In the early twentieth century, Freud’s contribution in the domain of neurology and psychotherapy changed the world’s perception of the medical scene. Known for his inventive mind and his will power to define the helms of science, Sigmund Freud was a living legend in his own right. He articulated the science behind unconsciousness, repression and infantile sexuality. He went on to discover the ‘tripartite’ version of the mind and designed various mechanisms and frames that would ultimately help in studying the balance and the psychological development of the human mind.
Nearly all of his works exist and are recognizable today. He also had massive influence over the fields of anthropology and semiotics. Apart from being a neurologist and a psychoanalyst, he was a fluid essayist and explained dreams and the discovery of transference. Although there have been countless critics who disowned Freud’s work for being highly sexist and unrealistic, there were many positive remarks about his discoveries and some even compared his works to those of Aquinas and Plato.
Sigmund Freud was born in the town of Freiburg, Moravia on 6th May 1856 to Jacob Freud and Amalie, who were Jewish by descent. He was the first of the eight children and that made him a favorite with his parents. Despite being wool merchants, the Freud family was fairly impoverished. From a very young age, Junior Freud was always displeased with the fact that he was born a Jew and did not pay too much respect to his religious practices. Freud’s parents decided to give the boy schooling and a good education but eventually move to Vienna after suffering huge business losses.
Sigmund Freud enrolled at a school in 1865 and later, went on to graduate from Matura in 1873 with accolades and recognition from the institute. Freud took a particular liking towards language and literature and was already a multi-linguist at an early age. He could proficiently converse, read and write in a variety of languages such as Italian, Spanish, German, French and Hebrew to name a few. He was greatly moved and influenced by the works of Shakespeare and this is how he was said to have inculcated an interest for psychology from a tender age.
The underlying concepts and theories of Shakespearean plays got him to ponder over various aspects that he would later identify and relate to psychology. At the age of 17, he enrolled at the University of Vienna where he studied medical sciences under prominent names such as Karl Claus, Ernst Brucke and Franz Brentano. Zoology, physiology and philosophy became an inevitable part of his life. He enjoyed science and acquired a taste for Zoology after dissecting a couple of Eels at his research station situated in Trieste. He successfully graduated from the University of Vienna in the year 1881, and went on to begin his career.
Career His career commenced with the “Theodor Meynert” psychiatric clinic at Vienne Hospital right after he graduated with an MD. After a brief stint at the general hospital, he decided to start his own venture that focused primarily on ‘mental and nervous disorders’. Freud had studied ‘hypnosis and psychopathology’ in the year 1885 and he began to practice the art of ‘hypnosis’ on his patients in his clinic. He was greatly influenced by the methods used by his former colleague and friend Joseph Breuer in the process of hypnotism. He successfully administered hypnosis on one of his celebrated patients known as ‘Anna O’.
History states that Freud was able to cure her of her mental illness while setting her in a state of trance and getting her to talk about her illness. Following this success, Freud often practiced hypnotism on his patients and got his patients to talk freely on anything that crossed their mind during the hypnotic process. This sort of practice would later be known as ‘the free association’ method. By 1896, Freud discovered a more complex system of studying a psychotic condition and the complex structure of brain material during a patient’s dream.
He coined a new word called ‘psychoanalysis’ and went on to establish new clinical practices and theories in this year. Freud defied all norms of science and studied repressed sexual thoughts that occurred in children which led to a new theory based on infantile sexuality known as ‘Freud’s seduction theory’. He believed that the repressed fantasies and sexual thoughts at a young age were responsible in the aggravation of another mental condition called ‘neurosis’. At a time when Freud was discovering these theories, he went into a state of great depression, and even faced a personal loss of his father’s death the subsequent year.
This led him to believe in superstitious omens and believing that he would die at the age of 51, Freud explored his own childhood and some of his deep, dark memories in the form of dreams. Owing to this ‘self-analysis’ he remembered seeing his mother nude once and that caused him to develop sexual feelings towards his mother. He published a detailed ‘Interpretation of Dreams’ in the winter of 1899. Most of his theories post ‘self-analysis’ began to take a more sexist form and he faced countless cruelty from pupils of other departments of sciences.
Later, a small group of Viennese physicians slowly began to admire Freud’s work and were instrumental in his promotion to professor at the University. His second publication was also produced around this time known as the ‘Jokes and their Relation to the Unconsciousness” in the year 1905. Many of Freud’s students went on to translate Freudian works in different parts of the world that attracted widespread media interest and also caused a breakthrough in the field of Psychoanalysis in the United States of American.
One of the close followers of Freud, called Jung, began to devise his own concepts and theories of Psychology, a little different from Freudian concepts, and he went on to launch it as analytical psychology. Later Years In 1930, Freud was awarded with the coveted Goethe Prize for his significant contributions to German medicine, literature and psychology. After the invasion of the Nazi’s in Germany, Hitler and his ‘Reich’, who were purely anti-Freudian, destroyed all his works, collections and books. Although the Nazi threat began to grow, Freud decided to stay on in the country before
Ernest Jones, then president of The International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), persuaded him to go to England. Although Freud decided to leave, he was stalled by the Nazi Reich. After much persuasion and deliberation, he was finally allowed to leave on the Orient Express on the 6 June 1938. Personal Life Sigmund Freud married Martha Bernays, the granddaughter of a Rabbi, in 1886. Although accused of having an extra marital affair with his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, he went on to have six children with his wife in the subsequent years. Freud was said to have fought a long battle with cancer which he detected as Leukoplakia in 1923.
