Sigmund Freud ( ), born
Sigismund Schlomo Freud (May 6, 1856 – September
23, 1939), was an Austrian
neurologist who founded the psychoanalytic school of psychology. Freud is best known for his
theories of the
unconscious mind
and the
defense mechanism of
repression and for creating
the clinical practice of
psychoanalysis for treating
psychopathology through dialogue between a
patient and a psychoanalyst. Freud is also renowned for his
redefinition of
sexual desire as the primary
motivational energy of human life, as well as his therapeutic
techniques, including the use of
free association, his theory
of
transference in the therapeutic
relationship, and the interpretation of
dreams
as sources of insight into unconscious desires. He was also an
early neurological researcher into
cerebral palsy.
While many of Freud's ideas have fallen out of favor or have been
modified by
Neo-Freudians, and modern
advances in the field of psychology have shown flaws in many of his
theories, Freud's work remains important in the history of clinical
psychodynamic approaches. In academia,
his ideas continue to influence the
humanities and some
social sciences.
Biography
Early life
Sigmund
Freud was born on May 6, 1856 to Galician
Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Příbor
, Austrian Empire
, which is now part of the Czech Republic.
His father Jakob was 41, a wool merchant, and had two children by a
previous marriage. His mother
Amalié
(née Nathansohn), the third wife of Jakob, was 21. He was the first
of their eight children and owing to his precocious intellect, his
parents favoured him over his siblings from the early stages of his
childhood. Despite their poverty, they sacrificed everything to
give him a proper education.
Due to the economic
crisis of 1857, Freud's father lost his business, and the
family moved to Leipzig
before
settling in Vienna
. In
1865, Sigmund entered the
Leopoldstädter
Kommunal-Realgymnasium, a prominent high school. Freud was an
outstanding pupil and graduated the
Matura in
1873 with honors.
After planning to study law, Freud joined the
medical faculty at University of Vienna
to study under Darwinist Prof. Karl Claus. At that
time,
eel life history was still
unknown.
In search for their male sex organs, Freud
spent four weeks at the Austrian zoological research station in
Trieste
, dissecting hundreds of eels without finding more
than his predecessors had.
Medical school
In 1874, the concept of "
psychodynamics" was proposed with the
publication of
Lectures on Physiology by German
physiologist
Ernst Wilhelm
von Brücke who, in coordination with physicist
Hermann von Helmholtz, one of the
formulators of the
first law
of thermodynamics (
conservation of energy), supposed
that all living organisms are energy-systems also governed by this
principle.
During this year, at the University of
Vienna
, Brücke served as supervisor for first-year medical
student Sigmund Freud who adopted this new "dynamic"
physiology. In his
Lectures on Physiology, Brücke
set forth the radical view that the living organism is a
dynamic system to which the laws of
chemistry and
physics
apply. This was the starting point for Freud's dynamic psychology
of the mind and its relation to the
unconscious. The origins of Freud’s basic
model, based on the fundamentals of chemistry and physics,
according to
John Bowlby, stems from
Brücke,
Meynert,
Breuer,
Helmholtz, and
Herbart. In 1876, he published his first paper about
"the
testicles of
eels"
in the
Mitteilungen der österreichischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften, conceding that he could not solve the matter.
In 1877, Freud abbreviated his first name from "Sigismund" to
"Sigmund." In 1879, Freud interrupted his studies to complete his
one year of obligatory military service, and in 1881 he received
his
Dr. med. (M.D.) with the thesis
Über das
Rückenmark niederer Fischarten ("on the
spinal cord of lower
fish
species").
Freud and psychoanalysis


19 Berggasse

Approach to Freud's consulting rooms
at Berggasse
In October 1885 Freud went to Paris on a traveling fellowship to
study with Europe's most renowned neurologist,
Jean Martin Charcot. He was later to
remember the experience of this stay as catalytic in turning him
toward the practice of medical psychopathology and away from a less
financially promising career in research neurology. Charcot
specialised in the study of
hysteria and
its susceptibility to
hypnosis, which he
frequently demonstrated with patients on stage in front of an
audience. Freud later turned away from hypnosis as a potential
cure, favouring free association and
dream analysis. Charcot himself questioned
his own work on hysteria towards the end of his life.
