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Revision as of 06:04, 14 December 2006 by 68.32.56.197 (talk)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind,
especially involving the mechanism of [[Psychological repression;
his redefinition of sexual desireas mobile and directed towards a
wide variety of objects; and his therapeutic technique, especially
his understanding of transference in the therapeutic relationship
and the presumed value of dreams as sources of insight into
unconscious desires.
He is commonly referred to as "List of people known as father or
mother of something the father of psychoanalysis" and his work has
been tremendously influential in the popular imagination —
popularizing such notions as the unconscious, defence mechanism,
Freudian slips and dream symbolism while also making a long-lasting
impact on fields as diverse as literature, film, MarxismMarxistand
feminist theories,literary criticism,philosophy and psychology.
Sigismund Schlomo Freud was born into a Jewish family in Příbor
Freiberg in German, He had his name after three Polish kings
Zygmunts Sigismunds Zygmunt Stary, Zygmunt August and Zygmunt III
Vasa. That was an old family tradition after the Freuds were living
in Poland at the years of Zygmunt kings (XVI and XVII). In 1877, at
the age of 21, he abbreviated his given name to "Sigmund." Although
he was the first-born of three brothers and five sisters among his
mother's children, Sigmund had older half-brothers from his father's
previous marriage. His family had limited finances and lived in a
crowded apartment, but his parents made every effort to foster his
intellect often favoring Sigmund over his siblings, which was
apparent from an early age. Sigmund was ranked first in his class in
six of eight years of schooling. He went on to attend the University
of Vienna at 17, from 1873 to 1881.
Little is known of Freud's early life, as he destroyed his personal
papers at least twice, once in 1885 and again in 1907. Additionally,
portions of his personal correspondence and unpublished papers were
closely guarded in the Sigmund Freud Archives at the Library of
Congress and for many years were made available only to a few
members of the inner circle of psychoanalysis. Most of these
previously restricted documents have now been declassified and are
available to researchers who visit the Library of Congress.
In 1886, Freud returned to Vienna and, after opening a private
practice specializing in nervous and brain disorders, he married
Martha Bernays. He experimented with hypnotism with his most
hysteric and neurotic patients, but he eventually gave up the
practice. One theory is that he did so because he was not very good
at it.He switched to putting his patients on a couch and encouraging
them to say whatever came into their minds a practice termed free
association psychology.
In his 40s, Freud "had numerous Psychosomatic illness psychosomatic
disorders as well as exaggerated fears of dying and other phobias" .
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 and "he also
recalled his childhood sexual feelings for his mother Amalia Freud,
who was attractive, warm, and protective" .
After publishing successful books on the unconscious mind in 1900
and 1901, Freud was appointed to a professorship at the University
of Vienna, where he began to develop a loyal following.
Freud had little tolerance for colleagues who diverged from his
psychoanalytic doctrines. He attempted to expel those who disagreed
with the movement or even refused to accept certain central aspects
of his theory the most notable examples are Carl Jung and Alfred
Adler. While Freud wrote a stinging attack on both of them in a
piece called "On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement," he
ostracized the dissidents Otto Gross and Wilhelm Reich by complete
silence.
In 1930, Freud was awarded the Goethe Prize by the city of
Frankfurt, in recognition of his exceptional qualities as a writer
in the German language. His mother died the same year, at the age
of ninety-five. In 1933, as Hitler and the Nazis seized power in
Germany, Freud's books were burnt publicly by the Sturmabteilung.
In England, in 1938, Freud's longing to be embraced by society as an
important scientist was partly realized when two secretaries of the
Royal Society brought the book of the Society for Freud to sign.
Freud wrote to his friend Arnold Zweig: "They left a facsimile of
the book with me and if you were here I could should show you the
signatures from Isaac NewtonI. to Charles Darwin.
Freud began smoking at age 24, and smoked cigars for most of his
life. When his colleague Wilhelm Fliess, a nose and throat
specialist, suggested that he quit in order to clear up some nasal
catarrhs, Freud was unwilling to do so. Even after having his jaw
removed due to cancer, he continued to smoke until his death on
September 23, 1939. After contracting cancer of the mouth in 1923
at the age of 67, he underwent over 30 operations to treat the
disease, and for several years wore a painful prosthesis to seal off
his mouth from his nasal cavity. In the end, Freud could no longer
tolerate the pain associated with his cancer. He requested that his
personal physician visit him at his London home for the purpose of
helping him end his own life. Freud's death was by a physician-
assisted morphine overdose.