Although he declared it benign, the tumor was actually malignant and worsened during his career. He wasn’t told that he had cancer, but he eventually faced the fact. He was under tremendous stress because of Nazis, and the death of his four beloved sisters at various Nazi Concentration camps during the Holocaust only made things worse for him. Death And Legacy Towards the end of his life, Freud persuaded his doctor to help him die. After the family decided that it would be pointless to watch him suffer with cancer, they put an end to his misery with substantial doses of morphine.
Thus, Sigmund Freud perished on 23rd September 1939, and was cremated three days later. Although his theories were some of the most complex to crack during his time and age, many followers agreed that they were highly testable and theories on psychoanalysis could never be proved wrong. Some of his famous works related to paranoia, unconsciousness, repressed sexuality, verbal psychotherapy, the libido, the pleasure principle, displacement of ego principles and his theories of psychological sexual development took the world by a storm and still studied under modern psychological aspects.
The work of Sigmund Freud, the Austrian founder of psychoanalysis, marked the beginning of a modern, dynamic psychology by providing the first well-organized explanation of the inner mental forces determining human behavior. Freud’s early life Sigmund Freud was born on May 6, 1856, in Freiberg, Moravia (now Czech Republic). Sigmund was the first child of his twice-widowed father’s third marriage. His mother, Amalia Nathanson, was nineteen years old when she married Jacob Freud, aged thirty-nine.
Sigmund’s two stepbrothers from his father’s first marriage were approximately the same age as his mother, and his older stepbrother’s son, Sigmund’s nephew, was his earliest playmate. Thus, the boy grew up in an unusual family structure, his mother halfway in age between himself and his father. Though seven younger children were born, Sigmund always remained his mother’s favorite. When he was four, the family moved to Vienna (now the capital of Austria), the capital city of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy (the complete rule of Central Europe by Hungary and Austria from 1867 to 1918).
Freud would live in Vienna until the year before his death. Youth in Vienna Because the Freuds were Jewish, Sigmund’s early experience was that of an outsider in an overwhelmingly Catholic community. However, Emperor Francis Joseph (1830–1916) had liberated the Jews of Austria, giving them equal rights and permitting them to settle anywhere in the empire. Many Jewish families came to Vienna, as did the Freuds in 1860, where the standard of living was higher and educational and professional opportunities were better than in the provinces.
They lived in an area that had a high concentration of Jewish people, called the Leopoldstadt slum. The housing was cramped and they had to move often, sometimes living with his father’s family. By his tenth year, Sigmund’s family had grown and he had five sisters and one brother. Freud went to the local elementary school, then attended the Sperl Gymnasium (a secondary school in Europe that students attend to prepare for college) in Leopoldstadt, from 1866 to 1873.
He studied Greek and Latin, mathematics, history, and the natural sciences, and was a superior student. He passed his final examination with flying colors, qualifying to enter the University of Vienna at the age of seventeen. His family had recognized his special scholarly gifts from the beginning, and although they had only four bedrooms for eight people, Sigmund had his own room throughout his school days. He lived with his parents until he was twenty-seven, as was the custom at that time. Pre-psychoanalytic work Freud enrolled in medical school in 1873.
Vienna had become the world capital of medicine, and the young student was initially attracted to the laboratory and the scientific side of medicine rather than clinical practice. He spent seven instead of the usual five years acquiring his doctorate. Freud received his doctor of medicine degree at the age of twenty-four. He fell in love and wanted to marry, but the salaries available to a young scientist could not support a wife and family. He had met Martha Bernays, the daughter of a well-known Hamburg family, when he was twenty-six; they were engaged two months later.
They were separated during most of the four years which preceded their marriage, and married in 1887. Of their six children, a daughter, Anna, would become one of her father’s most famous followers. Freud spent three years as a resident physician in the famous Allgemeine Krankenhaus, a general hospital and the medical center of Vienna. He spent five months in the psychiatry (the area of medicine involving emotional and mental health) department headed by Theodor Meynert. Psychiatry at this time was rigid and descriptive.
The psychological meaning of behavior was not itself considered important; behavior was only a set of symptoms to be studied in order to understand the structures of the brain. Freud’s later work changed this attitude. Freud, during the last part of his residency, received some money to pursue his neurological (having to do with the nervous system) studies abroad. He spent four months at the Salpetriere clinic in Paris, France, studying under the neurologist (a person who studies the nervous system and treats people with neurological problems) Jean Martin Charcot (1825–1893).
Here, Freud first became interested in hysteria (an illness in which a person complains of physical symptoms without a medical cause) and Charcot’s demonstration of its psychological origins. Beginning of psychoanalysis Freud returned to Vienna, established himself in the private practice of neurology, and married. He soon devoted his efforts to the treatment of hysterical patients with the help of hypnosis (the act of bringing about a change in a person’s attention which results in a change in their bodily experiences), a technique he had studied under Charcot.
Joseph Breuer (1857–1939), an older colleague (a partner or an associate in the same area of interest), told Freud about a hysterical patient whom he had treated successfully by hypnotizing her and then tracing her symptoms back to traumatic (emotionally stressful) events she had experienced at her father’s deathbed. Breuer called his treatment “catharsis” and traced its effectiveness to the release of “pent-up emotions. ” Freud’s experiments with Breuer’s technique were successful.
Together with Breuer he published Studies on Hysteria (1895). At the age of thirty-nine Freud first used the term “psychoanalysis,” (a way to treat certain mental illnesses by exposing and discussing a patient’s unconscious thoughts and feelings) and his major lifework was well under way. At about this time Freud began a unique project, his own self-analysis (the act of studying or examining oneself), which he pursued primarily by analyzing his dreams. A major scientific result was The Interpretation of Dreams (1901).