After opening his own medical practice, specializing in
neurology, Freud married
Martha Bernays in 1886. Her father Berman was
the son of
Isaac Bernays, chief rabbi
in Hamburg. After experimenting with
hypnosis on his neurotic patients, Freud abandoned
this form of treatment as it proved ineffective for many, in favor
of a treatment where the patient talked through his or her
problems. This came to be known as the "talking cure", as the
ultimate goal of this talking was to locate and release powerful
emotional energy that had initially been rejected, and imprisoned
in the unconscious mind. Freud called this denial of emotions
"
repression", and he believed that it was
often damaging to the normal functioning of the psyche, and could
also retard physical functioning as well, which he described as
"
psychosomatic" symptoms. (The term
"talking cure" was initially coined by the patient
Anna O. who was treated by Freud's colleague
Josef Breuer.) The "talking cure" is
widely seen as the basis of
psychoanalysis.
Carl
Jung initiated the rumor that a romantic relationship may have
developed between Freud and his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, who
had moved into Freud's
apartment at
19 Berggasse in 1896. (Psychologist
Hans Eysenck has suggested that the affair
resulted in a pregnancy and a subsequent abortion for Miss
Bernays.) The publication in 2006 of a Swiss hotel log, dated 13
August 1898, has suggested to some Freudian scholars (including
Peter Gay) that there was a factual basis
to these rumors.
In his forties, Freud "had numerous psychosomatic disorders as well
as exaggerated fears of dying and other phobias" (Corey 2001,
p. 67). During this time Freud was involved in the task of
exploring his own dreams, memories, and the dynamics of his
personality development. During this self-analysis, he came to
realize the hostility he felt towards his father (Jacob Freud), who
had died in 1896, and "he also recalled his childhood sexual
feelings for his mother (Amalia Freud), who was attractive, warm,
and protective" (Corey 2001, p. 67) considers this time of
emotional difficulty to be the most creative time in Freud's
life.
After the publication of Freud's books in 1900 and 1902, interest
in his theories began to grow, and a circle of supporters developed
in the following period. Freud often clashed with those supporters
who critiqued his theories, however, the most famous being
Carl Jung, who had originally supported Freud's
ideas. Part of the reason for the fallout between Freud and Jung
was the latter's interest and commitment to religion and mysticism,
which Freud saw as unscientific.
As if to highlight how important
nicotine
and fine
cigars were to Freud for his
cognitive productivity, during a time that World War I hit Austria
hard, he wrote in a letter:
Last years
In 1930, Freud received the
Goethe
Prize in appreciation of his contribution to psychology and to
German literary culture. Three years later the
Nazis took control of Germany and Freud's books
featured prominently among those burned and destroyed by the Nazis.
Freud quipped: At that time, he could not have foreseen that all of
his many sisters would perish in
The
Holocaust. In March 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria in the
Anschluss.
This led to violent outbursts of anti-Semitism in Vienna, and Freud and his
family received visits from the Gestapo
.
Freud decided to go into exile "to die in freedom".
He and his family left
Vienna in June 1938 and moved to 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead
, London
.
There is a
statue of him at the corner of Belsize Lane and Fitzjohn's Avenue,
near Swiss
Cottage
.
A heavy cigar smoker, Freud endured more than 30 operations during
his life due to
oral cancer. In
September 1939 he prevailed on his doctor and friend
Max Schur to assist him in suicide. After reading
Balzac's
La
Peau de chagrin in a single sitting he said, "My dear
Schur, you certainly remember our first talk. You promised me then
not to forsake me when my time comes. Now it is nothing but torture
and makes no sense any more." Schur administered three doses of
morphine over many hours that resulted in Freud's death on 23
September 1939.
