Sigmund Freud Is Commonly Known

Sigmund Freud is commonly known as the "father of psychoanalysis." Although many of his ideas and paradigms have been outmoded by subsequent research, he is recognized as the first to recognize a link between behavior and the brain. Today still, one might learn much from examining the life and career of this great man.

LIFE and WORK

Sigmund Freud was born on May 6, 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia. His father was a wool merchant. Freud's mother was her husband's second wife, and gave birth to Freud when she was only 21 years old. She would have six more children. Freud's father had two children from his previous marriage (Boeree, 2009).

Freud's first connections with psychology were made in Vienna, where his family moved when he was very young -- four or five years old. He had a very alert mind and went to medical school. According to Boeree (2009), this was largely due to the fact that he was Jewish, a group for whom not very many schooling options were open at the time. Demonstrating an early knack for academia and research, Freud was always at the head of his class. Later, he began to do research under a physiology professor, Ernst Brucke.

The professor introduced Freud to a notion known as reductionism -- all personality could be reduced to neurology. Although spending many years in an effort to find research grounds for this notion, Freud later gave up in search of a more viable idea. He was however successful in neurophysiology, and invented a cell-straining technique.

Because he was so good at research, Brucke helped Freud to obtain grants to study under great psychiatrists like Charcot and later with Bernheim. These researchers introduced Freud to the use of hypnosis. After Freud's time as a resident in neurology, he returned to Vienna, was married and began his practice in neuropsychiatry. Joseph Breuer helped him with this venture.

Freud's ideas, presented in books and lectures (Boeree, 2009), brought both fame and ostracism within the medical community. He used his fame to collected a number of bright researchers, who launched the psychoanalytic movement. Because of Freud's belief in his own thought system, he was unable to consider the opinions of those who did not agree with him. This resulted in the rise of competing schools of thought.

This however did not deter Freud from advancing his own school with great enthusiasm. When his "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" (1905), brought further alienation from the psychiatry mainstream, he organized his loyal recruits to meet weekly and form the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1908 (Gay, 1999).

Even within this group there were disagreements. Gay (1999) notes that the most significant of these were with Alfred Adler and Carl Jung. These two eventually left the group and worked on their own psychoanalytic philosophies. Freud regretted losing Jung for several reasons. Freud, being Jewish, tended to attract mostly Jews to his group of psychoanalysts. He feared that the field might become a "Jewish science." Jung was mitigate this danger because he was a Swiss from a Protestant background. What drove Jung from Freud's circle was not only his ambition, but also his increasing commitment to religion and mysticism. This was something Freud could not ignore, himself being an atheist.

Freud was a pioneer in his field, not least because he drew from various influences to arrive at his views, but also because of experiments he conducted on himself. During his research, he became convinced that most mysteries lay in the operations of the mind. This led to a specialization in "neurasthenics," which taught him to listen carefully to what patients said and to draw conclusions from this. He also began to write down his dreams during this time. From the Romantics, he gained the notion that dreams could be important in revealing the workings of the unconscious. In this, Freud became a researcher of the mind, taking material not only from his patients, but also from himself, his parents, and other psychological directions in order to arrive at answers to his questions. He was a scientist of the mind. His increasing introspection during this time brought him to a full self-analysis during the mid-1890s. This is a process nobody had ever embarked upon, making Freud a pioneer in the field (Gay, 1999).

The book the Interpretation of Dreams (1900) sold poorly, but made Freud's reputation in his profession. The work proposed the principle that the mental and physical realms were both part of nature. There were therefore no "accidents" in what was considered mental phenomena, including notions, dreams, or even slips of the tongue. For Freud, all these had intrinsic meaning and could be used as clues to the thinking process.

Although Freud was an atheist, his Jewish heritage nonetheless put in danger of the Nazis, as they began to overtake Vienna and the rest of Austria in World War II. To protect himself, Freud then emigrated to England (NNDB, 2010). After several years in this country, Freud began to suffer from cancer of the jaw and throat, mainly as a result of the huge cigars that he loved and became identified with. After a sixteen year battle with the disease, Freud was 83 years old when he died of a morphine overdose he asked his physician to administer. He died in London on September 23, 1939 (NNDB, 2010).

THE COCAINE EPISODE

According to Chiriac (2010), today's interest in Freud's association with cocaine during his life mostly stems from the fact of the current negative connections with the substance. It is important to note that, while Freud was indeed a cocaine user, this substance was not prohibited at the time. Instead, it was prescribed and used as a euphoric, because the harmful effects of the drug had not yet been discovered.

Freud used the substance as a stimulus to help with his depression and relax when he was tense. He also investigated the effects of the substance in surgery, and most notably as a local anaesthetic in microsurgery. Freud's investigation led to Carl Koller's discovery of the use of cocaine as an anaesthetic for sore eyes.

Freud's article "On Cocaine," was published in 1884. Freud's association with cocaine also has tragic undertones, according to Chiriac (2010). A friend of his, Von Fleischl-Marxow, was a morphine addict, having used this substance to control the pain he was suffering from an infection. Freud believed that cocaine could help his friend, and therefore administered the substance. Unfortunately, Von Fleischl-Marxow not only became a cocaine addict in the same way as becoming a morphine addict, but also died a slow and painful death. He took large quantities of the substance on a daily basis before his death. The cocaine did nothing to soothe his pain, much to Freud's horror.

INFLUENCES

Freud was influenced by both people and other elements during his time. His highly original thought processes incorporated these influences in highly unique ways, and allowed Freud to achieve his reputation. According to S.P. Thornton, Freud was influenced in three major ways.

Among his early influences for example are Charcot and Breuer, his professors. These men had a direct impact upon Freud's life and work. Also directly influencing him was his family and home life. As mentioned above, Freud's father had two sons from a previous marriage, Emmanuel and Philip. Philip had a son John, who was Freud's age. This brought about complicated factors in Freud's emotional crisis at the death of his father. His self-analysis revealed to him that his grief was not only the result of love and admiration for his father, but also of shame and hate (which he referred to as "ambivalence"). Furthermore, during his youth, he frequently fantasized that his half-brother Philip was his father. On the other hand, he had wished his real father dead, because he saw him as a rival for his mother's affection. This provided Freud with material for his theory of the Oedipus complex. These were all personal influences that brought about Freud's thinking as a psychoanalytical researcher.

Thornton also notes that the contemporary scientific climate of the time must be taken into account when considering Freud's influences. At the time, the most important scientific figure of the century was Charles Darwin with his publication of Origin of the Species. Freud was four years old when Darwin's work appeared. The most important effect of this publication was the conception of humanity. Previously, human beings were considered to be on a higher level than animals because of their immortal souls. Darwin's publication however changed this. Human beings were now seen as part of the animal kingdom and nature itself, differing from them only in structural complexity.

This change in viewpoint was important because it allowed, for the first time, the investigation of the human physique as an object of science. Furthermore, human behavior and motivation could also now be subjected to the principles of scientific explanation, rather than a spiritual one. This was fortunate for Freud, who accepted this view implicitly as part of his high esteem for science.

The personal and scientific environments within which Freud grew up therefore represent his primary influences. A further influence came in the form of physics. The second half of the nineteenth century, during which Freud did most of his important work, saw great advances in physics. According to Thornton, the discovery mostly responsible for this was Helmholz's principle of conservation energy. Helmholz held that the total amount of energy in a physical system is constant; that it could be changed but not annihilated; and that when the energy is moved from a part of the system, it would reappear in another part. This principle influenced areas such as thermodynamics, electromagneticism, and nuclear physics. The 19th century therefore saw major discoveries that changed the world.