By the turn of the century Freud had developed his therapeutic (having to do with treating a mental or physical disability) technique, dropping the use of hypnosis and shifting to the more effective and more widely applicable method of “free association. ” Development of psychoanalysis Following Freud’s work on dreams, he wrote a series of papers in which he explored the influence of unconscious thought processes Sigmund Freud. Courtesy of the Library of Congress . on various aspects of human behavior.
He recognized that the most powerful among the unconscious forces, which lead to neuroses (mental disorders), are the sexual desires of early childhood that have been shut out from conscious awareness, yet have preserved their powerful force within the personality. He described his highly debatable views concerning the early experiences of sexuality in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), a work that first met violent protest, but was gradually accepted by practically all schools of psychology (the area of science involving the study of the mind).
After 1902 Freud gathered a small group of interested colleagues on Wednesday evenings for presentation of psychoanalytic papers and discussion. This was the beginning of the psychoanalytic movement. Swiss psychiatrists Eugen Bleuler and Carl Jung (1875–1961) formed a study group in Zurich in 1907, and the first International Psychoanalytic Congress was held in Salzburg in 1908. Later years In 1923 Freud developed a cancerous (having to do with cancer cells that attack the healthy tissues of the body) growth in his mouth, which eventually led to his death sixteen years and thirty-three operations later.
In spite of this, these were years of great scientific productivity. He published findings on the importance of aggressive as well as sexual drives ( Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920); developed a new theoretical framework in order to organize his new data concerning the structure of the mind ( The Ego and the Id, 1923); and revised his theory of anxiety to show it as the signal of danger coming from unconscious fantasies, rather than the result of repressed sexual feelings ( Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, 1926).
In March 1938 Austria was occupied by German troops, and that month Freud and his family were put under house arrest. Through the combined efforts of many influential friends who were well connected politically, the Freuds were permitted to leave Austria in June. Freud spent his last year in London, England, undergoing surgery. He died on September 23, 1939. The influence of his discoveries on the science and culture of the twentieth century is limitless.
He took almost nine years to complete his studies, due to his interest in neurophysiological research, specifically investigation of the sexual anatomy of eels and the physiology of the fish nervous system. He entered private practice in neurology for financial reasons, receiving his M. D. degree in 1881 at the age of 25.
He was also an early researcher in the field of cerebral palsy, which was then known as “cerebral paralysis”. He published several medical papers on the topic, and showed that the disease existed long before other researchers of the period began to notice and study it. He also suggested that William Little, the man who first identified cerebral palsy, was wrong about lack ofoxygen during birth being a cause. Instead, he suggested that complications in birth were only a symptom.
Freud hoped that his research would provide a solid scientific basis for his therapeutic technique. The goal of Freudian therapy, or psychoanalysis, was to bring repressed thoughts and feelings into consciousness in order to free the patient from suffering repetitive distorted emotions. Classically, the bringing of unconscious thoughts and feelings to consciousness is brought about by encouraging a patient to talk about dreams and engage in free association, in which patients report their thoughts without reservation and make no attempt to concentrate while doing so.
Another important element of psychoanalysis is transference, the process by which patients displace on to their analysts feelings and ideas which derive from previous figures in their lives. Transference was first seen as a regrettable phenomenon that interfered with the recovery of repressed memories and disturbed patients’ objectivity, but by 1912 Freud had come to see it as an essential part of the therapeutic process. The origin of Freud’s early work with psychoanalysis can be linked to Josef Breuer.
Freud credited Breuer with opening the way to the discovery of the psychoanalytical method by his treatment of the case of Anna O. In November 1880, Breuer was called in to treat a highly intelligent 21-year-old woman (Bertha Pappenheim) for a persistent cough that he diagnosed as hysterical. He found that while nursing her dying father, she had developed a number of transitory symptoms, including visual disorders and paralysis and contractures of limbs, which he also diagnosed as hysterical.
Breuer began to see his patient almost every day as the symptoms increased and became more persistent, and observed that she entered states of absence. He found that when, with his encouragement, she told fantasy stories in her evening states of absence her condition improved, and most of her symptoms had disappeared by April 1881. However, following the death of her father in that month her condition deteriorated again. Breuer recorded that some of the symptoms eventually remitted spontaneously, and that full recovery was achieved by inducing her to recall events that had precipitated the occurrence of a specific symptom.
In the years immediately following Breuer’s treatment, Anna O. spent three short periods in sanatoria with the diagnosis “hysteria” with “somatic symptoms”, and some authors have challenged Breuer’s published account of a cure. Richard Skues rejects this interpretation, which he sees as stemming from both Freudian and anti-psychoanalytical revisionism, that regards both Breuer’s narrative of the case as unreliable and his treatment of Anna O. as a failure.
In the early 1890s Freud used a form of treatment based on the one that Breuer had described to him, modified by what he called his “pressure technique” and his newly developed analytic technique of interpretation and reconstruction. According to Freud’s later accounts of this period, as a result of his use of this procedure most of his patients in the mid-1890s reported early childhood sexual abuse. He believed these stories, but then came to believe that they were fantasies.
He explained these at first as having the function of “fending off” memories of infantile masturbation, but in later years he wrote that they represented Oedipal fantasies. Another version of events focuses on Freud’s proposing that unconscious memories of infantile sexual abuse were at the root of the psychoneuroses in letters to Fliess in October 1895, before he reported that he had actually discovered such abuse among his patients.