Three days after his death, Freud's body was
cremated at Golders Green Crematorium
in England during a service attended by Austrian
refugees, including the author Stefan
Zweig. His ashes were later placed in the crematorium's
columbarium. They rest in an ancient
Greek urn that Freud received as a present from
Marie Bonaparte, and which he had kept in
his study in Vienna for many years. After
Martha Freud's death in 1951, her ashes were
also placed in that urn. Golders Green Crematorium has since also
become the final resting place for
Anna
Freud and her lifelong friend
Dorothy Burlingham, as well as
for several other members of the Freud family.
Freud's ideas
Freud has been influential in two related but distinct ways. He
simultaneously developed a theory of how the human
mind is organized and operates internally, and a theory
of how human
behavior both conditions and
results from this particular theoretical understanding. This led
him to favor certain clinical techniques for attempting to help
cure
psychopathology. He theorized
that
personality is developed
by the person's
childhood
experiences.
Early work
Freud began his study of medicine at the University of Vienna but
took eight 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 (as noted above). 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 well 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 of
oxygen during the birth process being a
cause. Instead, he suggested that complications in birth were only
a symptom of the problem.
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
subconsciously repressed thoughts and
feelings into
consciousness in order
to free the patient from the suffering caused by the repetitive
return of distorted forms of these thoughts and feelings.
Classically, the bringing of unconscious thoughts and feelings to
consciousness is brought about by encouraging the patient to talk
in
free association and to talk
about dreams. Another important element of psychoanalysis is a
relative lack of direct involvement on the part of the analyst,
which is meant to encourage the patient to project thoughts and
feelings onto the analyst. Through this process,
transference, the patient can reenact and
resolve repressed conflicts, especially childhood conflicts with
(or about) parents.
The origin of Freud's early work with psychoanalysis can be linked
to
Joseph Breuer. Freud credited Breuer
with the discovery of the psychoanalytical method. One case started
this phenomenon that would shape the field of psychology for
decades to come, the case of
Anna O. In
1880, a young woman came to Breuer with symptoms of what was then
called
female hysteria. Anna O. was
a highly intelligent 21-year-old woman. She presented with symptoms
such as paralysis of the limbs,
dissociation, and amnesia; today this set of
symptoms are known as
conversion
disorder. After many doctors had given up and accused Anna O.
of faking her symptoms, Breuer decided to treat her
sympathetically, which he did with all of his patients. He started
to hear her mumble words during what he called states of absence.
Eventually Breuer started to recognize some of the words and wrote
them down. He then hypnotized her and repeated the words to her;
Breuer found out that the words were associated with her father's
illness and death.
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 the traditional
story, based on 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 realize 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 wishful fantasies.
A different version of events starts with Freud's first positing
that unconscious memories of infantile sexual abuse were at the
root of the psychoneuroses in letters to Wilhelm 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 with his patients
the imputed memories were not conscious, and that on his theory
they must be present as
unconscious 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. However they generally were
unconvinced that what they experienced under the influence of his
clinical procedures indicated that they had actually been subjected
to early childhood sexual abuse: he reported that even after the
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 infantile sexual abuse "scenes". His
claim of one hundred percent confirmation of his theory only served
to reinforce previously expressed reservations from his colleagues
about the validity of findings obtained by means of the suggestive
techniques he was using.
Cocaine
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 his friend and confidant
Wilhelm Fliess, who recommended cocaine for
the treatment of the "nasal reflex neurosis". Fliess operated on
Freud and a number of Freud's patients whom he believed to be
suffering from the disorder, including
Emma Eckstein, whose surgery proved
disastrous.
Freud felt that cocaine would work as a panacea for many disorders
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 he had
acquired while treating a disease of the nervous system. Freud also
recommended it to many of his close family and friends. He narrowly
missed out on obtaining
scientific
priority for discovering cocaine's
anesthetic properties (of which Freud was aware
but on which he had not written extensively), after
Karl Koller, a colleague of Freud's in Vienna,
presented a report to a medical society in 1884 outlining the ways
cocaine could be used for delicate
eye
surgery. Freud was bruised by this, especially because this would
turn out to be one of the few safe uses of cocaine, as 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, which later biographers have dubbed "The
Cocaine Incident". However, he managed to move on, and some
speculate that he even continued to use cocaine after this event.
