Psychic apparatus

The psychic apparatus indicates the Esprit. The psychoanalytical designs of the spirit are worked in the article Métapsychologie, while this article describes the design of the psychic apparatus by Sigmund Freud and to its evolution.

Materialism: the spirit Brain

Freud is initially neurologist. He studies the structure of the brain, or central Nervous system, and uses it in order to explain the behavior. In several texts, Freud appears materialist; well far from opposing heart and body, he studies the brain like revealing psychic operation to him.

The scientific project of psychology, works unfinished, attempted to describe the operation of the neuron, tending to discharge (according to the principle of neuronic inertia), like a model of the behavior: the neuronal activity can involve a driving discharge (by the means of a driving neuron) or involve the activity of a nearby neuron. The Synapse is then enough to include/understand the Hystérie.

Freud distinguishes from the neurons related to this activity of conscious representation, of neurons which would be responsible for the memory. A neuron is responsible for a representation (model now abandoned).

These designs freudiennes come from neurological knowledge having courses at its time and which are currently completely exceeded.

It should be noticed that Freud however did not publish the scientific project of psychology. It gave up this model.

What an apparatus, psychic?

The concept of apparatus psychic will be founder of the Métapsychologie freudienne. Why an apparatus?

With what treats the psychic apparatus

The concept of apparatus psychic according to Freud is between the spirit and the brain. The concept of apparatus returns to Freud to the mechanism of inertia. Freud transforms this general principle of physics by creating a specific principle of inertia and constancy.

In this theory Freud explains that the psychic quantity of energy must necessarily remain constant by finding spill modes.

The apparatus thus treats these excitations, information sources, and makes use of it in order to maintain the Homéostasie. The apparatus must manage these excitations, which can be too strong, starting the traumatism and the Névrose. For that, the psychic apparatus is provided with a Avoid-excitation.

Procedure of the psychic apparatus

The metapsychology treating of the operation and the evolution of the spirit, the impulse, its psychical representatives and its possible destinies, it acts here to fully consider the metaphor of the apparatus as for the methods of its operation.

Since they are the first theoretical efforts of Freud, but which announce many later developments, he is undoubtedly lighting to note under which Freud conditions starts to theorize this apparatus. Freud starts from its experiments with the Hystérie, and from this pathological state it will come from there to theorize the normal functioning.

There is in hysteria the sym' p' volume of conversion: a difficulty of psychic re-appears and is expressed in the body - but this difficulty is quite related to a psychic history.
Hysterical conversion would seem initially a failure in the installation of equipment. It is true that this representation will apply thereafter well better to the disorders Psychosomatique S not hystericals, since in hysteria there is a rich psychic work, preserving psychosis.
But Freud, still in 1915, clearly expresses hysteria like a failure of the Refoulement, exploding in summoned. There is perhaps a small success, since the affect is unobtrusive and that one can describe a beautiful indifference hysterical - the fact of not being concerned with his symptoms. However repression is a failure since the representation re-appears. Repression does not manage to eliminate it.

Freud speaks about Traumatisme. The traumatism indicates one moment in which the psychic apparatus is lacking, is taken at fault. The psychic apparatus, persons in charge of functions sometimes describable in term of survival and reproduction (at least at Freud), runs off the line and failed in its functions.

Everywhere in the metapsychology this concept of an apparatus facing is worked over again stimulations, with quantities, energy surges. The representation will be only one delegation in the psychic one, a spokesperson. Certain representations are unbearable and start defenses aiming at eliminating them, but they will remain registered in the unconscious one (in the case of the neurosis). But defenses originally aim at eliminating the irreconcilable representations.

If the idea of a psychical reality releases fields of study clearly differentiated from factual reality, the psychic term of apparatus and the conceptualization which surrounds it reveal better than all other this model of a tool to face the excitation. The psychic one is attempt to negotiate the perception, which will cross different sytèmes: since the sensors, with the unconscious system, then with the mnemic system that is préconscient it, and reaching the conscience finally.
There is a real opposition between the two topics of Freud, and this first topics describing of the systems sticking more completely to the model of an apparatus in which the conflict comes from it with what the apparatus has to make. Besides the second topic, presenting authorities of psychic, kinds of different characters, assumes much more the idea of an internal conflict, psychic theater, and not simply of a conflict vis-a-vis stimulations emerging. If, in the first topics, all the psychic apparatus faces the excitation whose source is organic, in the second topics essence is to show the difficulty vis-a-vis the part of psyché which that is the .

Let us recall however that these two topics are complementary, and that the second does not come to contradict the organic aspect of the impulse, unceasingly reaffirmed through the whole of works of Freud.

Energy nelle Impulse: abandonment of the model

New object of the psychoanalysis

The concepts physical, cerebral, will be altered and integrated in a metapsychology which directly does not consider any more the brain, but the spirit. This does not mean necessarily abandonment of the materialism, but modification of paradigm. What the psychoanalysis cuts out, observes, according to the model of the chemical analysis , it is not more the neuronal activity but the thought. For as much, the thought can hold well of the cerebral activity: to see Neuropsychanalyse.

This passage is characterized by the replacement of the concept of principle of neuronic inertia (the neuron tends to discharge) by the Pleasure principle: the Pulsion tends to discharge. The impulse is made the metaphor of the electric and chemical activity of the neurons. Instinctual energy, the thorough is worked out like image of the mechanical energy.

Psychoanalytical methodology

With the abandonment of the neuronal model, Freud forsakes any project of applied science. The psychoanalysis does not conceive experiments which could be repeated; it cannot stick to the tangible one, but it treats indeed disours, the imaginary one: it is a question of giving a place to the desire.

This modification of method, it is the passage of a Physiologie applied to hysteria, with listening, the Suspended attention.

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