In the first half of 1896 Freud published three papers stating that he had uncovered, in all of his current patients, deeply repressed memories of sexual abuse in early childhood. In these papers Freud recorded that his patients were not consciously aware of these memories, and must therefore be present asunconscious memories if they were to result in hysterical symptoms or obsessional neurosis.
The patients were subjected to considerable pressure to “reproduce” infantile sexual abuse “scenes” that Freud was convinced had been repressed into the unconscious. Patients were generally unconvinced that their experiences of Freud’s clinical procedure indicated actual sexual abuse. He reported that even after a supposed “reproduction” of sexual scenes the patients assured him emphatically of their disbelief.
As well as his pressure technique, Freud’s clinical procedures involved analytic inference and the symbolic interpretation of symptoms to trace back to memories of infantile sexual abuse. His claim of one hundred percent confirmation of his theory only served to reinforce previously expressed eservations from his colleagues about the validity of findings obtained through his suggestive techniques.
The unconscious Main article: Unconscious mind The concept of the unconscious was central to Freud’s account of the mind. Freud believed that while poets and thinkers had long known of the existence of the unconscious, he had ensured that it received scientific recognition in the field of psychology. However, the concept made an informal appearance in Freud’s writings.
It was first introduced in connection with the phenomenon of repression, to explain what happens to ideas that are repressed; Freud stated explicitly that the concept of the unconscious was based on the theory of repression. He postulated a cycle in which ideas are repressed, but remain in the mind, removed from consciousness yet operative, then reappear in consciousness under certain circumstances. The postulate was based upon the investigation of cases of traumatic hysteria, which revealed cases where the behavior of patients could not be explained without reference to ideas or thoughts of which they had no awareness.
This fact, combined with the observation that such behavior could be artificially induced by hypnosis, in which ideas were inserted into people’s minds, suggested that ideas were operative in the original cases, even though their subjects knew nothing of them. Freud, like Breuer, found the hypothesis that hysterical manifestations were generated by ideas to be not only warranted, but given in observation. Disagreement between them arose, however, when they attempted to give causal explanations of their data: Breuer favored a hypothesis of hypnoid states, while Freud postulated the mechanism of defense.
Richard Wollheim comments that given the close correspondence between hysteria and the results of hypnosis, Breuer’s hypothesis appears more plausible, and that it is only when repression is taken into account that Freud’s hypothesis becomes preferable. Freud originally allowed that repression might be a conscious process, but by the time he wrote his second paper on the “Neuro-Psychoses of Defence” (1896), he apparently believed that repression, which he referred to as “the psychical mechanism of (unconscious) defence”, occurred on an unconscious level.
Freud further developed his theories about the unconscious in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), where he dealt with condensation and displacement as inherent characteristics of unconscious mental activity. Freud presented his first systematic statement of his hypotheses about unconscious mental processes in 1912, in response to an invitation from the London Society of Psychical Research to contribute to its Proceedings. Freud in 1915 expanded that statement into a more ambitious metapsychological paper entitled “The Unconscious.
In both these papers, when Freud tried to distinguish between his conception of the unconscious and those that predated psychoanalysis, he found it in his postulation of ideas that are simultaneously latent and operative. Dreams Main article: Dream Freud believed that the function of dreams is to preserve sleep by representing as fulfilled wishes that would otherwise awaken the dreamer. Psychosexual development Main article: Psychosexual development Freud hoped to prove that his model was universally valid and thus turned to ancient mythology and contemporary ethnography for comparative material.
Freud named his new theory the Oedipus complex after the famous Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. “I found in myself a constant love for my mother, and jealousy of my father. I now consider this to be a universal event in childhood,” Freud said. Freud sought to anchor this pattern of development in the dynamics of the mind. Each stage is a progression into adult sexual maturity, characterized by a strong ego and the ability to delay gratification( Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality). He used the Oedipus conflict to point out how much he believed that people desire incest and must repress that desire.
The Oedipus conflict was described as a state of psychosexual development and awareness. He also turned to anthropological studies of totemism and argued that totemism reflected a ritualized enactment of a tribal Oedipal conflict. Freud also believed that the Oedipus complex was bisexual, involving an attraction to both parents.
Traditional accounts have held that, as a result of frequent reports from his patients, in the mid-1890s Freud posited that psychoneuroses were a consequence of early childhood sexual abuse. More specifically, in three papers published in 1896 he contended hat unconscious memories of sexual abuse in infancy are a necessary precondition for the development of adult psychoneuroses.
However, examination of Freud’s original papers has revealed that his clinical claims were not based on patients’ reports but were findings deriving from his analytical clinical methodology, which at that time included coercive procedures. He privately expressed his loss of faith in the theory to his friend Fliess in September 1897, giving several reasons, including that he had not been able to bring a single case to a successful conclusion.
In 1906, while still maintaining that his earlier claims to have uncovered early childhood sexual abuse events remained valid, he postulated a new theory of the occurrence of unconscious infantile fantasies. He had incorporated his notions of unconscious fantasies in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), but did not explicitly relate his seduction theory claims to the Oedipus theory until 1925. Notwithstanding his abandonment of the seduction theory, Freud always recognized that some neurotics had experienced childhood sexual abuse.
Freud also believed that the libido developed in individuals by changing its object, a process codified by the concept of sublimation. He argued that humans are born “polymorphously perverse”, meaning that any number of objects could be a source of pleasure. He further argued that, as humans develop, they become fixated on different and specific objects through their stages of development—first in the oral stage (exemplified by an infant’s pleasure in nursing), then in the anal stage (exemplified by a toddler’s pleasure in evacuating his or her bowels), then in the phallic stage.