Jurgen von Scheidt posits that most of Freud's psychoanalytical
theory was a byproduct of his cocaine use.
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, as psychologist Jacques
Van Rillaer pointed out, "contrary to what most people believe, the
unconscious was not discovered by Freud. In 1890, when
psychoanalysis was still unheard of,
William James, in
Principles of Psychology his
monumental treatise on psychology, examined the way
Schopenhauer,
von Hartmann,
Janet,
Binet and
others had used the term 'unconscious' and 'subconscious'".
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 cerebration 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. Although Freud later attempted to find patterns of repression
among his patients in order to derive a general model of the mind,
he also observed that repression varies among individual patients.
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.
Later, Freud distinguished between three concepts of the
unconscious: the descriptive unconscious, the dynamic unconscious,
and the system unconscious. The descriptive unconscious referred to
all those features of mental life of which people are not
subjectively aware. The dynamic unconscious, a more specific
construct, referred to mental
processes and contents that are defensively removed from
consciousness as a result of conflicting attitudes. The system
unconscious denoted the idea that when mental processes are
repressed, they become organized by principles different from those
of the conscious mind, such as condensation and displacement.
Eventually, Freud abandoned the idea of the system unconscious,
replacing it with the concept of the
ego, super-ego, and id. Throughout
his career, however, he retained the descriptive and dynamic
conceptions of the unconscious.
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 (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. He also turned to
anthropological studies of
totemism and argued that totemism reflected a
ritualized enactment of a tribal
Oedipal conflict.
Freud originally posited childhood
sexual
abuse as a general explanation for the origin of neuroses, but
he abandoned this so-called "seduction theory" as insufficiently
explanatory. 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 etiology 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 term '
Electra complex' is sometimes used to refer
to such a fixation on the father, although Freud did not advocate
its use.) The repressive or dormant
latency stage of
psychosexual development preceded the sexually mature
genital stage of psychosexual
development.
Freud's views have sometimes been called phallocentric. This is
because, for Freud, the unconscious desires the phallus (penis).
Males are afraid of losing their masculinity, symbolized by the
phallus, to another male. Females always desire to have a phallus -
an unfulfillable desire. Thus boys resent their fathers (fear of
castration) and girls desire theirs. Also, when asked if he should
have included vulva related concepts Freud responded that "...the
vulva is a void while the phallus is a presence...."
Id, ego, and super-ego
In his later work, Freud proposed that the human psyche could be
divided into three parts:
ego,
super-ego, and id. 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 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". Freud acknowledged that his use of the term
Id (
das Es, "the It") derives from the writings
of
Georg Groddeck. The term 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 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 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.
The life and death drives
Freud believed that humans were driven by two conflicting central
desires: the life drive (
libido/Eros)
(survival, propagation, hunger, thirst, and sex) and the death
drive (
Thanatos). Freud's description of
Cathexis, whose energy is known as libido, included all creative,
life-producing drives. The
death drive
(or death instinct), whose energy is known as anticathexis,
represented an urge inherent in all living things to return to a
state of calm: in other words, an inorganic or dead state.
Freud recognized Thanatos only in his later years and developed his
theory on the death drive in
Beyond the Pleasure
Principle. Freud approached the paradox between the life
drives and the death drives by defining pleasure and unpleasure.
According to Freud, unpleasure refers to stimulus that the body
receives. (For example, excessive friction on the skin's surface
produces a burning sensation; or, the bombardment of visual stimuli
amidst rush hour traffic produces anxiety.)
Conversely, pleasure is a result of a decrease in stimuli (for
example, a calm environment the body enters after having been
subjected to a hectic environment). If pleasure increases as
stimuli decreases, then the ultimate experience of pleasure for
Freud would be zero stimulus, or death.
Given this proposition, 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
Eros and Thanatos represented a revolution in his manner of
thinking.
