Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud born Sigismund Schlomo Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939), was an Austrian neurologist who founded the psychoanalytic school of psychiatry. 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, technically referred to as an "analysand", and a psychoanalyst. Freud redefined sexual desire as the primary motivational energy of human life, developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association, created the theory of transference in the therapeutic relationship, and interpreted dreams as sources of insight into unconscious desires. He was an early neurological researcher into cerebral palsy, and a prolific essayist, drawing on psychoanalysis to contribute to the history, interpretation and critique of culture.

Many of Freud's ideas have been abandoned or modified by other analysts, and modern advances in the field of psychology have shown flaws in some of his theories, while psychoanalysis itself has often been called a pseudoscience. Numerous critics dispute his work, and it has been marginalized within psychology departments. However, it remains influential in clinical approaches, and in the humanities and social sciences. Freud is considered one of the most prominent thinkers of the 20th century, in terms of originality and intellectual influence.

Early life

Freud was born on 6 May 1856, to Jewish Galician parents in the Moravian town of Freiburg, Austrian Empire, now Příbor in the Czech Republic. His father, Jacob, was 41, a wool merchant, and had two children by a previous marriage. His mother, Amalié (née Nathansohn), the second wife of Jakob, was 21. He was the first of their eight children and, in accordance with tradition, his parents favored him over his siblings from the early stages of his childhood. Freud was born with a caul, which the family accepted as a positive omen.

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, Freud entered the Leopoldstädter Kommunal-Realgymnasium, a prominent high school. He 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, the eel life cycle was unknown and Freud spent four weeks at the Austrian zoological research station in Trieste, dissecting hundreds of eels in an unsuccessful search for their male reproductive organs.

Freud began smoking at 24; he smoked cigarettes at first, but later switched exclusively to cigars. Freud believed that smoking enhanced his capacity to work and ability to muster self-control, and continued despite warnings from Wilhelm Fliess.

Freud greatly admired the philosopher 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 unconscious and empathy.

Freud read Friedrich Nietzsche as a young student, and bought his collected works in 1900, the year of Nietzsche's death; Freud told Fliess that he hoped to find in Nietzsche "the words for much that remains mute in me." According to Peter Gay, however, Freud treated Nietzsche's writings "as texts to be resisted far more than to be studied"; immediately after reporting to Fliess that he had bought Nietzsche's works, Freud added that he had not yet opened them. Students of Freud began to point out analogies between his work and that of Nietzsche almost as soon as he developed a following.

Freud was a "partially assimilated, mostly secular Jew." According to biographer Ernest Jones "Freud's Jewishness contributed greatly to his work and his firm convictions about his findings. Freud often referred to his ability to stand alone, if need be, without wavering or surrendering his intellectual and scientific discoveries, and he attributed this ability to his irreligious but strong Jewish identity in an antisemitic society, whereby he was accustomed to a marginal status and being set aside as different." Freud once described himself as "an author who is ignorant of the language of holy writ, who is completely estranged from the religion of his fathers--as well as from every other religion" but who remains "in his essential nature a Jew and who has no desire to alter that nature".

Development of psychoanalysis

In October 1885, Freud went to Paris on a traveling fellowship to study with Europe's most renowned neurologist and researcher of hypnosis, 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 neurology research. Charcot specialised in the study of hysteria and 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 for mental illness, instead 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, he favored treatment where the patient talked through his or her problems. This came to be known as the "talking cure" and the ultimate goal of this talking was to locate and release powerful emotional energy that had initially been rejected or imprisoned in the unconscious mind. Freud called this denial of emotions "repression", and he believed that it was an impediment to the normal functioning of the psyche, even capable of causing physical retardation which he described as "psychosomatic". The term "talking cure" was initially coined by a 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 suggested that the affair occurred, resulting in an aborted pregnancy for Miss Bernays. The publication in 2006 of a Swiss hotel log, dated 13 August 1898, has been regarded by some Freudian scholars (including Peter Gay) as showing that there was a factual basis to these rumors.