In the latter stage, Freud contended, male infants become fixated on the mother as a sexual object (known as the Oedipus Complex), a phase brought to an end by threats of castration, resulting in the castration complex, the severest trauma in his young life. (In his later writings Freud postulated an equivalent Oedipus situation for infant girls, the sexual fixation being on the father. Though not advocated by Freud himself, the term ‘Electra complex’ is sometimes used in this context. ) The repressive or dormant latency stage of psychosexual development preceded the sexually mature genital stage of psychosexual development.
The child needs to receive the proper amount of satisfaction at any given stage in order to move on easily to the next stage of development; under or over gratification can lead to a fixation at that stage, which could cause a regression back to that stage later in life. Freud felt that masturbation was unwise and harmful. He and his colleague Fliess wrote about the topic during a period in which views on the topic were becoming more liberal due to the influence of doctors such as Havelock Ellis. Freud remained an opponent of masturbation, seeing it as having partially caused the neuroses.
He stated “a priori one is forced to oppose the assertion that masturbation has to be harmless; on the contrary there must be cases in which masturbation is harmful. Since the aetiology of the neuroses is given by way of the conflict between infantile sexuality and the opposition of the ego (repression) masturbation, which is only an executive of infantile sexuality, cannot a priori be presented as harmless”. ego and super-ego Main article: Id, ego and super-ego In his later work, Freud proposed that the human psyche could be divided into three parts: Id, ego and super-ego.
Freud discussed this model in the 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and fully elaborated upon it in The Ego and the Id (1923), in which he developed it as an alternative to his previous topographic schema (i. e. , conscious, unconscious and preconscious). The id is the completely unconscious, impulsive, childlike portion of the psyche that operates on the “pleasure principle” and is the source of basic impulses and drives; it seeks immediate pleasure and gratification.
Freud acknowledged that his use of the term Id (das Es, “the It”) derives from the writings of Georg Groddeck. The super-ego is the moral component of the psyche, which takes into account no special circumstances in which the morally right thing may not be right for a given situation. The rational ego attempts to exact a balance between the impractical hedonism of the id and the equally impractical moralism of the super-ego; it is the part of the psyche that is usually reflected most directly in a person’s actions. When overburdened or threatened by its tasks, it may employdefense mechanisms including denial, repression, and displacement. This concept is usually represented by the “Iceberg Model”.
This model represents the roles the Id, Ego, and Super Ego play in relation to conscious and unconscious thought. Freud compared the relationship between the ego and the id to that between a charioteer and his horses: the horses provide the energy and drive, while the charioteer provides direction. Life and death drives Main articles: Libido and Death drive Freud believed that people are driven by two conflicting central desires: the life drive (libido or Eros) (survival, propagation, hunger, thirst, and sex) and the death drive.
The death drive was also termed “Thanatos”, although Freud did not use that term; “Thanatos” was introduced in this context by Paul Federn. Freud hypothesized that libido is a form of mental energy with which processes, structures and object-representations are invested. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud inferred the existence of the death instinct. Its premise was a regulatory principle that has been described as “the principle of psychic inertia”, “the Nirvana principle”, and “the conservatism of instinct”.
Its background was Freud’s earlier Project for a Scientific Psychology, where he had defined the principle governing the mental apparatus as its tendency to divest itself of quantity or to reduce tension to zero. Freud had been obliged to abandon that definition, since it proved adequate only to the most rudimentary kinds of mental functioning, and replaced the idea that the apparatus tends toward a level of zero tension with the idea that it tends toward a minimum level of tension.
Freud in effect readopted the original definition in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, this time applying it to a different principle. He asserted that on certain occasions the mind acts as though it could eliminate tension entirely, or in effect to reduce itself to a state of extinction; his key evidence for this was the existence of the compulsion to repeat. Examples of such repetition included the dream life of traumatic neurotics and children’s play.
In the phenomenon of repetition, Freud saw a psychic trend to work over earlier impressions, to master them and derive pleasure from them, a trend was prior to the pleasure principle but not opposed to it. In addition to that trend, however, there was also a principle at work that was opposed to, and thus “beyond” the pleasure principle. If repetition is a necessary element in the binding of energy or adaptation, when carried to inordinate lengths it becomes a means of abandoning adaptations and reinstating earlier r less evolved psychic positions.
By combining this idea with the hypothesis that all repetition is a form of discharge, Freud reached the conclusion that the compulsion to repeat is an effort to restore a state that is both historically primitive and marked by the total draining of energy: death.Religion Main article: Freud and religion Freud regarded the monotheistic God as an illusion based upon the infantile emotional need for a powerful, supernatural pater familias.
He maintained that religion – once necessary to restrain man’s violent nature in the early stages of civilization – in modern times, can be set aside in favor of reason and science. “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” (1907) notes the likeness between faith (religious belief) and neurotic obsession. Totem and Taboo (1913) proposes that society and religion begin with the patricide and eating of the powerful paternal figure, who then becomes a revered collective memory.
In Civilization and its Discontents (1930), he quotes his friend Romain Rolland, who described religion as an “oceanic sensation”, but says he never experienced this feeling. Moses and Monotheism (1937) proposes that Moses was the tribal pater familias, killed by the Jews, who psychologically coped with the patricide with areaction formation conducive to their establishing monotheist Judaism;analogously, he described the Roman Catholic rite of Holy Communion as cultural evidence of the killing and devouring of the sacred father.
