Freud, Sigmund

His medical career began with an apprenticeship (1885–86) under J. M. CharcotCharcot, Jean Martin
, 1825–93, French neurologist. At the Salpêtrière in Paris he developed the greatest clinic of his time for diseases of the nervous system.
..... Click the link for more information.  in Paris, and soon after his return to Vienna he began his famous collaboration with Josef BreuerBreuer, Josef
, 1842–1925, Austrian physician. He was the first to use (1880–82) the cathartic method to cure hysteria. His therapy and theory, when developed by Freud, became psychoanalysis. Together they wrote Studies in Hysteria (1895).
..... Click the link for more information.  on the use of hypnosis in the treatment of hysteria. Their paper, On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena (1893, tr. 1909), more fully developed in Studien über Hysterie (1895), marked the beginnings of psychoanalysis in the discovery that the symptoms of hysterical patients—directly traceable to psychic trauma in earlier life—represent undischarged emotional energy (conversion; see hysteriahysteria
, in psychology, a disorder commonly known today as conversion disorder, in which a psychological conflict is converted into a bodily disturbance. It is distinguished from hypochondria by the fact that its sufferers do not generally confuse their condition with real,
..... Click the link for more information. ). The therapy, called the cathartic method, consisted of having the patient recall and reproduce the forgotten scenes while under hypnosis. The work was poorly received by the medical profession, and the two men soon separated over Freud's growing conviction that the undefined energy causing conversion was sexual in nature.

Freud then rejected hypnosis and devised a technique called free association (see associationassociation,
in psychology, a connection between different sensations, feelings, or ideas by virtue of their previous occurrence together in experience. The concept of association entered contemporary psychology through the empiricist philosophers John Locke, George Berkeley,
..... Click the link for more information. ), which would allow emotionally charged material that the individual had repressed in the unconsciousunconscious,
in psychology, that aspect of mental life that is separate from immediate consciousness and is not subject to recall at will. Sigmund Freud regarded the unconscious as a submerged but vast portion of the mind.
..... Click the link for more information.  to emerge to conscious recognition. Further works, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900, tr. 1913), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1904, tr. 1914), and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905, tr. 1910), increased the bitter antagonism toward Freud, and he worked alone until 1906, when he was joined by the Swiss psychiatrists Eugen BleulerBleuler, Eugen
, 1857–1939, Swiss psychiatrist. He taught (1898–1927) at the Univ. of Zürich, serving concurrently as director of Zürich's Burghölzi Asylum.
..... Click the link for more information.  and C. G. JungJung, Carl Gustav
, 1875–1961, Swiss psychiatrist, founder of analytical psychology. The son of a country pastor, he studied at Basel (1895–1900) and Zürich (M.D., 1902).
..... Click the link for more information. , the Austrian Alfred AdlerAdler, Alfred
, 1870–1937, Austrian psychologist, founder of the school of individual psychology. Although one of Sigmund Freud's earlier associates, he rejected the Freudian emphasis upon sex as the root of neurosis.
..... Click the link for more information. , and others.

In 1908, Bleuler, Freud, and Jung founded the journal Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen, and in 1909 the movement first received public recognition when Freud and Jung were invited to give a series of lectures at Clark Univ. in Worcester, Mass. In 1910 the International Psychoanalytical Association was formed with Jung as president, but the harmony of the movement was short-lived: between 1911 and 1913 both Jung and Adler resigned, forming their own schools in protest against Freud's emphasis on infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex. Although these men, and others who broke away later, objected to Freudian theories, the basic structure of psychoanalysis as the study of unconscious mental processes is still Freudian. Disagreement lies largely in the degree of emphasis placed on concepts largely originated by Freud.

He considered his last contribution to psychoanalytic theory to be The Ego and the Id (1923, tr. 1927), after which he reverted to earlier cultural preoccupations. Totem and Taboo (1913, tr. 1918), an investigation of the origins of religion and morality, and Moses and Monotheism (1939, tr. 1939) are the result of his application of psychoanalytic theory to cultural problems. Other works include A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1910, tr. 1920) and New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis (1933). With the National Socialist occupation of Austria, Freud fled (1938) to England, where he died the following year. His daughter, Anna FreudFreud, Anna
, 1895–1982, British psychoanalyst, b. Vienna, Austria. Continuing the work of her father, Sigmund Freud, she was a pioneer in the psychoanalysis of children.
..... Click the link for more information. , was a major proponent of psychoanalysis, developing in particular the Freudian concept of the defense mechanismdefense mechanism,
in psychoanalysis, any of a variety of unconscious personality reactions which the ego uses to protect the conscious mind from threatening feelings and perceptions.
..... Click the link for more information. .

Freudian theory has had wide impact, influencing fields as diverse as anthropology, education, art, and literary criticism. At the same time, his work has been criticized by many for containing flawed or misrepresented research and for being pseudoscientfic in nature. It has also been criticized by feminists as being marred by a male bias.