In his 40s Freud experienced several, probably psychosomatic, medical problems, including depression and heart irregularities that fuelled a superstitious belief that he would die at the age of 51. (Some of these may have been a consequence of his occasional use of cocaine in this period.) Around this time Freud began exploring his own dreams, memories, and the dynamics of his personality development. During this self-analysis, he came to realize a hostility he felt towards his father, Jacob Freud, who had died in 1896. He also became convinced that he had had sexual feelings towards his mother in infancy ("between two and two and a half years"). (Richard Webster argues that Freud's account shows that he "had remembered only a long train journey from whose duration he deduced that he might have seen his mother undressing" and that his memory was artifically reconstructed.) Freud considered this time of emotional difficulty to be the most creative period in his life.

After the publication of Freud's books in 1900 and 1905, interest in his theories began to grow, and a circle of supporters developed in the following period. However, Freud often clashed with those supporters who critiqued his theories, the most famous being Carl Jung, who had originally supported Freud's ideas. Part of the disagreement between the two was in Jung's interest and commitment to religion, which Freud saw as unscientific.

Karen Horney, a pupil of Karl Abraham, criticized Freud's view of femininity, leading him to defend it against her. Horney's challenge to Freud's theories, along with that of Melanie Klein, produced the first psychoanalytic debate on femininity. Ernest Jones, although usually "ultra-orthodox", participated in the debate on the side of Horney and Klein. Horney was the most outspoken of Freud's critics, although her and Jones's disagreement with Freud was over how to interpret penis envy rather than whether it existed. Horney understood Freud's conception of the castration complex as a theory about the biological nature of women, one in which women were biologically castrated men. Horney rejected that theory as scientifically unsatisfying.

Patients

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Freud's couch used during psychoanalytic sessions

Freud used pseudonyms in his case histories. 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.

Several writers have criticized both Freud's clinical efforts and his accounts of them. Hans Eysenck writes that Freud consistently mis-diagnosed his patients and fraudulently misrepresented case histories. Frederick Crews writes that "...even applying his own indulgent criteria, with no allowance for placebo factors and no systematic followup to check for relapses, Freud was unable to document a single unambiguously efficacious treatment". Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen writes that historians of psychoanalysis have shown "that things did not happen in the way Freud and his authorised biographers told us"; he cites Han Israëls's view that "Freud...was so confident in his first theories that he publicly boasted of therapeutic successes that he had not yet obtained." Freud, in that interpretation, was forced to provide explanations for his abandonment of those theories that concealed his real reason, which was that the therapeutic benefits he expected did not materialise; he knew that his patients were not cured, but "did not hesitate to build grand theories on these non-existent foundations."

Peter Medawar, a Nobel Prize winning immunologist, made the oft-quoted remark that psychoanalysis is the "most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century". Ethan Watters and Richard Ofshe write that, "The story of Freud and the creation of psychodynamic therapy, as told by its adherents, is a self-serving myth".Template:Why?

Followers

Freud spent most of his life in Vienna, where a brilliant group of followers formed around him. They believed that his ideas could do more for the treatment of neurotic patients than any other method. These people spread their ideas throughout Europe and America. Some of them subsequently withdrew from the original psychoanalytic society and founded their own divergent schools. The most famous of these are Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung.

Around 1910, Alfred Adler began to pay attention to some of the conscious personality factors and gradually deviated from Freud's basic ideas. Adler eventually realized that his views were different from Freud's, and started a system he called Individual psychology.

In 1912 Jung published Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (published in English in 1916 as Psychology of the Unconscious) and it became clear that his views were taking a direction quite different from those of Freud. To distinguish his system from psychoanalysis, Jung called it analytical psychology.

Struggle with cancer

In February 1923, Freud detected a leukoplakia, a benign growth associated with heavy smoking, on his mouth. Freud initially kept this secret, but in April 1923 informed Ernest Jones, telling him that the growth had been removed. Freud consulted the dermatologist Maximilian Steiner, who advised him to quit smoking but lied about the growth's seriousness, minimizing its importance. Freud later saw Felix Deutsch, who saw that the growth was cancerous; he identified it to Freud using the euphemism "a bad leukoplakia" instead of the technical diagnosis epithelioma. Deutsch advised Freud to stop smoking and have the growth excised. Freud was treated by Marcus Hajek, a rhinologist whose competence he had previously questioned; Hajek performed an unnecessary cosmetic surgery in his clinic's outpatient department. Freud bled during and after the operation, and may narrowly have escaped death. Freud subsequently saw Deutsch again; Deutsch saw that further surgery would be required, but refrained from telling Freud that he had cancer because he was worried that Freud might wish to commit suicide.