These ideas resemble aspects of the philosophies of
Arthur Schopenhauer and
Friedrich Nietzsche. Schopenhauer's
pessimistic philosophy, expounded in
The World as Will and
Representation, describes a renunciation of the will to live
that corresponds on many levels with Freud's Death Drive.
Similarly, the life drive clearly parallels much of Nietzsche's
concept of the Dionysian in
The Birth of Tragedy. However,
Freud denied having been acquainted with their writings before he
formulated the groundwork of his own ideas.
Freud's legacy
Psychotherapy
Freud's theories and research methods have always been
controversial. However, Freud has had a tremendous impact on
psychotherapy. Many psychotherapists
follow Freud's approach to an extent, even if they reject his
theories.
One influential post-Freudian psychotherapy has been the
primal therapy of the American psychologist
Arthur Janov.
Freud's contributions to psychotherapy have been extensively
criticized and defended by many scholars and historians.
Critics include
H. J. Eysenck, who
wrote that Freud 'set psychiatry back one hundred years',
consistently mis-diagnosed his patients, fraudulently
misrepresented case histories and that "what is true in Freud is
not new and what is new in Freud is not true".
Betty Friedan also criticised Freud
and his Victorian slant on women in her 1963 book
The Feminine Mystique. Freud's
concept of
penis envy—and his definition
of female as a negative—was attacked by
Kate Millett, whose 1970 book
Sexual Politics explained confusion and
oversights in his work.
Naomi
Weisstein wrote that Freud and his followers erroneously
thought that his "years of intensive clinical experience" added up
to scientific rigor.
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen wrote in a review of Han Israëls's book
Der Fall Freud published in
The London Review of
Books that, "The truth is that Freud knew from the very start
that Fleischl, Anna O. and his 18 patients were not cured, and yet
he did not hesitate to build grand theories on these non-existent
foundations...he disguised fragments of his self-analysis as
‘objective’ cases, that he concealed his sources, that he
conveniently antedated some of his analyses, that he sometimes
attributed to his patients ‘free associations’ that he himself made
up, that he inflated his therapeutic successes, that he slandered
his opponents."
Jacques Lacan saw attempts to locate
pathology in, and then to cure, the individual as more
characteristic of American
ego
psychology than of proper psychoanalysis. For Lacan,
psychoanalysis involved "self-discovery" and even social criticism,
and it succeeded insofar as it provided emancipatory
self-awareness.
David Stafford-Clark summed up
criticism of Freud: "Psychoanalysis was and will always be Freud's
original creation. Its discovery, exploration, investigation, and
constant revision formed his life's work. It is manifest injustice,
as well as wantonly insulting, to commend psychoanalysis, still
less to invoke it 'without too much of Freud'." It's like
supporting the theory of evolution 'without too much of Darwin'. If
psychoanalysis is to be treated seriously at all, one must take
into account, both seriously and with equal objectivity, the
original theories of Sigmund Freud.
Philosophy
Freud did not consider himself a philosopher, although he greatly
admired
Franz Brentano, known for his
theory of perception, as well as
Theodor
Lipps, who was one of the main supporters of the ideas of the
subconscious and empathy. In his 1932 lecture on psychoanalysis as
"a philosophy of life" Freud commented on the distinction between
science and philosophy:
- Philosophy is not opposed to science, it behaves itself as if
it were a science, and to a certain extent it makes use of the same
methods; but it parts company with science, in that it clings to
the illusion that it can produce a complete and coherent picture of
the universe, though in fact that picture must needs fall to pieces
with every new advance in our knowledge. Its methodological error
lies in the fact that it over-estimates the epistemological value
of our logical operations, and to a certain extent admits the
validity of other sources of knowledge, such as intuition.
Freud's model of the mind is often considered a challenge to the
enlightenment model of rational
agency, which was a key element
of much
modern philosophy. Freud's
theories have had a tremendous effect on the
Frankfurt school and
critical theory. Following the
"return to Freud" of
the French psychoanalyst
Jacques
Lacan, Freud had an incisive influence on some French
philosophers.
