Sigmund Freud: life, theory, and contributions

Sigmund Freud

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Sigismund Schlomo Freud was born in 1856. His mother would forever call him "my golden Sigi." The Freud home was a run-down apartment in Freiberg in what is now the Czech Republic. Sigi's father, Jacob, was a traveling wool salesman who was not a very good salesman.

There were eight brothers and sisters for Sigi and all were very close. Sigi was the smartest, and his parents favored him, sacrificing whatever they could to give him a good education. In 1860, the family moved to Leipzig and eventually settled in Vienna, Austria.

Freud loved Vienna and its museums. It had dozens of wonderful coffeehouses, fabulous opera houses and art galleries. Though he would have loved to spend time in all of them, he was too poor. But the museums were free. He became well-read and absorbed everything he could find -- art and literature from all countries. He also mastered languages in school: Latin, Greek, French, and absolutely perfect English. Then he taught himself Italian and Spanish (Krull & Kulikov, 2006, p. 22).

He admired strong men in history like Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Napoleon, and perhaps most of all, Leonardo da Vinci, because if his intellectual curiosity and independence.

Sigi graduated from a prominent high school, passing his matura, a written and oral final exam, in 1873 with honors. He went to medical school where he studied under Ernst Brucke, a physiology professor (Boeree, 2009).

Freud was excellent at research. He focussed on neurophysiology, but only a limited number of jobs were available and there was a line ahead of him. Brucke helped him to get a grant to study with the famous psychiatrist Charcot in Paris, and then with Brucke's rival Bernheim. Both were studying the use of hypnosis with hysterics (Boeree, 2009). He spent a short time as resident in neurology and direcor of a children's ward in Berlin, Freud came back to Vienna and married his fiancee, Martha Bernays, in 1887. He set up a neuropsychiatry practice.

His interests focused on the treatment of hysterical patients using hypnosis. This involved changing a person's attention which would result in a change in their bodily experience -- techniques he had studied under Charcot. A colleague had treated a patient successfully through hypnosis and then traced her symptoms back to traumatic events at her father's deathbed. His colleague named the treatment "catharsis" and pinned its effectivity as a treatment on the release of "pent-up" emotions. Freud experimented with it successfully and, in 1895, along with his colleague, published Studies on Hysteria. This was a signficiant accomplishment because it presented the first full statement of a theory of neurosis: that an experience which is accompanied by a strong emotion is usually overcome when the emotion is adequately expressed. A hysterical symptom is formed when the affect becomes "strangulated" (obstructed).Then, barred from expression, the affect finds a tricky route and gives rise to a hysterical symptom. When, under hypnosis that process is reversed and the feeling can be expressed, the symptom disappears (Strupp, 1967, p. 6)

At the same time, Freud first used the term "psychoanalysis," and defined it as a way to treat mental illness by discussing a patient's unconscious thoughts and feelings. It would shape the rest of his life's work (Sigmund Freud, 2010).

Freud also began another project -- self-analysis -- examining himself, which meant that he studied and analyzed his dreams. He wrote the Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. At about that same time, he had created his therapeutic technique, dropping completely the use of hypnosis as therapy and initiating the use of "free association," which he found more effective.

Freud and Psychoanalysis

Several of Freud's early writings were not widely accepted by either his peers or the public. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) sold a few hundred copies. It led Freud to comment that "Psychoanalysis brings out the worst in everyone" (Strupp, 1967, p. 83).

When Freud had introduced sexual factors in his work on hysteria, the medical and scientific professions in Vienna and parts of the rest of Europe came down hard on him, claiming it was not scientific work, but labeling it "a matter for the police." He was forced into near isolation for several years, the attacks were so persistent and vicious. As he worked into the subject of psychoanalysis and produced less controversial writings, his influence returned, but the attacks seemed never to stop.

Psychoanalysis refers to several parts of Freud's work including his therapeutic techniques as well as the research methods he utilized to create the theories. He used observation and case studies when he developed his theory of personality development.

Freud always thought of psychoanalysis as not only a scientific discovery, but also as his own creation for the most part. He had taken a science which, for decades, had been chiefly concerned with "unconscious" processes, such as dreams, and had made it into a matter of understanding the whole personality of an individual. In other words, he studied the human as both a normal and abnormal manifestation. What he did for psychoanalysis was the same as what Galileo had done for astronomy when he said that earth was not the center of the universe. While utilizing reason and rationale in his analysis, he also knew their limitations. The big difference, practically speaking, was that he explored the human mind, yet he also used his insight to temper is conclusions with compassion for man's fallibility (Strupp, 1967, p. 11).

Freud divided the human mind into two parts: conscious and unconscious. The conscious mind is everything that we are normally aware of, like thinking and talking. The unconscious mind is our feelings, thoughts, desires and most of our memories. Most of the unconscious mind is filled with unpleasant feelings.

Freud's theory of personality further divides personality into three elements: id, ego, and superego.

The id is driven by pleasure. It strives for gratification of all of an individual's wants and needs. And if the needs are not met quickly, the id causes a state of anxiety or tension. A wish to eat or drink would produce eating or drinking something. If that satisfaction is delayed, then we are anxious about when we will get to eat or have a drink. Freud states that the id is more important at younger ages and for infants, because it makes certain their needs are met without them being able to communicate. If an infant is hungry, it will cry, for example.

The ego deals with real life. Freud says that the ego is created out of the id and makes certain that the id's whims can be actually expressed in ways that might be normally acceptable to most people. The ego attempts to actually gratify the desires of the id but in real-world ways that are appropriate. This reality check looks at the positives and negatives of a particular action before picking one to accept or reject. Often, the impulses of the id can be fulfilled through a process Freud named "delayed gratification." That is, the ego will pick an appropriate occasion for the id's behavior to be displayed.

The ego can also neutralize friction or tension that has developed by those desires of the id through a process of locating an object in reality that might be the equivalent of the desire expressed by the id.

The superego is the final part of personality to develop. This the part of our personality that maintains our morals, and such things as our ideals that have been adopted or acquired from parents and all of society. It is, in other words, our own personal sense of what is right and what is wrong.