Four cornerstones of psychoanalysis

In several places in his writings, Freud talks about the four cornerstones (Grundpfeliler) of psychoanalysis. These are: 

1. The method of free association. Freud asked his patients to free associate because he discovered that when they did it, something was released that exceeded the explicit meaning of their words and stories. Freud was less interested in what the patient was saying than in the effect the saying had upon the patient. The effect was often invigorating, enlivening, and surprising. Freud called this the return of the repressed. In other words, he discovered that the patient’s conscious awareness concealed something other than what the words were taken to mean and the best way to approach this “otherwise meaningfulness” was indirectly, through the method of free association. Today, with the aid of several twentieth century philosophical traditions, we can confirm Freud’s discovery that consciousness is inherently repressive. In addition to this inherent repressiveness, psychoanalytic practitioners have learned that their patient resist the process of free association because the lifting of repression is unsettling and challenging to one’s ego. So, the first cornerstone, free association, automatically implicates two other key Freudian concepts: repression and resistance.
2. The repetition compulsion. Patients often seek psychotherapy because they find themselves stuck in restricted and repetitive behaviors. Despite our best intentions, we often find ourselves making the same mistakes and the same bad choices. These repetitions have their roots in our personal histories, especially in our childhood years which is why therapists and patients often find themselves talking about the inner child—because that child lives on in the present, oftentimes inconveniently so. Psychoanalysis works with the idea of “pluritemporality” which means that past, present, and future times coexist and these temporalities don’t correspond to a linear chronology. Psychoanalytic patients learn to listen to themselves and to hear the echoes and reverberations of a past that compels us to re-live it. Psychoanalysis is a therapeutic method that can loosen attachments to the past by releasing the energies that have been repressively bound by those attachments.
3. Sexuality. Freud shocked the Victorian world by proposing that some common mental health ailments were caused by sexual repression. Sadly, this idea has been lost in many versions of what passes for psychoanalysis today. The idea has also been made risible by popular oversimplifications of Freud’s thesis as well as by outright prudery and a general Christian allergy to the charged and potent threat that sexuality poses for our staid sensibilities. Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality described a sensually embodied beginning to our human life, in intimate, bodily contact with caregivers. This contact ranged from pleasure to trauma and encompassed sensations as well as subtle, intangible communications that were transmitted from the adult to the child. Freud’s child was awash in a state of “polymorphous perversity,” or what we might label in a less stigmatizing fashion today as a state of “polysexuality,” affording many avenues for obtaining erotic pleasure with different parts of the body and with a variety of objects. All this infantile polysexuality would be lost to repression in the course of encountering the incest taboo and in traversing the “oedipal complexities” described below. Every adult has lost access to his or her infantile sexual experience, burdening them with an unrecoverable memory of an ecstatic and erotic past that begs for remembering—inducing a desire—a manque à être—Lacan’s term for a “wanting-to-be” in that place again.
4. The Oedipus Complex: The process of passing from the polymorphous state of infantile sexuality to the genitally focused state of adult sexuality entails traversing the Oedipal complex. Every human being is forced by culture and the inescapably repressive demands that are structured into symbolic systems of consciousness into making gender and sexual identifications that are framed as binary oppositions—male or female; hetero- or homosexual. We emerge from the Oedipal period identifying as a man or a woman who desires either a man or a woman (although a few people escape this binary destiny and assume non-traditional gender and sexual identities that are nevertheless signified in terms of these binaries—for example “bisexual” or “transexual”). Each person has their own particular personal history with this process—their own particular “oedipal complexity”—but the common outcome for all is that one’s sexual destiny is shaped both in terms of what possibilities and pleasures are afforded and what possibilities and pleasures are foreclosed. Secondly, all are marked by the permanent erasure of what had come before, namely the infantile sexuality that is repressed by the incest taboo and repressed by the linguistic structuration that constitutes the post-oedipal condition. After Oedipus, we are all alienated in language from the desirous echoes of the expansive sensual embodiment of a pre-linguistic (prelapsarian) time.