Freud once openly admitted to avoiding the work of
Nietzsche, "whose guesses and intuitions often
agree in the most astonishing way with the laborious findings of
psychoanalysis" . Nietzsche, however, vociferously rejected the
conjecture of so-called 'scientific' men, and despite also
'diagnosing' the death of a father-God, chose instead to embrace
the animal desires (or '
Dionysian
energies') the humanist Freud sought to reject through
positivism.
Science
Austrian-British philosopher
Karl Popper
argued that Freud's psychoanalytic theories were presented in
untestable form. Psychology
departments in American universities today are
scientifically oriented, and Freudian theory has
been marginalized, being regarded instead as a "desiccated and
dead" historical artifact, according to a recent
APA study. Recently,
however, researchers in the emerging field of
neuro-psychoanalysis have argued for
Freud's theories, pointing out brain structures relating to
Freudian concepts such as
libido,
drives, the
unconscious, and
repression. Founded by South
African neuroscientist
Mark Solms,
neuro-psychoanalysis has received contributions from researchers
including
Oliver Sacks,
Jaak Panksepp, Douglas Watt,
António Damásio,
Eric Kandel, and
Joseph E. LeDoux.
Patients

Freud's couch used during
psychoanalytic sessions
Freud used pseudonyms in his case histories. Many of the people
identified only by pseudonyms were traced to their true identities
by
Peter Swales. Some
patients known by pseudonyms were
Anna O.
(Bertha Pappenheim, 1859–1936); Cäcilie M. (Anna von Lieben); Dora
(
Ida Bauer, 1882–1945); Frau Emmy von N.
(Fanny Moser); Fräulein Elisabeth von R. (Ilona Weiss); Fräulein
Katharina (Aurelia Kronich); Fräulein Lucy R.;
Little
Hans (
Herbert Graf, 1903–1973);
Rat Man (Ernst Lanzer, 1878–1914); and
Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff,
1887–1979). Other famous patients included
H.D.
(1886–1961);
Emma Eckstein
(1865–1924);
Gustav Mahler
(1860–1911), with whom Freud had only a single, extended
consultation; and
Princess
Marie Bonaparte.
People on whom psychoanalytic observations were published, but who
were not patients, included
Daniel
Paul Schreber (1842–1911);
Giordano
Bruno,
Woodrow Wilson
(1856–1924), on whom Freud co-authored an analysis with primary
writer
William Bullitt;
Michelangelo, whom Freud analyzed in his essay,
"The Moses of Michelangelo";
Leonardo
da Vinci, analyzed in Freud's book,
Leonardo da Vinci and a
Memory of His Childhood;
Moses, in
Freud's book,
Moses and Monotheism; and Josef
Popper-Lynkeus, in Freud's paper, "Josef Popper-Lynkeus and the
Theory of Dreams".
Bibliography
Major works by Freud
- The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated from
the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey. In collaboration with
Anna Freud. Assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, 24 volumes,
Vintage, 1999
- Studies on Hysteria
(with Josef Breuer) (Studien über
Hysterie, 1895)
- The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, Publisher:
Belknap Press, 1986, ISBN 0674154215
- The Interpretation
of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung, 1899 [1900])
- The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Zur Psychopathologie
des Alltagslebens, 1901)
- Three
Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Drei Abhandlungen
zur Sexualtheorie, 1905)
- Jokes and their
Relation to the Unconscious (Der Witz und seine
Beziehung zum Unbewußten, 1905)
- Totem and Taboo
(Totem und Tabu, 1913)
- On Narcissism (Zur
Einführung des Narzißmus, 1914)
- Introduction to
Psychoanalysis (Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die
Psychoanalyse, 1917)
- Beyond the
Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips,
1920)
- The Ego and the Id
(Das Ich und das Es, 1923)
- The Future of an
Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion, 1927)
- Civilization
and Its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur,
1930)
- Moses and
Monotheism (Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische
Religion, 1939)
- An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (Abriß der
Psychoanalyse, 1940)
- A Phylogenetic Fantasy: Overview of the
Transference Neuroses translated by Axel Hoffer by Peter
Hoffer, Harvard University
Press
-
On Creativity and the Unconscious: The Psychology of Art,
Literature, Love, and Religion, Publisher: Harper
Perennial Modern Thought, 2009, ISBN 9780061718694.