Early work
A lesser known interest of Freud's was neurology. He was an early
researcher on the topic of cerebral palsy, then known as "cerebral
paralysis." He published several medical papers on the topic and
showed that the disease existed far before other researchers in his
day began to notice and study it. He also suggested that William
Little English surgeon, 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. It was not until the 1980s that Freud's
speculations were confirmed by more modern research.
Freud was an early user and proponent of cocaine as a stimulant. 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 cure-all 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
in which 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
enthusiasm. 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."
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 to consciousness repressed thoughts and
feelings. According to some of his successors, including his
daughter Anna Freud, the goal of therapy is to allow the patient to
develop a stronger Ego, super-ego, and id; according to others,
notably Jacques Lacan, the goal of therapy is to lead the analys and
to a full acknowledgement of his or her inability to satisfy the
most basic desires.
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 Josef Breuer|Joseph Breuer. Freud actually credits 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 girl came to Breuer with
symptoms of what was then called female hysteria. Anna O. was a 21
year old highly intelligent young girl. She presented with symptoms
such as paralysis of the limbs, split personality and amnesia; today
these 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. Anna O. coined the term 'talk
therapy' to describe this process.
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". The traditional story, based on Freud's
later accounts of this period, is that 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 for the most part his patients were fantasizing the
abuse scenes.
However in recent decades several researchers have returned to the
original documents and found that the received story, based on
Freud's late retrospective account of the episode, is false in many
respects. In 1896 Freud posited that the symptoms of 'hysteria' and obsessional neurosis derived from *unconscious* memories of sexual abuse in infancy, and claimed that he had uncovered such incidents for every single one of his current patients . However a close reading of his papers and letters from this period indicates that these patients did not report early childhood sexual abuse as he later claimed: rather, he arrived at his findings by analytically inferring the supposed incidents, using a procedure that was heavily dependent on the symbolic interpretation of somatic symptoms.
The Unconscious
It has often been claimed that the most significant contribution Freud made to Western thought was his argument for the existence of an unconscious mind. During the 19th century, the dominant trend in western worldthought was positivism, which subscribed to the belief that people could ascertain real knowledge concerning themselves and their environment and judiciously exercise control over both. Freud, however, suggested that such declarations of free will are in fact delusions; that we are not entirely aware of what we think and often act for reasons that have little to do with our conscious thoughts. The concept of the unconscious as proposed by Freud was allegedly groundbreaking in that he proposed that awareness existed in layers and that there were thoughts occurring "below the surface." Nevertheless, as psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer, among others, 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 his monumental treatise on psychology, examined the way Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, Janet, Binet and others had used the term 'unconscious' and 'subconscious'. Moreover, the historian of psychology Mark Altschule writes: "It is difficult or perhaps impossible to find a nineteenth century psychologist or medical psychologist who did not recognize unconscious cerebration as not only real but of the highest importance.
Dreams, which he called the "royal road to the unconscious", provided the best access to our unconscious life and the best illustration of its "logic", which was different from the logic of conscious thought. Freud developed his first topology of the psyche in The Interpretation of Dreams(1899) in which he proposed the argument 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—that which we could access with a little effort. Thus for Freud, the ideals of the Enlightenment, positivism and rationalism, could be achieved through understanding, transforming, and mastering the unconscious, rather than through denying or repressing it.
Crucial to the operation of the unconscious is "Psychological repression." According to Freud, people often experience thoughts and feelings that are so painful that people cannot bear them. Such thoughts and feelings—and associated memories—could not, Freud argued, be banished from the mind, but could be banished from consciousness. Thus they come to constitute the unconscious. 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 individual patients repress different things. Moreover, Freud observed that the process of repression is itself a non-conscious act in other words, it did not occur through people willing away certain thoughts or feelings. Freud supposed that what people repressed was in part determined by their unconscious. In other words, the unconscious was for Freud both a cause and effect of repression.
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 we are not subjectively aware. The dynamic unconscious, a more specific social construct, referred to mental process and contents which are defensively removed from consciousness as a result of conflictual forces or "dynamics". 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 mythologyand contemporary ethnography for comparative material. Freud named his new theory the Oedipus complex after the famous Greek tragedy Oedipus the King 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 . 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 cultural anthropology 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, noting that he had found 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 been sexually abused by their fathers, and was quite explicit about discussing several patients that he knew to have been abused. Freud also believed that the libido developed in individuals by changing its object, a process designed by the concept of sublimation psychology. 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 emptying 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 lesser known Electra complex refers to such a fixation upon the father. The repressive or dormant latency stage of psychosexual development preceded the sexually mature genital stage of psychosexual development.