Bibliography

See his Basic Writings (tr. and ed. by A. A. Brill, 1938, repr., 1977); The Freud-Jung Letters (ed. by W. McGuire, tr. by R. F. C. Hull and R. Manheim, 1974; abr. ed. 1994); biographies by E. Jones (3 vol., 1953–57, abr. ed. 1974) and P. Gay (1988, repr. 2006) and of his early life by A. Phillips (2014); studies by F. Cioffi (1973 and 1998), P. Roazen (1975), F. J. Sulloway (1979), H. Lewis (2 vol., 1981–83), S. Schneiderman (1987), O. Olson and S. Koppe (1988), J. Kerr (1993), I. Gubrich-Simitis (1993, tr. 1997), L. Breger (2000), A. I. Tauber (2010), H. Markel (2011), M. Borch-Jacobsen and S. Shamdasani (2012), and F. Crews (2017).

Freud, Sigmund

Honored in this Austrian stamp, Sigmund Freud put forth many innovative theories about the importance of dreams and how they may be analyzed to alleviate mental and emotional distress.

Freud, Sigmund

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was the founder of psychoanalysis and one of the great thinkers of this century. As a practicing medical doctor, Freud became interested in the role of the mind in disease. Partially as a result of his work with patients afflicted with hysteria (a psychosomatic illness), as well as his training in hypnosis under the brilliant French neurologist J. Martin Charcot, Freud was led to specialize in psychological disturbances. His early theorizing about the sexual origins of mental illness was scandalous to contemporaneous polite society, and it was many years before he was able to convince his medical colleagues of the truth of his basic discoveries. Although few, if any, current analysts adhere to “orthodox” Freudianism, certain fundamental Freudian notions, such as the idea that we are influenced by unconscious motivations, are widely accepted among psychotherapists.

Freud’s theory of human nature (what contemporary psychologists would call Freud’s personality theory) presents a highly uncomplimentary picture of the human being. Basically selfish animals driven by aggressive urges and the desire for pleasure, people learn how to repress their animal impulses as they grow up in order to get along in society. They never, however, completely conquer their primitive selves. Freud called this animal self, which constitutes the core of the psyche, the id. The other aspects of the psyche, the ego and the superego, are later developments that arise from the need to survive and to adapt to the surrounding social environment. The ego is the rational, reasoning part of the psyche that undertakes the task of adjusting our inner urges to the demands and restrictions of the surrounding environment. The superego represents the internalized mores of society and tells us what is right and wrong.

The superego is frequently in conflict with the id. The demands of external reality (an ego function) also tend to conflict with certain id drives. Thus, in Freud’s theory of human nature, the psyche is a kind of battleground in which the various components of the personality are engaged in an ongoing struggle. At the core of conflicts that lead to mental illness is often a denial of urges that people regard as unacceptable and that they do not wish to admit are a part of themselves. One might, for instance, wish to have intercourse with the parent of the opposite sex (termed Oedipus complex; in women, also termed Electra complex). This desire, however, is so beyond the bounds of what our society regards as proper that we repress our awareness of the urge and it remains unconscious. Mental illness comes about when such desires become too strong to deal with through the normal coping process.

Freudian therapy involves discovery of the repressed urges causing dysfunction. Once patients are confronted with their real desires and accept them as part of themselves, a cure is effected because the psyche no longer need go to extraordinary lengths to hide the “terrible truth” from the conscious mind. Freud initially hoped that hypnosis would be a useful tool for accessing the unconscious, but soon gave that technique up in favor of free association.

He also came to believe that the analysis of dreams was a powerful avenue for uncovering repressed desires, even referring to dreams as “the royal road” to the unconscious. Freud’s principal work on this subject, The Interpretation of Dreams, was first published in 1900 and went through eight editions in his lifetime. At one point he wrote that The Interpretation of Dreams “contains even according to my present day judgment the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make. Insights such as this fall to one’s lot but once in a lifetime.” Despite many minor revisions, his basic theory of dreams remained remarkably constant after its initial formulation.

In Freud’s view, the purpose of dreams is to allow us to satisfy in fantasies the instinctual urges that society judges unacceptable. So that we do not awaken as a result of the strong emotions that would be evoked if we dreamed about the literal fulfillment of such desires, the part of the mind that Freud called the censor transforms the dream content so as to disguise its true meaning. Freud called the censorship process the dreamwork. Freud explicitly identified five processes brought into play during dreamwork: displacement, condensation, symbolization, projection, and secondary revision.

After undergoing one or more of the dreamwork process, the secondary processes of the ego reorganize the otherwise bizarre components of a dream so that it has a comprehensible surface meaning, called the manifest dream. The process of dream interpretation in psychoanalysis involves “decoding” the manifest dream content to discover the real, hidden meaning of the dream, called the latent dream.