Correspondence
- The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, (editor and
translator Jeffrey Moussaieff
Masson), 1985, ISBN 0-674-15420-7
- The Sigmund Freud Carl Gustav
Jung Letters, Publisher: Princeton University Press; Abr
edition , 1994, ISBN 0691036438
- The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham, 1907-1925, Publisher: Karnac
Books, 2002, ISBN 1855750511
- The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud
and Ernest Jones, 1908-1939., Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1995,
ISBN 067415424X
- The Sigmund Freud Ludwig
Binswanger Letters, Publisher: Open Gate Press, 2000, ISBN
187187145X
- The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor
Ferenczi, Volume 1, 1908-1914, Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1994,
ISBN 0674174186
- The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor
Ferenczi, Volume 2, 1914-1919, Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1996,
ISBN 0674174194
- The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor
Ferenczi, Volume 3, 1920-1933, Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2000,
ISBN 0674002970
- The Letters of Sigmund Freud to Eduard
Silberstein, 1871-1881, Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, ISBN
067452828X
- Sigmund Freud and Lou
Andreas-Salome; letters, Publisher: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich; 1972, ISBN 0151334900
- The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Arnold Zweig, Publisher: New York
University Press, 1987, ISBN 0814725856
- Letters of Sigmund Freud - selected and edited by Ernst Ludwig Freud, Publisher: New
York: Basic Books, 1960, ISBN 0486271056
Biographies
- Helen Walker Puner, Freud: His Life and His Mind
(1947)
- Ernest Jones, The Life and Work
of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols. (1953–1958)
- Henri Ellenberger, The
Discovery of the Unconscious (1970)
- Frank Sulloway, Freud:
Biologist of the Mind (1979)
- Jeffrey Moussaieff
Masson. The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the
Seduction Theory, Ballantine Books (November 2003), ISBN
0-345-45279-8
- Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our
Time (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988)
- Louis Breger, Freud: Darkness
in the Midst of Vision (New York: Wiley, 2000), ISBN
978-0471078586
Media Representation
See also
References
- Hothersall, D. 1995. History of Psychology, 3rd ed.,
Mcgraw-Hill:NY
- Joseph Aguayo Charcot and Freud: Some
Implications of Late 19th Century French Psychiatry and Politics
for the Origins of Psychoanalysis (1986). Psychoanalysis and
Contemporary Thought, 9:223-260
- AnxietyConnection.com Jerry KennardFreud 101:
Psychoanalysis Tuesday, 12 February 2008
- Freudfile Sigmund Freud Life and Work - Jean-Martin
Charcot
- Hans Jurgen Eysenck. Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire.
Transaction Publishers. 2004, p146
- The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor
Ferenczi, Volume 2, 1914-1919, Sigmund Freud, Sándor
Ferenczi
- Freud Museum
London at www.freud.org.uk
-
http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/psych-training/seminars/history-of-psychiatry-8-04.pdf
- THE HISTORY OF PSYCHIATRY PGY II Lecture 9/18/03 Larry Merkel
M.D., Ph.D.
- Freud, S. (1940). An Outline of Psychoanalysis. The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
Volume XXIII.
- Cranefield, Paul F. "Breuer, Josef". In Dictionary of
Scientific Biography, edited by Charles Coulston Gillispie,
vol. 2. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970
- Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 7, 1906, p. 274;
S.E. 14, 1914, p. 18; S.E. 20, 1925, p. 34;
S.E. 22, 1933, p. 120; Schimek, J.G. (1987), Fact and
Fantasy in the Seduction Theory: a Historical Review. Journal
of the American Psychoanalytic Association, xxxv: 937-965;
Esterson, A. (1998), Jeffrey Masson and Freud’s seduction theory: a
new fable based on old myths. History of the Human
Sciences, 11 (1), pp. 1-21.
http://human-nature.com/esterson
- Masson (ed), 1985, pp. 141, 144. Esterson, A. (1998), Jeffrey
Masson and Freud’s seduction theory: a new fable based on old
myths. History of the Human Sciences, 11 (1), pp. 1-21.
