Understanding the Psyche
In the period which historians usually call the 'Enlightenment' there was a movement away from understanding more or less everything on the basis of a given authority (usually associated with the medieval church) towards a purely rational way of thinking.
Freud is the best known name of those who tried to analyze the human condition in this totally rationalistic way. He gave the names 'id' and 'ego' and 'super-ego' in his analysis of our psychic apparatus. Actually he gave the names in his natural language of German, but when they were translated into English, the 'it', the 'I', and the 'over-I', did not sound technical terms enough, so in English we got the Latin equivalents. Freud also referred to the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious, elements of the mind.
Freud was aware (aren't we all?) of the tensions arising from our natural desire for the necessities of life (to satisfy our need to be fed and sheltered, and so on) and he called this the 'id'. In opposition to this natural urge is our conscience that advises the reality that we cannot just take whatever happens to be at hand (it might belong to someone else). This aspect of our being he called the 'super-ego'. It is within our very selves, the 'ego' in us, that the tension between wanting and having, the constraints of the society we live in, is played out. Freud, trained as a medical doctor, saw the tension we all see being worked on, from the infant who grabs whatever there is, and the educational process, mainly from parents, of tempering the natural with the moral. He saw this developing process as going through these stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital, the last being reached at puberty. He proposed that many psychotic difficulties could be explained by repressed events of a sexual nature which had occurred much earlier, but were now lodged in the subconscious and needed to be brought to the surface. He is famous for originating the idea of the Oedipus complex (a boy's sexual desire for his mother) and the Electra complex (a girl's desire for her father). He also believed that dreams could be used as symbolic evidence of what was going on in a person's subconscious.
Another founding father of modern psychoanalysis was Carl Jung, and he gave much more attention to the spiritual side of life. He introduced the concepts of extroversion and introversion as categories of mental orientation. Wikipedia comments: 'Jung's work on himself and his patients convinced him that life has a spiritual purpose beyond material goals. Our main task, he believed, is to discover and fulfill our deep innate potential. Based on his study of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, Taoism, and other traditions, Jung believed that this journey of transformation, which he called individuation, is at the mystical heart of all religions. It is a journey to meet the self and at the same time to meet the Divine.'
There were other followers of these early proponents of psychoanalysis, all with different emphases around the central tenets originated by Freud, but the main difficulty they all had was scientific verification of these hypotheses. Control groups, essential for systematic testing of medical hypotheses, are virtually impossible within the framework of psychoanalysis. You can do it with drugs, but how can you do it with talking?
As a postscript to this bald summary of the origins of psychoanalysis it is now possible to read a book called 'Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire' written by Hans Jürgen Eysenck, who believed very strongly that understanding of personality should be fully scientific in its methodology.
More recently cognitive psychology focuses more on the mind rather than the psyche. It investigates the mental processes of attention, language use, memory, perception, mimicry, problem solving, creativity, and thinking. More on this later.
All attempts to understand the human condition recognize the dichotomy between our conscious and our sub/un-conscious, and character variations such as introvert and extrovert. We talk of autism, schizophrenia, and paranoia, with many phobias defined under the general heading of psychic disorders. Within modern psychiatry there are different schools of thought, different terminology, and different views on diagnosis and treatment. Can psychotic problems be best treated by counseling or drugs, or a combination of both?
The trouble with psychiatry is that it focuses on what, as the word's derivation actually means, may be called a 'sickness of the soul'. To be able to define something as a sickness one needs first to make a judgment of what is 'normal'. This often means making a value judgment: what is good, what is bad? There is a noticeable tendency in recent times to describe certain patterns of behavior as an illness, which in former times would simply have attracted the epithets 'good' and 'bad'.
Anyone who taught in schools as I did during the 1960s will remember what we then called bad or disruptive behavior. We treated it as controllable naughtiness, and the sanctions (deterrents) were primitive – if usually quite effective. Nowadays we have the same behavior classified as a disorder (illness): attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD for short). The treatment? If you have the time and trained staff available, counseling, but why not simply give them a drug to manage their naughtiness, sorry, disorder?
In fact, if you thought that calling naughtiness a disorder a bit over the top, how about 'oppositional defiant disorder' (ODD) which has now (2013) been added to the list in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association? I will resist the temptation to make the obvious pun.
Yes, I recognize that these comments reveal my generational distance from modern approaches, and who am I to say they are wrong?
As a remedy for my own ignorance on this subject I have been reading Iain McGilchrist's books about the 'divided mind' ('The Master and His Emissary', and the much shorter and less technical 'The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning'). This has led me to explore in some depth the whole subject of neuroscience, and how it can help us understand how the psyche actually works in modern scientific terms.