Freud's way of interpretation has been called phallocentric by many contemporary thinkers. This is because, for Freud, the unconscious always desires the penis. Males are afraid of castration losing their phallus or masculinity to another male. Females always desire to have a phallus an unfulfillable desire. Though boys resent their father fear of castration and girls desire theirs. For Freud, desire is always defined in the negative term of lack you always desire what you don't have or what you are not, and it is very unlikely that you will fulfill this desire. Thus his psychoanalysis treatment is meant to teach the patient to cope with his unsatisfiable desires.
Ego, super-ego, and id
In his later work, Freud proposed that the psyche was divided into three parts: Ego, super-ego, and id. Freud discussed this structural model of the mind in the 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and fully elaborated it in The Ego and The Id (1923), where he developed it as an alternative to his previous topographic schema conscious, unconscious, preconscious.
Defense Mechanisms
According to Freud, the defense mechanisms are the method by which the ego can solve the conflicts between the super-ego and the id. The use of defense mechanisms may attenuate the conflict between the id and super-ego, but their overuse or reuse rather than confrontation can lead to either anxiety or guilt which may result in psychological disorders such as depression. His daughter Anna Freud had done the most significant work on this field, yet she credited Sigmund with defense mechanisms, as he began the work. The defense mechanisms include: denial, reaction formation, Displacement psychology, psychological repression, psychological projection, intellectualisation, rationalization psychology, compensation, sublimation psychology and regressive emotionality.
Denial occurs when someone fends off awareness of an unpleasant truth or of a reality that is a threat to the ego. For example, a student may have received a bad grade on a report card but tells himself that grades don't matter. Some early writers argued for a striking parallel between Freudian denial and Nietzsche's ideas of ressentiment and therevaluation of values that he attributed to herd or "slave" morality.
Reaction formation takes place when a person takes the opposite approach consciously compared to what that person wants unconsciously. For example, someone may engage in violence against another race because, that person claims, the members of the race are inferior, when unconsciously it is that very person who feels inferior.
Displacement takes place when someone redirects emotion from a "dangerous" object to a "safe" one, such as punching a pillow when one is angry at a friend.
Psychological repressionoccurs when an experience is so painful such as war trauma that it is unconsciously forced from consciousness, while suppression is a conscious effort to do the same.
- Psychological projection occurs when a person "projects" his or her own undesirable thoughts, motivations, desires, feelings — basically parts of oneself — onto someone or something else. Since the person is experiencing particular desires, feelings, thoughts, or anxieties, s/he is more prone to attribution theorythose same characteristics into the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of others.
Intellectualisation involves removing one's self, emotionally, from a stressful event, by focusing on rational and factual components of the situation.
Rationalizationinvolves constructing a logical justification for a decision that was originally arrived at through a different mental process. For example, Jim may drink red wine because he is an alcoholic, but he tells himself he drinks it because it has some health benefits, in order to avoid facing his alcoholism.
Compensation occurs when someone takes up one behaviour because one cannot accomplish another behaviour. For example, the second born child may clown around to get attention since the older child is already an accomplished scholar.
Sublimation is the channeling of impulses to socially accepted behaviours. For instance, an aggressive or homicidal person may join the military as a cover for their violent behavior.
Psychotherapy
Freud's theories and research methods were controversial during his life and still are so today, but few dispute his huge impact on psychologists and the academically inclined.
Most importantly, Freud popularized the "talking-cure"an idea that a person could solve problems simply by talking over them, something that was almost unheard of in the 19th century. Even though many psychotherapists today tend to reject the specifics of Freud's theories, this basic mode of treatment comes largely from his work.
Most of Freud's specific theorieslike his stages of psychosexual development and especially his methodology, have fallen out of favor in modern experimental psychology.
Some psychotherapists, however, still follow an approximately Freudian system of treatment. Many more have modified his approach, or joined one of the schools that branched from his original theories . Still others reject his theories entirely, although their practice may still reflect his influence.
Psychoanalysis today maintains the same ambivalent relationship with medicine and academia that Freud experienced during his life.
Pop Culture
Freud has also had a remarkably powerful and lasting impact on popular culture. Many of his general psychological ideas have made their way into people's everyday thinking for example, the idea that someone can be motivated by unconscious impulses, or the general idea that man contains a "beast" within, restrained only by the institutions of society. Some of his more specific ideas have also been popularized"Freudian slips," "Oedipal complexes," and "anal" personality traits, for example, are frequently mentioned in non-technical discourse.
Since the early 1900s, Freud's ideas have often been represented explicitly or implicitly in a wide variety of art, literature, and film. A small sampling of famous artistic figures famous for their Freudian overtones would include: Alfred Hitchcock, Thomas Mann, and many others.