Escape from Austria and final years

In 1932, Freud received the Goethe Prize in appreciation of his contribution to psychology and to German literary culture. One year later (on 30 January 1933), the Nazis took control of Germany, and Freud's books were prominent among those burned and destroyed by the Nazis. Freud quipped: "What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books." Freud's four sisters perished in Nazi concentration camps.

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". In this goal, he was fortuitously assisted by Anton Sauerwald, a Nazi official given control over all Freud's assets in Austria. Sauerwald, however, was not an ordinary Nazi; while "he had made bombs for the Nazi movement, he had also studied medicine, chemistry and law."

At the University of Vienna, Sauerwald had been a student of Professor Josef Herzig, who often visited Freud to play cards. Sauerwald did not disclose to his Nazi superiors that Freud had many secret bank accounts and disobeyed a Nazi directive to have Freud's books on psychoanalysis destroyed. Instead, Sauerwald and an accomplice smuggled them to the Austrian national library, where they were hidden. Finally, dismayed by a Nazi order to transform Freud's home into an institute for the study of Aryan superiority, Sauerwald signed Sigmund Freud's exit visa. In June 1938, Freud left Vienna aboard the Orient Express train and settled in London. While Freud told a local newspaper that "all my money and property in Vienna is gone", he did not mention his secret bank accounts. When Anton Sauerwald went to trial on charges of absconding with Freud’s secret wealth after the war, Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud's daughter, intervened to protect Sauerwald. She disclosed to Harry Freud, a US army officer who had had Sauerwald arrested, that: "[The] truth is that we really owe our lives and our freedom to ,... [Sauerwald]. Without him we would never have got away."

Sauerwald was then released from U.S. custody.

After arriving in Britain, Freud and his family settled in 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, London. There is a statue of him at the corner of Belsize Lane and Fitzjohn's Avenue, near Swiss Cottage.

In September 1939, Freud, who was suffering from cancer and in severe pain, persuaded his doctor and friend Max Schur to help him commit suicide. After reading Balzac's La Peau de chagrin in a single sitting, he said, "Schur, you remember our 'contract' not to leave me in the lurch when the time had come. Now it is nothing but torture and makes no sense." When Schur said that he had not forgotten, Freud said, "I thank you." and then "Talk it over with Anna, and if she thinks it's right, then make an end of it." Anna Freud wanted to postpone Freud's death, but Schur convinced her it was pointless to keep him alive, and on 21 and 22 September administered doses of morphine 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's death in 1951, her ashes were also placed in the urn.

Ideas

Freud has been influential in two related but distinct ways: he simultaneously developed a theory of the human mind's organization and internal operations and a theory that human behavior both conditions and results from how the mind is organized. This led him to favor certain clinical techniques for trying to help cure mental illness. He theorized that personality is developed by a person's childhood experiences.

Early work

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Sigmund Freud memorial in Hampstead, North London. Sigmund and Anna Freud lived at 20 Maresfield Gardens, near this statue. Their house is now a museum dedicated to Freud's life and work. The building behind the statue is the Tavistock Clinic, a major psychological health care institution.

Freud began his study of medicine at the University of Vienna. He took nine 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. 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 long 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 birth being a cause. Instead, he suggested that complications in birth were only a symptom.

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 repressed thoughts and feelings into consciousness in order to free the patient from suffering repetitive distorted emotions.

Classically, the bringing of unconscious thoughts and feelings to consciousness is brought about by encouraging a patient to talk in free association and to talk about dreams. Another important element of psychoanalysis is lesser 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 discover and resolve repressed conflicts, especially childhood conflicts involving parents.