Moreover, he perceived religion, with its suppression of violence, as mediator of the societal and personal, the public and the private, conflicts between Eros and Thanatos, the forces of life and death. Later works indicate Freud’s pessimism about the future of civilization, which he noted in the 1931 edition of Civilization and its Discontents.Legacy Sigmund Freud memorial inHampstead, North London. The statue is located near to where Sigmund and Anna Freud lived.
The building behind the statue is the Tavistock Clinic, a major psychological health care institution. [edit]Psychotherapy Though not the first methodology in the practice of individual verbal psychotherapy, Freud’s psychoanalytic system came to dominate the field from early in the twentieth century, forming the basis for many later variants. While these systems have adopted different theories and techniques, all have followed Freud by attempting to effect behavioral change through having patients talk about their difficulties.
Psychoanalysis itself has, according to psychoanalyst Joel Kovel, declined as a distinct therapeutic practice, despite its pervasive influence on psychotherapy. The neo-Freudians, a group understood by Kovel to include Adler, Rank, Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm, rejected Freud’s theory of instinctual drive, emphasized interpersonal relations and self-assertiveness, and made modifications to therapeutic practice that reflected these theoretical shifts.
Adler originated the approach, although his influence was indirect due to his inability to systematically formulate his ideas. In Kovel’s view, neo-Freudian practice shares the same assumption as most current therapeutic approaches in the United States: “If what is wrong with people follows directly from bad experience, then therapy can be in its basics nothing but good experience as a corrective. ” Neo-Freudian analysis therefore places more emphasis on the patient’s relationship with the analyst and less on exploration of the unconscious.
Jung believed that the collective unconscious, which reflects the cosmic order and the history of the human species, is the most important part of the mind. It contains archetypes, which are manifested in symbols that appear in dreams, disturbed states of mind, and various products of culture. Jungians are less interested in infantile development and psychological conflict between wishes and the forces that frustrate them than in integration between different parts of the person. The object of Jungian therapy was to mend such splits.
Jung focused in particular on problems of middle and later life. His objective was to allow people to experience the split-off aspects of themselves, such as the anima (a man’s suppressed female self), the animus (a woman’s suppressed male self), or the shadow (an inferior self-image), and thereby attain wisdom. Lacan approached psychoanalysis through linguistics and literature.
Lacan believed that Freud’s essential work had been done prior to 1905, and concerned the interpretation of dreams, neurotic symptoms, and slips, which had been based n a revolutionary way of understanding language and its relation to experience and subjectivity. Lacan believed that ego psychology and object relations theory were based upon misreadings of Freud’s work; for Lacan, the determinative dimension of human experience is neither the self (as in ego psychology) nor relations with others (as in object relations theory), but language. Lacan saw desire as more important than need, and considered it necessarily ungratifiable.
Wilhelm Reich developed ideas that Freud had developed at the beginning of his psychoanalytic investigation, but then superseded but never finally discarded; these were the concept of the Actualneurosis, and a theory of anxiety based upon the idea of dammed-up libido. In Freud’s original view, what really happened to a person (the “actual”) determined the resulting neurotic disposition. Freud applied that idea both to infants and to adults; in the former case, seductions were sought as the causes of later neuroses, and in the latter incomplete sexual release.
Unlike Freud, Reich retained the idea that actual experience, especially sexual experience, was of key significance. By the 1920s, Reich had “taken Freud’s original ideas about sexual release to the point of specifying the orgasm as the criteria of healthy function. ” Reich was also “developing his ideas about character into a form that would later take shape, first as “muscular armour”, and eventually as a transducer of universal biological energy, the “orgone”. “Fritz Perls, who helped to develop Gestalt therapy, was influenced by Reich, Jung and Freud.
The key idea of gestalt therapy is that Freud overlooked the structure of awareness, which, properly understood, is “an active process that moves toward the construction of organized meaningful wholes… between an organism and its environment. ” These wholes, called gestalts, are “patterns involving all the layers of organismic function — thought, feeling, and activity. ” Neurosis is seen as splitting in the formation of gestalts, and anxiety as the organism sensing “the struggle towards its creative unification. “
Gestalt therapy attempts to cure patients through placing them in contact with “immediate organismic needs. Perls rejected the verbal approach of classical psychoanalysis; talking in gestalt therapy serves the purpose of self-expression rather than gaining self-knowledge. Gestalt therapy usually takes place in groups, and in concentrated “workshops” rather than being spread out over a long period of time; it has been extended into new forms of communal living. Arthur Janov’s primal therapy, which has been an influential post-Freudian psychotherapy, resembles psychoanalytic therapy in its emphasis on early childhood experience, but nevertheless has profound differences with it.
While Janov’s theory is akin to Freud’s early idea of Actualneurosis, he does not have a dynamic psychology but a nature psychology like that of Reich or Perls, in which need is primary while wish is derivative and dispensable when need is met. Despite its surface similarity to Freud’s ideas, Janov’s theory lacks a strictly psychological account of the unconscious and belief in infantile sexuality. While for Freud there was a hierarchy of danger situations, for Janov the key event in the child’s life is awareness that the parents do not love it. 139]Janov writes that primal therapy has in some ways returned to Freud’s early ideas and techniques.
