Sigmund Freud: Life, Psychoanalysis, and Personality Theory

Biographical Sketch of Freud's Life

Sigmund Freud was born on May 6, 1856, in what is now the Czech Republic (then part of Austria). Freud was the first child born during his father's third marriage; his father had been widowed twice prior to his marriage to nineteen-year-old Amalia Nathanson. When Freud was four years old, the family moved to Vienna. Author Samuel Kahn explains that due to Freud's Jewish heritage, and the Nazis' obsessive drive to kill all Jews, Freud needed to flee Vienna in order to preserve his life and his library of research and writings. Kahn notes that a woman who had been analyzed by Freud in Austria — which the Nazis annexed early in their drive to dominate Europe — and who had access to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, "interceded" for Freud, allowing him to move to London in 1938, the last year of his life (Kahn, 1976, p. 1).

The Nazi scourge took a devastating toll on Freud's family. Author Giovanni Costigan writes that Freud was the oldest in a family of eight children. One brother died in infancy, another was the last child of Jakob and Amalia, and five daughters — Anna, Rosa, Mitzi, Dolfi, and Paula — were born in between. Years later, Rosa, Mitzi, and Paula were murdered in Hitler's gas chambers at Auschwitz (Costigan, 1965, p. 3).

As to his father's advice, Sigmund later told his own children what his father had told him: do not "submit meekly if attacked, but strike back at the aggressor." Throughout his life, in particular when anti-Semitism reared its ugly head, "Freud acted consistently on [his father's] advice" (Costigan, 4). Freud reportedly despised the Christian concept of "turning the other cheek" and had little patience with pacifism (Costigan, 4).

Freud attended an elementary school in Vienna and then went to Sperl Gymnasium — a secondary school that served as a college preparatory institution — between 1866 and 1873. Everything in his home was "sacrificed to the single end of his scholastic success," Costigan writes (6). Freud was provided with a small private room in the modest household where he could work "without interruption — with an oil lamp for late reading while the rest of the household used only candles" (Costigan, 6).

His school studies included Latin, mathematics, Greek, and history, and on his own he taught himself Italian and Spanish. He kept a personal diary at this time, writing it in Greek. He was reading and enjoying Shakespeare at the age of eight, and also read classic literature extensively, including works by John Milton, Goethe, and Cervantes (Costigan, 6). When seventeen-year-old Sigmund attended the Vienna World's Fair in 1873, it marked his first meaningful encounter with American culture. He was supremely impressed by the Gettysburg Address, the U.S. Constitution, and other American documents. He was so captivated by the Declaration of Independence that he hung a copy of it "above his bed in the hospital where he was an intern" (Costigan, 6).

Having passed his final examinations with high grades, Freud entered university at the age of seventeen (World of Sociology, 2001). In 1873 he enrolled in medical school, and seven years later he was awarded a Doctor of Medicine degree at the age of twenty-four. While he was fascinated with medicine and physical health, opportunities in academic medicine were limited, and as a Jew he faced additional obstacles rooted in the biases common to that era.

Anti-Semitism in Europe during Freud's formative years was stifling. Freud was eleven years old by the time Jews were granted "legal equality with their fellow citizens in Vienna" (Costigan, 8). It was surely "galling" to learn that his life would be "branded forever with the stigma of [cultural] inferiority," and Costigan asserts that being "set apart by race" had an enormous influence "in the development of Freud's personality" (Costigan, 9).

At the age of twenty-six he married Martha Bernays. Since he now had a wife to support and the stipends available to a young scientist were insufficient, he was drawn into psychiatry. He spent three years serving a residency at the Allgemeine Krankenhaus, the general hospital that served as Vienna's main medical center. Because of his intense interest in the workings of the human brain, he became deeply immersed in psychology, focusing on the treatment of patients with "hysteria" (World of Sociology).

Freud's Development of Psychoanalysis

Using hypnosis, Freud was able to demonstrate that the symptoms of hysteria could be traced to "highly emotional experiences, which had been 'repressed' from past conscious memories" (World of Sociology, p. 2). It was around this time that Freud became interested in self-analysis and dream study, and at the age of thirty-nine he first used the term "psychoanalysis."

By 1892, Costigan writes, Freud was "becoming permanently disillusioned with hypnosis" because the problems it resolved were "rarely permanent" and the patient became too dependent on the physician (37–38). Freud therefore began to develop a new method in which the patient was given "absolute freedom" to talk about whatever came to mind. He referred to this method as "free association," which in time became one of the "two great cornerstones of psychoanalytic practice and one of Freud's most important discoveries" (Costigan, 38).

While refining the strategy of free association with patients, Freud noticed that many of the "episodes salvaged by patients from their forgotten past were sexual in nature," which were difficult for some patients to disclose. He came to call this patient resistance to revealing intimate details of their lives "repression" (Costigan, 40). Freud referred to the moment when the patient "projects his repressed infantile feelings" onto the analyst as "transference." By 1896 he had coined the term "psychoanalysis" to describe the therapeutic strategy he had pioneered.

