

Lacan

Lacan Theory

Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who came from a religious family but instead of following that religion he was an atheist, stopping believing in the ideals of god at a young age and instead became obsessed with philosophy and mathematics; even going on to study medicine and specialise in psychiatry at university. Lacan wrote many essays and published transcripts of the seminars he gave and presented his ideas in complex ways and and often used mathematical equations and diagrams to explain them. Lacan made some great understanding to the complexity of humans.

He was deeply interested in the ideal of children minds and even delved into what he called the mirror phase; the idea the first time a child recognises themselves in the mirror and having the moment of knowing its them. The mirror phase can be quite unsettling because the face in the mirror doesn't always look as we humans feel.

This concept meaning that on the inside we are full of many different things and have a wide stream of consciousness; made up of speeding thoughts, desires and images. As humans we're chaotic, ever-changing and ambivalent to the core. However on the outside we seem like stable entities with composed features that portray almost nothing about whats going on within. Theres only words to be able to describe how we feel but most of the time they fail to do justice to our real intentions.

In conclusion the image in the mirror is far more one dimensional than the entity that beholds it. This can lead to a problem that follows humans throughout life and not just stay in the childhood. As adults humans long for other to understand us in the deepest ways but Lacans theory prepares us to face the darker possibility that people you encounter will be stuck on the outside of us and assuming us to just be as you seem to the eye and nothing more. This can lead to humans changing who they are entirely by changing their appearance to appear one way other than what they really are on the outside. For example the whole fashion industry rides on this due to humans changing their external appearances, tinkering with what people see such as hair or the design of clothes in hopes that eventually we will be properly understood.

However Lacan's theory suggests a difficult and somewhat more mature move: that we accept that other people will never experience us the way we experience ourselves and that us as humans will be almost entirely misunderstood and therefore will in turn almost entirely misunderstand.