Crews considers Freud the key influence upon “champions of survivorship” such as Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, co-authors of The Courage to Heal, although in his view they are indebted not to classic psychoanalysis but to “the pre-psychoanalytic Freud, the one who supposedly took pity on his hysterical patients, found that they were all harboring memories of early abuse… nd cured them by unknotting their repression. “
Crews sees Freud as having anticipated the recovered memory movement’s “puritanical alarmism” by emphasizing “mechanical cause-and-effect relations between symptomatology and the premature stimulation of one body zone or another”, and with pioneering its “technique of thematically matching a patient’s symptom with a sexually symmetrical ‘memory. ” Crews believes that Freud’s confidence in accurate recall of early memories anticipates the theories of recovered memory therapists such as Lenore Terr, which in his view have led to people being wrongfully imprisoned or involved in litigation.
Ethan Watters and Richard Ofshe write that the psychodynamic conception of the mind may be at the end of its usefulness, which could affect “thousands upon thousands and therapists and their patients. They believe that due to “the massive investment the field of psychotherapy has made in the psychodynamic approach, the dying convulsions of the paradigm will not be pretty”, even though uninformed or unsophisticated people may continue to accept the psychodynamic paradigm despite its lack of validity.
Science Karl Popper was a critic of Freud. Research projects designed to empirically test Freud’s theories have led to a vast literature on the topic. Seymour Fisher and Roger P. Greenberg concluded in 1977, on the basis of their analysis of research literature, that Freud’s concepts of oral and anal personality constellations, his account of the role of Oedipal factors in certain aspects of male personality functioning, his formulations about the relatively greater concern about loss of love in women’s as compared to men’s personality economy, and his views about the instigating effects of homosexual anxieties on the formation of paranoid delusions were supported byempirical evidence.
They also found limited and equivocal support for Freud’s theories about the development of homosexuality. However, they found that several of Freud’s other theories, including his portrayal of dreams as primarily containers of secret, unconscious wishes, as well as some of his views about the psychodynamics of women, were either not supported or contradicted by research.
Reviewing the issues again in 1996, they concluded that much experimental data relevant to Freud’s work exists, and supports some of his major ideas and theories. Fisher and Greenberg’s similar conclusions in their more extensive earlier volume on experimental studies have, however, been strongly criticised for alleged methodological deficiencies by Paul Kline, who writes that they “accept results at their face value with almost no consideration of methodological adequacy”,and by Edward Erwin.
Other viewponts include Eysenck’s contention that Freud set back the study of psychology and psychiatry “by something like fifty years or more”,and that of Malcolm Macmillan, who concluded that “Freud’s method is not capable of yielding objective data about mental processes”. Morris Eagle states that it has been “demonstrated quite conclusively that because of the epistemologically contaminated status of clinical data derived from the clinical situation, such data have questionable probative value in the testing of psychoanalytic hypotheses”.
Webster considers psychoanalysis perhaps the most complex and successful pseudoscience in history. J. Allan Hobson believes that Freud, by rhetorically discrediting 19th century investigators of dreams such as Alfred Maury and the Marquis de Hervey de Saint-Denis at a time when study of the physiology of the brain was only beginning, interrupted the development of scientific dream theory for half a century.
Karl Popper, who argued that all proper scientific theories must be potentially falsifiable, claimed that Freud’s psychoanalytic theories were presented in unfalsifiable form, meaning that no experiment could ever disprove them. Adolf Grunbaum has maintained, in opposition to Popper, that many of Freud’s theories are empirically testable. Whilst in agreement with Grunbaum regarding Popper, Donald Levy rejects Grunbaum’s argument that therapeutic success is the empirical basis on which Freud’s theories stand or fall in that it rests on a “false dichotomy between intra- and extraclinical evidence”.
In his wider consideration of and response to philosophical critics of Freud’s scientific credibility Levy argues for the importance of clinical case material and the concepts related to it, notably resistance and transference, in establishing the evidentiary status of Freud’s work. In a study of psychoanalysis in the United States, Nathan Hale reported on the “decline of psychoanalysis in psychiatry” during the years 1965-1985.
The continuation of this trend was noted by Alan Stone: “As academic psychology becomes more ‘scientific’ and psychiatry more biological, psychoanalysis is being brushed aside. ” Paul Stepansky, while noting that psychoanalysis remains influential in the humanities, records the “vanishingly small number of psychiatric residents who choose to pursue psychoanalytic training” and the “nonanalytic backgrounds of psychiatric chairpersons at major universities” among the evidence he cites for his conclusion that “Such historical trends attest to the marginalisation of psychoanalysis within American psychiatry.
Researchers in the emerging field of neuro-psychoanalysis, founded by neuroscientist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms,have argued for Freud’s theories, pointing out brain structures relating to Freudian concepts such as libido, drives, the unconscious, and repression. However, Solms’s case frequently depends on the notion of neuro-scientific findings being “broadly consistent” with Freudian theories, rather than strict validations of those theories.
More generally, the dream researcher G. William Domhoff has disputed claims of specifically Freudian dream theory being validated. There has also been criticism of the very concept of neuro-psychoanalysis by psychoanalysts. Neuroscientist and Nobel laureate Eric Kandel argues that “psychoanalysis still represents the most coherent and intellectually satisfying view of the mind. “
Philosophy Herbert Marcuse synthesized psychoanalysis with Marxism. Psychoanalysis has been interpreted as both radical and conservative. By the 1940s, it had come to be seen as conservative by the European and American intellectual community. Critics outside the psychoanalytic movement, whether on the political left or right, saw Freud as a conservative.
Fromm had argued that several aspects of psychoanalytic theory served the interests of political reaction in his The Fear of Freedom (1942), an assessment confirmed by sympathetic writers on the right. Philip Rieff’s Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959) portrayed Freud as a man who urged men to make the best of an inevitably unhappy fate, and admirable for that reason. Three books published in the 1950s challenged the then prevailing interpretation of Freud as a conservative: Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955), Lionel Trilling’s Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture, andNorman O. Brown’s Life Against Death (1959).
