Sigmund Freud
1856-1939
Table of Contents:
Hysteria
and Hypnosis
Personality
Psychoanalytic psychology
Life Before Psychology
Sigmund Freud was born in Freiberg, Moravia, now in the Czech Republic on May 6th, 1856. At age four his family moved to Vienna where he lived until the Nazi regime forced him to move to London in 1938, the year that he died. Freud's immediate family was strange to say the least. His father was twenty years older than his mother, he had half-brothers the same age as his mother, and he had a nephew slightly older then him.
A career in law seemed to be the path Freud would take until on a whim
he enrolled in the University
of Vienna in 1873. There he met several influential teachers,
most notably Ernst Brucke, Theodor Meynert, and Jean-Martin Charcot who
led him down the path of psychology.
Dreams
Freud’s
interest in dreams rose for several different reasons:
1.Patients
often brought up dreams during free association.
2.Freud,
under Meynert’s urging was looking for a link between dreams and psycho-pathological
conditions.
3.Freud
was a “good” dreamer, constantly remembering his dreams and being fascinated
with possible meanings.
Theories
One of Freud's theories of behavior was that there are two kinds of behavior, purposive and hydraulically directed behaviors. Both were governed by a fundamental minimal tension principle, they were directed to bring about minimal tension in the end-state. He thought processes of behavior were governed mainly by hydraulic processes, like Descartes before him thought the body was governed by, a mechanistic view.He began the start of psychoanalysis by writing a book about hysteria with his friend Breuer, called Studies on Hysteria. He relied heavily on hypnosis to treat his patients’ problems. Freud along with Breuer thought hysterical symptoms were conversions, conversions of emotions into physical energy. They got this from their theory that emotionally charged experiences not released were repressed and became pathogenic ideas, that caused stimuli that would normally make a person remember the event now would activate this bottled up energy instead. He eventually got away from hypnotism when he came up with the idea of free association. He would let his patient think back to where and when problems started and freely associate other ideas in their heads.
At first Freud saw his therapy technique as simple and straight forward, but gradually learned that his patients' unconscious would resist the treatment subtly and that he could not always expect a complete cure. He discovered that many of his patients sessions were complicated by what he called transference feelings, which his patients would transfer feelings, motives and attributes of important people from their past lives who were implicated in their neurotic symptoms onto him the therapist. He found this a hindrance to the therapy. This made him stop looking at individual symptoms and start looking at the underlying emotional conflicts. So instead of providing the quick and specific cures he had originally hoped he could he now provided psychoanalysis, a long and often difficult process of self-examination that offered symptom relief almost as an incidental consequence of increased insight into one's unconscious mental life. He tried to develop a general model of the mind, which he called metapsychology. Freud argued that the human mind is pulled by three different kinds of demands and that they inevitably cause conflict with one another. Freud referred to these demands as the instincts. He proposed that different systems represented these psychic demands. The id was the repository of unconscious but powerful impulses and energies from the instincts. Then he hypothesized a perception-consciousness system that conveys information about external reality to the mind. This system not only produces immediate consciousness of whatever is being perceived, but also leaves behind memories that remain open to future consciousness in part of the psyche Freud described as "preconscious." Moral demands on the conscious are regulated by the superego. So the id, the external-perceptions system, and the superego all introduce their differing and inevitably conflicting demands into the psyche, which must sort them out and achieve some sort of compromise among them. Freud's hypothetical psychic structure for compromising was the ego. He proposed many other theories such as displacement and projection as defense mechanisms and he even theorized about love.
Even today his work is sill argued and debated over, and has remained in
the public eye for the half century since his death. Some of his
followers created the International Psycho-Analytic Association.
He influenced many people including; Erik Erikson, the object relations
school, W.R.D. Fairbairn, and Carl Jung who used "neo-Freudian" techniques.
Freud remains a dominating figure, for or against whom virtually all therapists
feel compelled to take a stand, without a doubt he was one of the greatest
psychological minds in psychology.