The origin of Freud's early work with psychoanalysis can be linked to Josef Breuer. Freud credited Breuer with opening the way to the discovery of the psychoanalytical method by his treatment of the case of Anna O. In November 1880 Breuer was called in to treat a highly intelligent 21-year-old woman (Bertha Pappenheim) for a persistent cough which he diagnosed as hysterical. He found that while nursing her dying father she had developed a number of transitory symptoms, including visual disorders and paralysis and contractures of limbs, which he also diagnosed as hysterical. Breuer began to see his patient almost every day as the symptoms increased and became more persistent, and observed that she entered states of absence. He found that when, with his encouragement, she told fantasy stories in her evening states of absence her condition improved, and most of her symptoms had disappeared by April 1881. However, following the death of her father in that month her condition deteriorated again. Breuer recorded that some of the symptoms eventually remitted spontaneously, and that full recovery was achieved by inducing her to recall events that had precipitated the occurrence of a specific symptom.</i> In the years immediately following Breuer's treatment, Anna O. spent three short periods in sanatoria with the diagnosis "hysteria" with "somatic symptoms," and some authors have challenged Breuer's published account of a cure. (A contrary view has been published by Richard Skues.)

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 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 believe 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 fantasies.

Another version of events focuses on Freud's proposing 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 his patients were not consciously aware of these memories, and must therefore 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. Patients were generally unconvinced that their experiences of Freud's clinical procedure indicated actual sexual abuse. He reported that even after a 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 memories of infantile sexual abuse. 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 through his suggestive techniques.

Cocaine

As a medical researcher, Freud was an early user and proponent of cocaine as a stimulant as well as analgesic. He believed that cocaine was a cure for many mental and physical problems, and in his 1884 paper "On Coca" he extolled its virtues. Between 1883 and 1887 he wrote several articles recommending medical applications, including its use as an antidepressant. He narrowly missed out on obtaining scientific priority for discovering its anesthetic properties of which he was aware but had mentioned only in passing. (Karl Koller, a colleague of Freud's in Vienna, received that distinction in 1884 after reporting to a medical society the ways cocaine could be used in delicate eye surgery.) Freud also recommended cocaine as a cure for morphine addiction. He had introduced cocaine to his friend Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow who had become addicted to morphine taken to relieve years of excruciating nerve pain resulting from an infection acquired while performing an autopsy. However, his claim that Fleischl-Marxow was cured of his addiction was premature, though he never acknowledged he had been at fault. Fleischl-Marxow developed an acute case of "cocaine psychosis", and soon returned to using morphine, dying a few years later after more suffering from intolerable pain.

The application as an anesthetic turned out to be one of the few safe uses of cocaine, and as reports of addiction and overdose began to filter in from many places in the world, Freud's medical reputation became somewhat tarnished.

After the "Cocaine Episode" Freud ceased to publicly recommend use of the drug, but continued to take it himself occasionally for depression, migraine and nasal inflammation during the early 1890s, before giving it up in 1896. In this period he came under the influence of his friend and confidant Wilhelm Fliess, who recommended cocaine for the treatment of the so-called "nasal reflex neurosis". Fliess, who operated on the noses of several of his own patients, also performed operations on Freud and on one of Freud's patients whom he believed to be suffering from the disorder, Emma Eckstein. However, the surgery proved disastrous.

Some critics Template:Who? have suggested that much of Freud's early psychoanalytical theory was a by-product of his cocaine use, but this is very much a minority view.

The Unconscious

Freud argued for 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 called dreams the "royal road to the unconscious", meaning that they illustrate the "logic" of the unconscious mind. Freud's theory of dreams can be compared to Plato's; Ernest Gellner writes that, "Plato and Freud hold virtually the same theory of dreams", but Michel Foucault streses the differences: "The sentence 'dreams fulfil desires' may have been repeated throughout the centuries; it is not the same statement in Plato and in Freud."

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 id, ego, and super-ego. 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 Template:By whom? 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.

Id, ego, and super-ego

In his later work, Freud proposed that the human psyche could be divided into three parts: Id, ego, and super-ego. 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.

Life and death drives

Freud believed that people are driven by two conflicting central desires: the life drive (libido or Eros) (survival, propagation, hunger, thirst, and sex) and the death drive. The death drive was also termed "Thanatos", although Freud did not use that term; "Thanatos" was introduced in this context by Paul Federn.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud inferred the existence of the death instinct. Its premise was a regulatory principle that has been described as "the principle of psychic inertia", "the Nirvana principle", and "the conservatism of instinct". Its background was Freud's earlier Project for a Scientific Psychology, where he had defined the principle governing the mental apparatus as its tendency to divest itself of quantity or to reduce tension to zero. Freud had been obglied to abandon that definition, since it proved to be adequate only to the most rudimentary kinds of mental functioning, and replaced the idea that the apparatus tends toward a level of zero tension with the idea that it tends toward a minimum level of tension.