- Freud, S.E. 3, (1896a), (1896b), (1896c); Israëls, H.
& Schatzman, M. (1993), The Seduction Theory. History of
Psychiatry, iv: 23-59; Esterson, A. (1998).
- Freud, S. (1896c). The Aetiology of Hysteria. Standard
Edition, Vol. 3, p. 204; Schimek, J. G. (1987). Fact and
Fantasy in the Seduction Theory: a Historical Review. Journal of
the American Psychoanalytic Association, xxxv: 937-65; Toews, J.E.
(1991). Historicizing Psychoanalysis: Freud in His Time and for Our
Time, Journal of Modern History, vol. 63 (pp. 504-545), p.
510, n.12; McNally, R.J. (2003), Remembering Trauma,
Harvard University Press, pp. 159-169.
- Freud, S.E. 3, 1896c, pp. 204, 211; Schimek, J. G.
(1987); Esterson, A. (1998); Eissler, 2001, p. 114-115; McNally,
R.J. (2003).
- Freud, S.E. 3, 1896c, pp. 191-193; Cioffi, F. (1998
[1973]). Was Freud a liar? Freud and the Question of
Pseudoscience. Chicago: Open Court, pp. 199-204; Schimek, J.
G. (1987); Esterson, A. (1998); McNally, (2003), pp, 159-169.
- Borch-Jacobsen, M. (1996), Neurotica: Freud and the
seduction theory. October, vol. 76, Spring 1996, MIT,
pp. 15-43; Hergenhahn, B.R. (1997), An Introduction to the
History of Psychology, Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole, pp.
484-485; Esterson, A. (2002). The myth of Freud’s ostracism by the
medical community in 1896-1905: Jeffrey Masson’s assault on truth.
History of Psychology, 5(2), pp. 115-134
- Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff, The Assault on Truth: Freud's
Suppression of the Seduction Theory, pp. 233-250
- See Borch-Jacobsen (2001)
- William James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols.
(Henry Holt & Co, 1890) Dover Publications 1950, vol. 1: ISBN
0-486-20381-6, vol. 2: ISBN 0-486-20382-4
- ]
- Zilborg,
- Eysenck, Hans, Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire
(Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1986)
- How Fabrications Differ from a Lie
- Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on
Psycho-analysis (1933)
- Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, London: Routledge and
Keagan Paul, 1963, pp. 33-39; from Theodore Schick, ed., Readings
in the Philosophy of Science, Mountain View, CA: Mayfield
Publishing Company, 2000, pp. 9-13. [1]
- June 2008 study by the American Psychoanalytic
Association, as reported in the New York Times,
"Freud Is Widely Taught at Universities, Except in the Psychology
Department" by Patricia Cohen, November 25, 2007. "[Chair of the
psychology department at Northwestern University Dr.
Alice] Eagly said...that while most disciplines in psychology began
putting greater emphasis on testing the validity of their
approaches scientifically, 'psychoanalysts haven’t developed the
same evidence-based grounding.' As a result, most psychology
departments don’t pay as much attention to psychoanalysis."
- Kaplan-Solms, K., & Solms, M. (2000). Clinical studies in
neuro-psychoanalysis: Introduction to a depth neuropsychology.
London: Karnac Books.; Solms, M., & Turnbull, O. (2002). The
brain and the inner world: An introduction to the neuroscience of
subjective experience. New York: Other Press
- Sacks, O. (1984). A leg to stand on. New York: Summit
Books/Simon and Schuster.
- Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective neuroscience: The foundations of
human and animal emotions. New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
- Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the
Human Brain, 1994; The Somatic marker hypothesis and
the possible functions of the prefrontal cortex, 1996; The
Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of
Consciousness, 1999; Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and
the Feeling Brain, 2003
- The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of
Emotional Life, 1996, Simon & Schuster, 1998
Touchstone edition: ISBN 0-684-83659-9
External links