Eros and Civilization helped make the idea that Freud and Marx were addressing similar questions from different perspectives credible to the left. Marcuse criticized neo-Freudian revisionism for discarding seemingly pessimistic theories such as the death instinct, arguing that they could be turned in a utopian direction. Freud’s theories also influenced the Frankfurt school and critical theory as a whole. Reich saw Freud’s importance for psychiatry as parallel to that of Marx for economics.
Fromm identifies Freud, together with Marx and Einstein, as the “architects of the modern age”, but rejects the idea that Marx and Freud were equally significant, arguing that Marx was both far more historically important than Freud and a finer thinker. Fromm nevertheless credits Freud with permanently changing the way human nature is understood, writing that Freud’s accomplishments should not be dismissed simply because they were less than those of Marx.
Paul Robinson sees Freud as a revolutionary whose ontributions to twentieth century thought are comparable in importance to Marx’s contributions to nineteenth century thought. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari write in Anti-Oedipus that psychoanalysis resembles theRussian Revolution in that it became corrupted almost from the beginning. They believe this began with Freud’s development of the theory of the Oedipus complex, which they see as idealist. Jean-Paul Sartre critiques Freud’s theory of the unconscious in Being and Nothingness, claiming that consciousness is essentially self-conscious.
Sartre also attempts to adapt some of Freud’s ideas to his own account of human life, and thereby develop an “existential psychoanalysis” in which causal categories are replaced by teleological categories.Maurice Merleau-Pontyconsiders Freud to be one of the anticipators of phenomenology, while Theodor W. Adorno considers Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, to be Freud’s philosophical opposite, writing that Husserl’s polemic against psychologism could have been directed against psychoanalysis.
Louis Althusser drew on Freud’s concept of overdetermination for his reinterpretation of Marx’s Capital. 180] Jean-Francois Lyotard developed a theory of the unconscious that reverses Freud’s account of the dream-work: for Lyotard, the unconscious is a force whose intensity is manifest via disfiguration rather than condensation.
Jacques Derrida finds Freud to be both a late figure in the history of western metaphysics and, with Nietzsche and Heidegger, an important precursor of his own brand of radicalism. Gellner sees Freud as parallel to Plato, writing that they hold nearly the same theory of dreams and have similar theories of the tripartite structure of the human soul or personality.
Gellner concludes that Freud’s theories are an inversion of Plato’s. Whereas Plato saw a hierarchy inherent in the nature of reality, and relied upon it to validate norms, Freud was a naturalist who could not follow such an approach. Both men’s theories drew a parallel between the structure of the human mind and that of society, but while Plato wanted to strengthen the super-ego, which corresponded to the aristocracy, Freud wanted to strengthen the ego, which corresponded to the middle class.
Michel Foucault writes that Plato and Freud meant different things when they claimed that dreams fulfill desires, since the meaning of a statement depends on its relation to other propositions. Paul Vitz compares Freudian psychoanalysis to Thomism, noting St. Thomas’s belief in the existence of an “unconscious consciousness” and his “frequent use of the word and concept ‘libido’ – sometimes in a more specific sense than Freud, but always in a manner in agreement with the Freudian use. Vitz suggests that Freud may have been unaware that his theory of the unconscious was reminiscent of Aquinas.
Bernard Williams writes that there has been hope that some psychoanalytical theories may “support some ethical conception as a necessary part of human happiness”, but that in some cases the theories appear to support such hopes because they themselves involve ethical thought. In his view, while such theories may be better as channels of individual help because of their ethical basis, it disqualifies them from providing a basis for ethics.
Cocaine Main article: Cocaine As a medical researcher, Freud was an early user and proponent of cocaine as a stimulant as well as analgesic. He believed that cocaine was a cure for many mental and physical problems, and in his 1884 paper “On Coca” he extolled its virtues. Between 1883 and 1887 he wrote several articles recommending medical applications, including its use as an antidepressant. He narrowly missed out on obtaining scientific priority for discovering its anesthetic properties of which he was aware but had mentioned only in passing.
Karl Koller, a colleague of Freud’s in Vienna, received that distinction in 1884 after reporting to a medical society the ways cocaine could be used in delicate eye surgery. Freud also recommended cocaine as a cure for morphineaddiction. He had introduced cocaine to his friend Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow who had become addicted to morphine taken to relieve years of excruciating nerve pain resulting from an infection acquired while performing an autopsy. However, his claim that Fleischl-Marxow was cured of his addiction was premature, though he never acknowledged he had been at fault.
Fleischl-Marxow developed an acute case of “cocaine psychosis”, and soon returned to using morphine, dying a few years later after more suffering from intolerable pain. The application as an anesthetic turned out to be one of the few safe uses of cocaine, and as reports of addiction and overdose began to filter in from many places in the world, Freud’s medical reputation became somewhat tarnished. After the “Cocaine Episode” Freud ceased to publicly recommend use of the drug, but continued to take it himself occasionally for depression, migraine and nasal inflammation during the early 1890s, before giving it up in 1896.
In this period he came under the influence of his friend and confidant Fliess, who recommended cocaine for the treatment of the so-called nasal reflex neurosis. Fliess, who operated on the noses of several of his own patients, also performed operations on Freud and on one of Freud’s patients whom he believed to be suffering from the disorder,Emma Eckstein. However, the surgery proved disastrous. It has been suggested that much of Freud’s early psychoanalytical theory was a by-product of his cocaine use.
