Sigmund Freud

Freud in 1905

Freud, late 1930s

File:Freud Sofa.JPG

The famous couch at his London house.

1909 photo:Freud sitting left and Carl Jung sitting right.

Sigmund Freud (Moravia, 6 May 1856 – London, 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist (a person who treats the nervous system) and famous psychologist. He invented the treatment of mental illness and neurosis by means of psychoanalysis.

Freud is important in psychology because he was the first person to study the unconscious scientifically. The unconscious is a part of a person's mind which he is not aware of, and which he cannot control easily.

After Freud wrote his first book, he got married to Martha Bernays. They had six children, and the youngest (Anna Freud) became another famous psychologist.

Freud thought sex was the most important need for human beings after staying alive. He called this need the libido. He thought that sometimes people would do something they did not really want to do because the libido made them do it.

Freud lived in Austria in the 1930s. After the Anschluss, Germany and Austria were combined. Because he was Jewish, he received a visit from the Gestapo. Freud and his family did not feel safe anymore, so they left Vienna and went to England in June 1938.

Freud's ideas

Freud developed a theory of the human mind (its organisation and operations). He also had a theory that human behaviour both conditions and results from how the mind is organised.

This led him to favor certain clinical techniques for trying to help cure mental illness. He theorised that personality is developed by a person's childhood experiences. In his philosophical writings he advocated an atheistic world view; he was eulogized as "'the atheist's touchstone' for the 20th century".

Early work

Sigmund Freud memorial in Hampstead, North London. Sigmund and Anna Freud lived at 20 Maresfield Gardens, near this statue. Their house is now a museum dedicated to Freud's life and work. The building behind the statue is the Tavistock Clinic, a major psychological health care institution.

Freud began his study of medicine at the University of Vienna. He got his M.D. degree in 1881 at the age of 25 and entered private practice in neurology for financial reasons.

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 in free association and to talk about dreams.

The origin of Freud's early work with psychoanalysis can be linked to Josef Breuer. In November 1880 Breuer was called in to treat a highly intelligent 21-year-old woman (Bertha Pappenheim) for a persistent cough which 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. He found that when, with his encouragement, she told fantasy stories 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. This recovery is disputed.

Freud famously proposed that unconscious memories of infantile sexual abuse were at the root of the psychoneuroses. However, patients were generally unconvinced that 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.

Cocaine

As a medical researcher, Freud was an early user and proponent of cocaine as a stimulant as well as analgesic. He wrote several articles on the antidepressant qualities of the drug and he was influenced by friend and confidant Wilhelm Fliess, who recommended cocaine for the treatment of "nasal reflex neurosis".

Freud felt that cocaine would work as a panacea and wrote a well-received paper, "On Coca", explaining its virtues. He prescribed it to his friend Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow to help him overcome a morphine addiction acquired while treating a disease of the nervous system. Freud also recommended cocaine to many of his close family and friends.

Reports of addiction and overdose began to filter in from many places in the world. Freud's medical reputation became somewhat tarnished because of this early ambition. Furthermore, Freud's friend Fleischl-Marxow developed an acute case of "cocaine psychosis" as a result of Freud's prescriptions and died a few years later. Freud felt great regret over these events.

The Unconscious

Perhaps the most significant contribution Freud made to Western thought were his arguments concerning the importance of the unconscious mind in understanding conscious thought and behavior.

However, contrary to what most people believe, the unconscious was not discovered by Freud. Boris Sidis, a Russian Jew who emigrated to the United States of America in 1887, and studied under William James, wrote The Psychology of suggestion: a research into the subconscious nature of man and society in 1898, followed by ten or more works over the next twenty five years on similar topics to the works of Freud.

Historian of psychology Mark Altschule concluded, "It is difficult—or perhaps impossible—to find a nineteenth-century psychologist or psychiatrist who did not recognize unconscious thought as not only real but of the highest importance". Freud's advance was not to uncover the unconscious but to devise a method for systematically studying it.

Freud called dreams the "royal road to the unconscious". This meant that dreams illustrate the "logic" of the unconscious mind. Freud developed his first topology of the psyche in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) in which he proposed that the unconscious exists and described a method for gaining access to it. The preconscious was described as a layer between conscious and unconscious thought; its contents could be accessed with a little effort.

One key factor in the operation of the unconscious is "repression". Freud believed that many people repress painful memories deep into their unconscious mind. Freud also argued that the act of repression did not take place within a person's consciousness. Thus, people are unaware of the fact that they have buried memories or traumatic experiences.

Psychosexual development

Freud hoped his model was universally valid and so turned to ancient mythology and 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 (cf. 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.

Freud originally thought childhood sexual abuse was a general explanation for the origin of neuroses, but he abandoned this so-called "seduction theory". He noted finding many cases in which apparent memories of childhood sexual abuse were based more on imagination than on real events.

During the late 1890s Freud, who never abandoned his belief in the sexual cause of neuroses, began to emphasize fantasies built around the Oedipus complex as the primary cause of hysteria and other neurotic symptoms. Despite this change in his explanatory model, Freud always recognized that some neurotics had in fact been sexually abused by their fathers. He explicitly discussed several patients whom he knew to have been abused.

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.

Freud argued that children then passed through a stage in which they fixated on the mother as a sexual object (known as the Oedipus Complex) but that the child eventually overcame and repressed this desire because of its taboo nature. The repressive or dormant latency stage of psychosexual development comes before the sexually mature genital stage of psychosexual development.

Id, Ego, and Super-ego

See the 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). The Id is the impulsive, child-like portion of the psyche that operates on the "pleasure principle" and only takes into account what it wants and disregards all consequences.

The term Ego entered the English language in the late 18th century; Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) described the game of chess as a way to "...keep the mind fit and the ego in check". Ego is Latin for 'I am', and hence represents the thought and behaviour derived from two other sources.

The term Id ('the It' ot 'the Thing') represents the primitive urges to possess, conquer, dominate and achieve pleasure. It can be seen very clearly in young children, who have not yet learnt to mask their feelings. The Id appears in the earliest writing of Boris Sidis, in which it is attributed to William James, as early as 1898.

The Super-ego is the moral component of the psyche, which makes a clear distinction between right and wrong, and makes no allowance for special circumstances.

The rational Ego attempts to get 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, the Ego may employ defense mechanisms including denial, repression, and displacement. The theory of ego defense mechanisms has received empirical validation, and the nature of repression, in particular, became one of the more fiercely debated areas of psychology in the 1990s.

Life and death drives

Freud believed that humans were driven by two conflicting central desires: the life drive (survival, propagation, hunger, thirst, and sex) and the death drive (Thanatos).

Freud recognized the death drive only in his later years and developed his theory of it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

Freud acknowledged the tendency for the unconscious to repeat unpleasurable experiences in order to desensitize, or deaden, the body. This compulsion to repeat unpleasurable experiences explains why traumatic nightmares occur in dreams, as nightmares seem to contradict Freud's earlier conception of dreams purely as a site of pleasure, fantasy, and desire.

On the one hand, the life drives promote survival by avoiding extreme unpleasure and any threat to life. On the other hand, the death drive functions simultaneously toward extreme pleasure, which leads to death. Freud addressed the conceptual dualities of pleasure and unpleasure, as well as sex/life and death, in his discussions on masochism and sadomasochism. The tension between life drive and death drive represented a revolution in his manner of thinking.

Other pages

• Anal retentive

Other websites

• Freud Museum in London
• Freud's Life and Work
• Sigmund Freud - birthplace PRIBOR in Czech language