Freudian Theory: Definition & Examples​

By Charlie Huntington, M. A., Ph.D. Candidate
​Reviewed by Tchiki Davis, M.A., Ph.D.
Freudian theory is as controversial as it is fundamental to understanding the history of psychology. This article provides the definition of Freudian theory and gives many examples of Freud’s contributions to the field.
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My introduction to Sigmund Freud came in a comparative literature class where I read one of Freud’s most famous cases with a female client. I had no background in psychology at the time, and I found Freud’s treatment of his client sexist and infantilizing. While it is true that Freud often was this way with women – and this is just one of several well-justified criticisms we can make of Freudian theory – many of his ideas have endured in the field of psychology, even when they are difficult to prove.
So why does Freudian theory remain so important to understand, even if you are not interested in receiving or providing Freudian psychoanalysis (the kind of psychotherapy that Freud developed)? Through introducing and applying many of Freud’s key concepts, I hope this article can shed light on the staying power of Freudian theory.
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What Is Freudian Theory? (A Definition)

There are many pieces to Freudian theory, which makes it hard to concisely define what Freud’s theory was. First of all, it is important to understand that Freud was trained as a doctor – a neurologist and psychiatrist, to be specific – and was guided in his thinking by the philosophers and scientists who came before him. Freudian theory takes inspiration in particular from Darwin’s revelations regarding adaptation and evolution. He saw humans as both social animals and instinctual animals, and Freud developed his theories out of a desire to explain how people balanced their need to connect with and be accepted by others with their drive to act on their instinctual desires (Freud, 1936).
 
Freud saw humans as growing over time in their ability to manage both instinctual and social demands – more on that later. At the same time, he believed that many of our instinctual drives were unacceptable to our conscious minds – they were either too likely to lead to rejection from others, or too likely to clash with our ideas about who we were – for us to tolerate acknowledging them outright. For that reason, he focused a great deal on understanding how we handle all these unconscious thoughts and feelings, especially when they clash with our conscious beliefs and desires.
 
While Freud’s ideas about the unconscious manifested in his thinking about libido, defense mechanisms, transference, and dreams, the most important place to start in understanding Freudian theory is to understand Freud’s three parts of our psyche: the id, superego, and ego (Freud, 1936):
 
  1. The id. Freud conceived of the id as the seat of the unconscious. All of the desires and wishes we might have but not wish to consciously acknowledge were thought to reside in the id. For example, a parent might resent and want desperately to be free of their children, but because such a thought seems completely “unparentlike” to that parent, they cannot consciously acknowledge it to themselves.
  2.  The superego. If the id is the seat of all of our innate desires, then the superego is very much the opposite: it is the part of the brain that keeps track of all moral and social expectations of us. To carry on with the example of the resentful parent, the superego is the part of the brain that would remind the parent, “here is what a parent should do, and what everyone expects of you as a parent.” It is the part of the brain that blares its disapproval when a parent raises their voice in the grocery store at their demanding, hungry child.
  3. The ego. Stuck in between the id and the superego is the ego: it is our sense of self that seeks to balance the demands of the superego and the id. To finish with my example, the ego may try to negotiate between the parent’s id and superego (e.g., “It is not okay to hate your kids, but it is okay to vent to your best friend about how annoying they are.”).
 
I wrote the examples above as though the ego, id, and superego are actually separate parts of the brain that can communicate with each other, but we have no proof that this is how our brains work, and I doubt any of us experience ourselves in this way. The point of portraying Freud’s parts of the psyche this way is to make it clear how Freud saw these parts relating to each other and functioning in our lives. You might have noticed that a theme I mentioned earlier – the tension between our unconscious and conscious – is very much present in the relationships among the ego, id, and superego.

Why Freudian Theory Is Important

The simple answer for why Freudian theory is important is twofold: (1) it inspired a field of psychotherapy that continues to be widely practiced and is known to be effective; and (2) many of Freud’s ideas have entered the public consciousness and continue to influence psychologists today (Blatt, 1998). More generally, Freud was one of the first people to provide long-term, intensive therapy – sometimes several sessions a week with each client – and he is one of the first people to pay a great deal of attention to what happens in the psychotherapeutic process (Blatt, 1998).
 
While some of Freud’s ideas about how children develop into adults are not considered accurate, his focus on how the quality and nature of parenting powerfully impacts who children become brought a much-needed focus to parent-child interactions and has informed the work of many developmental psychologists. For example, Freud believed that parents who punish, harshly criticize, and overcontrol their children set those children up to be depressive, in part by giving them an overly critical superego (Freud, 1936). This assertion has been validated by many psychological studies since Freud’s time (e.g., Blatt & Homann, 1992; Zuroff et al., 1994), which have shown that the self-criticism this kind of parenting develops in children leads to many negative outcomes later in life.
 
Additionally, although many of the particulars of different psychological diagnoses have changed over time, Freud’s ideas about how personalities develop and the nature of different personality disorders were also foundational for later work on these topics (Blatt, 1998).
 
Finally, Freudian theory remains important because it has entered the vernacular – many of Freud’s ideas have become part of the ways we describe our everyday lives. For example, Freud introduced the idea of verbal slip-ups (Freudian slips), or moments when we misspeak in a way that reveals hidden thoughts or feelings (Freud, 1901) (e.g., saying “I can’t wait to see you go” when you intended to say “I hate to see you go.”)