Unfortunately, many of his colleagues at the Vienna Neurological Society were shocked by his findings and hostile to his methodology (Costigan, 42). The chairman of the Society dismissed Freud's paper "The Aetiology of Hysteria" as "a scientific fairy tale" (Costigan, 42). As a result, in much of his subsequent work Freud relied largely on himself.

Freud's Theory of Personality

Grunbaum questions how Freud arrived at the conclusion that repression is driven by "obsessive recall of distressing experiences." He also insists that there are "defects" in Freud's fundamental rule of free association, arguing that it is a stretch to claim free association can be both "causally investigative and therapeutic" simultaneously (187). Furthermore, Grunbaum notes that many scholars today wonder how Freud determined that having the patient overcome resistances and "lifting repressions" could remove "unconscious pathogens of neuroses." Grunbaum is not even certain that repression is a necessary condition for "cathartically lifting repressions" (189).

Essayist Peter Kramer observes that many readers today do not take Freud's recounting of his therapeutic work at face value, and Freud's speculations regarding his female patients are not widely accepted. Moreover, the virtues that had been "automatically" accorded to Freud over the years — "clinical acumen, wisdom in human affairs, dedication to his patients and to the truth" — are now obscured by skepticism generated through deep questioning and investigation (Kramer, 1998, pp. 199–200). That skepticism has also been fueled by a lack of "accord" between what Freud posited and "contemporary opinion about paranoia and post-traumatic stress disorder" (Kramer, 201).

That said, contemporary attacks on Freud's character tend to "diminish his work," which may not be fair, Kramer continues (201). If assessments of Freud the man are distorted by unfair criticism, his work suffers as well. Kramer asks: was Freud simply a "relentless self-promoter," or do his ideas and theories represent strong and profoundly honest science? (201).

William J. McGrath is less harsh, asserting that the "historical task of understanding the relationship between the culture and time in which he lived and the creative process leading to his discoveries remains to be accomplished" (McGrath, 1986, p. 20). Placing his life "more firmly" in its historical context — including the political dynamics in Europe at the time — would open up a richer perspective on the great volume of work he accomplished and its meaning for the twenty-first century (McGrath, 24).

McGrath also takes issue with those who criticize Freud for his experimentation with cocaine. Between 1883 and 1885, Freud experimented with cocaine and wrote about the drug's positive psychic effects, advocating its use for a number of ailments — not knowing that his work on cocaine would later bring him "more professional grief than profit" (McGrath, 151). At the time, Freud did not understand the addiction that regular cocaine use produces, and hindsight is 20/20; it is therefore unfair to critique something that was genuinely believed to be beneficial in 1885, McGrath explains.

In a letter Freud wrote to Dr. Wilhelm Fliess on January 24, 1895, Freud appears clearly euphoric through his use of cocaine. Fliess was Freud's closest friend and confidant, and the two men shared a homosexual relationship. They both believed, according to Jeffrey Masson's book, that bisexuality was perfectly normal "for all individuals" (Masson, 1985, p. 2). In the letter, Freud says he has been feeling "unbelievably well" following a few "viciously bad days" (Freud, 106). He wrote that this was because:

"[I applied] a cocainization of the left nostril… [which] helped me to an amazing extent… the next day I kept the nose under cocaine, which one should not really do; that is, I repeatedly painted it to prevent the renewed occurrence of swelling; during this time I discharged what in my experience is a copious amount of thick pus; and since then I have felt wonderful, as though there never had been anything wrong at all…" (Freud, in Jeffrey Masson's book).

Freud believed that people are motivated by "innate instincts that convert bodily needs into psychological tensions," according to Robert B. Ewen's An Introduction to Theories of Personality. Freud reduced personality types to instincts, emphasizing two: (a) "sexual, which includes the whole range of pleasurable and self-preserving behavior," and (b) "destructive" (Ewen, 2003, p. 50). By destructive he meant that humans' "inherent nature is murderous and incestuous," and combining the two instincts, Freud believed that any behavior is "at least partly erotic and partly aggressive" (Ewen, 50).

Freud's theory of personality — which still holds considerable credibility today — posits that the Id is present at birth. The Id is an unconscious state containing innate human instincts. At birth, a human is entirely driven by the "pleasure principle"; the infant has no concept of self-preservation, logic, or time.

Conclusion

Sigmund Freud's valiant work and revolutionary theories may be challenged by some, and his behaviors may seem to twenty-first-century scholars to be out of touch or even misguided. Nevertheless, his discoveries that gave rise to psychoanalysis, and his penetrating understanding of human personality, constitute — in many minds — the holy grail of psychology.