Freud in effect readopted the original definition in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, this time applying it to a different principle. He asserted that on certain occasions the mind acts as though could eliminate tension entirely, or in effect to reduce itself to a state of extinction; his key evidence for this was the existence of the compulsion to repeat. Examples of such repetition included the dream life of traumatic neurotics and children's play. In the phenomenon of repetition, Freud saw a psychic trend to work over earlier impressions, to master them and derive pleasure from them, a trend was prior to the pleasure principle but not opposed to it. In addition to that trend, however, there was also a principle at work that was opposed to, and thus "beyond" the pleasure principle. If repetition is a necessary element in the binding of energy or adaptation, when carried to inordinate lengths it becomes a means of abandoning adaptations and reinstating earlier or less evolved psychic positions. By combining this idea with the hypothesis that all repetition is a form of discharge, Freud reached the conclusion that the compulsion to repeat is an effort to restore a state that is both historically primitive and marked by the total draining of energy: death.

Religion

In an early essay, "Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices", Freud notes the similarity between religious belief and neurotic obsession.

In later works, Freud regards God as an illusion, based on the infantile need for a powerful father figure, and argues that religion, which was necessary to restrain violent impulses earlier in the development of civilization, can now be set aside in favor of reason and science. In Civilization and its Discontents"., Freud describes religion as an "oceanic" sensation he has never felt (though he self-identified as Jewish through-out his life). In Totem and Taboo he postulates that society, including religious beliefs, begins with the murder and consumption of a powerful paternal figure who is then revered. In Moses and Monotheism he suggests Moses was such a figure, killed by the Jews who then, in a reaction formation, became monotheistic. Elsewhere, he describes the Catholic rite of communion as an evidence of the killing and devouring of the sacred father figure.

In Freud's view, religion, with its suppression of violence, played a role in the individual and social battle between the life and death forces, Eros and Thanatos. In his later work, Freud is very pessimistic about the future of civilization, as he notes in a line he added to a 1931 edition of Civilization and its Discontents.

Legacy

Psychotherapy

Freud provided the basis for the entire field of individual verbal psychotherapy. According to Donald H. Ford and Hugh B. Urban, "Later systems have differed about therapy and technique in certain respects, but all of them have been constructed around Freud's basic discovery that if one can arrange a special set of conditions and have the patient talk about his difficulties in certain ways, behavior changes of many kinds can be accomplished." Psychoanalysis itself has "sunk to a relatively minor role so far as actual therapeutic practice goes."

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.

One influential post-Freudian psychotherapy has been psychologist Arthur Janov's primal therapy. Joel Kovel writes that primal therapy resembles psychoanalytic therapy in its emphasis on early childhood experience, but nevertheless has profound differences with it. While Janov's theory is akin to Freud's early idea of Actualneurosis, he does not have a dynamic psychology but a nature psychology in which need is primary while wish is derivative and disepensible when need is met. Despite its surface similarity to Freud's ideas, Janov's theory lacks a strictly psychological account of the unconscious and belief in infantile sexuality. While for Freud there was a hierarchy of danger situations, for Janov the key event in the child's life is awareness that the parents do not love it. Mark Pendergrast writes that Janov provided the prototype for the current trauma therapist.

Philosophy

Freud's theories have influenced the Frankfurt School and critical theory.

Regarding the interest of French philosophers in psychoanalysis, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen remarks, "Historically speaking, Lacan was by no means the first French intellectual who tried to mix psychoanalysis and philosophy. Think not only of Georges Politzer, but also of Georges Bataille, who put Freudian concepts to use in his early 'sociological' writings of the thirties...French philosophers and intellectuals were interested in Freud well before Lacan's teaching began to attract people outside psychoanalytic circles."

Bernard Williams writes that there has been hope that some psychoanalytical theories may "support some ethical conception as a necessary part of human happiness", but that in some cases the theories appear to support such hopes because they themselves involve ethical thought. In his view, while such theories may be better as channels of individual help because of their ethical basis, it disqualifies them from providing a basis for ethics.

Science

Freud has been described by David Stafford-Clark as "a man whose name will always rank with those of Darwin, Copernicus, Newton, Marx and Einstein; someone who really made a difference to the way the rest of us can begin to think about the meaning of human life and society." However, 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.