Examples of Freudian Theory

Another example of enduring Freudian theory are Freud’s defense mechanisms (Freud, 1936). Simply put, Freud thought that one way the ego could defend itself against thoughts, feelings, and events that it thought was unacceptable was to use a variety of psychological tricks, or defense mechanisms, to make that unacceptable thing go away. For Freud, one particularly important impulse that most people would use defense mechanisms to resist was a sexual interest in one of their parents (usually, the other-gender parent). Since such a desire is socially taboo, a person might engage in a defense mechanism such as denial or projection to avoid facing it.
 
Another example of Freud’s theory in action is his idea of fixation, or getting stuck on the challenges that are typical of a certain developmental stage, even as one continues to age and should “outgrow” the fixation (Freud, 1936). For Freud, these fixations were often related to body parts – see the section below on sexual development in Freudian theory for more details.
 
Finally, Freud used the word “libido” to describe the mental energy inside us that is driven by our innate, instinctual desires. He saw our libido as being fulfilled through both sexual activity and through the fulfillment of wishes, such as in dreams (Solms, 2000).

Freudian Theory of Psychoanalysis

Freudian psychoanalysis took as its goal the acknowledgment and integration of one’s unconscious desires and needs, since ignoring those unconscious urges seemed to generally result in painful outcomes and psychological challenges for his clients (Sarnoff, 1960). For example, many people were thought to engage in defense mechanisms that made their lives much more difficult, but through exploring the unconscious causes of those defense mechanisms, a psychoanalyst could help a client react to the unconscious urges more effectively.
 
For example, a person in a minoritized group, when faced with racism or homophobia, might identify with their oppressors (a defense mechanism) and take on the attitudes of those people, all in an attempt to neutralize the threat from these people (Sarnoff, 1960). A psychoanalyst might help their client recognize how they are unconsciously identifying with the beliefs and attitudes of a more privileged group and how this is negatively impacting their life.
 
Another lens that psychoanalysis used is to consider our lives as being full of conflicting motives, which are all driven by either the desire for social connection and acceptance or the desire to fulfill the urges of one’s libido. Or, this tension may result from an external motive (e.g., not wanting to anger a parent) clashing with an internal motive (e.g., wanting to be honest and admit a transgression). Our difficulty in choosing how to resolve these conflicting motives, in combination with the difficulty of waiting to fulfill certain motives while we prioritize others, are thought in psychoanalysis to underlie our mental health challenges.

Freudian Theory of Personality

Freud saw our personalities as being determined by how our id, ego, and superego interacted with each other (Freud, 1936). For example, a person with a highly developed and powerful superego might come across as perfectionistic, judgmental, or highly self-critical, while a person with a weak ego would have lots of mood swings and great difficulty telling you what their sense of self is.
 
Freud saw a child’s early years as a time when the ego and the superego take shape and begin to exercise control over the id. He believed that fixations and other challenges in developing a healthy ego and superego would be the cause of psychiatric disorders in adulthood. We can now turn our attention to the psychosexual stages of development in Freudian theory, which are key to understanding what fixations and challenges with the ego and superego look like in his eyes.

Freudian Theory of Sexuality

Freud (1905) believed that personality developed as an individual progressed through five psychosexual (and very heteronormative, gender binary-reinforcing) developmental stages. In each stage, he saw our libidos as fixated on certain body parts.
  1. Oral stage. As babies, we engage with the world through our mouths. Freud believed that developmental challenges during this period of life would leave people with an oral fixation in later years, such as biting their nails in adulthood.
  2. Anal stage. From roughly ages one to three, we focus more on pleasure in defecting and come to see ourselves as distinct from other humans. Freud saw potty training as a central conflict of this stage.
  3. Phallic stage. From ages three to six, Freud thought children became aware of their genitals and, by extension, their gender. This would lead them to begin to develop antagonistic feelings toward people of their gender, and attractions toward people of the other gender. Discovering self-pleasure was also characteristic of this stage.
  4. Latency stage. From age seven until puberty, Freud thought sexual energy was mostly repressed or transferred into other activities such as school work and sports.
  5. Genital stage. Starting in puberty, Freud thought that sexual energy became focused on experimentation with both one’s own genitals and those of other people. He saw this exploration – as long as it was heterosexual – as normative and healthy at this stage.​

Freudian Theory & The Unconscious

For a description of how Freud’s theory of the unconscious and how it is related to several other topics in this article, I recommend watching the following video:

Video: Sigmund Freud: The Unconscious Mind

Freudian Theory of Dreams

Freud (1961) believed that dreams demonstrated our unconscious urges – they were a gateway to seeing what our libidos wanted. Freud was intensely interested in interpreting his clients’ dreams to identify the urges they were repressing or turning into other thoughts and images. This was one of the places where Freud’s theory is hardest to prove – there is no science that supports his methods of dream interpretation as being accurate or helpful, and indeed his interpretations were just that – interpretations, based on his own theories (Solms, 2000).

Articles Related to Freudian Theory

​Want to learn more? Check out these articles:

Books Related to Freudian Theory

If you’d like to keep learning more, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

Final Thoughts on Freudian Theory

This article barely scratches the surface of understanding Freudian theory, but I hope it can serve as a helpful starting point if you are new to his work. You can always learn more from reputable sources on the Internet, Freud’s own writings, and the work of the many people whom he either directly mentored or indirectly inspired.

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