Philosophers have debated the scientific status of psychoanalysis. Karl Popper argued that Freud's psychoanalytic theories were presented in unfalsifiable form. Adolf Grünbaum describes Popper as a slovenly reader of Freud and a poor logician, arguing that Freud's theory that paranoia results from repressed homosexuality invites the falsifiable prediction that a decline in the repression of homosexuality will result in a corresponding decline in paranoia, and therefore disproves Popper's claim that psychoanalytic propositions are unfalsifiable.

Freud critic Richard Webster calls psychoanalysis "perhaps the most complex and successful" pseudoscience in history.

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, Eric Kandel, and Joseph E. LeDoux. Still other clinical researchers have recently found empirical support for more specific hypotheses of Freud such as that of the "repetition compulsion" in relation to psychological trauma. 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.

Feminism

Betty Friedan criticized Freud and what she considered his Victorian view of women in her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique. Freud's concept of penis envy was attacked by Kate Millett, whose 1970 book Sexual Politics accused him of confusion and oversights. Naomi Weisstein writes that Freud and his followers erroneously thought that his "years of intensive clinical experience" added up to scientific rigor. Juliet Mitchell defended Freud against Friedan, Millett and other feminist critics, and accused them of misreading him.

Works

On 1 January 2010, in accordance with the Life+70 law of copyright, the works of Sigmund Freud passed into the Public Domain.

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 978-0674154216
• The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung, 1899 [1900]) ISBN 978-0465019779
• The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens, 1901) ISBN 978-1456568566
• 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)
• Delusion and Dream in Jensen's Gradiva (Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensens Gradiva, 1907)
• 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)

Correspondence

• The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, (editor and translator Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson), 1985, ISBN 978-0-674-15420-9
• The Sigmund Freud Carl Gustav Jung Letters, Publisher: Princeton University Press; Abr edition , 1994, ISBN 978-0-691-03643-4
• The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham, 1907–1925, Publisher: Karnac Books, 2002, ISBN 978-1-85575-051-7
• The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, 1908–1939., Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1995, ISBN 978-0-674-15424-7
• The Sigmund Freud Ludwig Binswanger Letters, Publisher: Open Gate Press, 2000, ISBN 978-1-871871-45-6
• The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Volume 1, 1908–1914, Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1994, ISBN 978-0-674-17418-4
• The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Volume 2, 1914–1919, Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1996, ISBN 978-0-674-17419-1
• The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Volume 3, 1920–1933, Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2000, ISBN 978-0-674-00297-5
• The Letters of Sigmund Freud to Eduard Silberstein, 1871–1881, Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, ISBN 978-0-674-52828-4
• Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salome; letters, Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 1972, ISBN 978-0-15-133490-2
• The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Arnold Zweig, Publisher: New York University Press, 1987, ISBN 978-0-8147-2585-6
• Letters of Sigmund Freud – selected and edited by Ernst Ludwig Freud, Publisher: New York: Basic Books, 1960, ISBN 978-0-486-27105-7

See also

• Afterwardsness
• American Psychoanalytic Association
• Dostoevsky and Parricide
• Freud and religion
• Freud family
• Freud: The Secret Passion
• Freud's seduction theory
• Freudian slip
• Freudo-Marxism
• History of the Jews in Galicia (Eastern Europe)
• Neo-Freudian

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• Psychoanalytic literary criticism
• Psychoanalytic theory
• Psychodynamics
• Psychosexual development
• Sigmund Freud Archives
• Sigmund Freud Museum (London)
• Sigmund Freud Museum (Vienna)
• Sigmund Freud's views on homosexuality
• Signorelli parapraxis
• The Century of the Self (related documentary)
• The Mark Steel Lectures – Freud

References

Further reading

• Cioffi, Frank. Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience. Peru, IL: Open Court, 1999.
• Crews, Frederick. The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute. New York: The New York Review of Books, 1995.
• Crews, Frederick, ed. Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.
• Dufresne, Todd, ed. Against Freud: Critics Talk Back. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.
• Dufresne, Todd. Killing Freud: Twentieth-Century Culture and the Death of Psychoanalysis. New York: Continuum, 2003.
• Ellenberger, Henri. Beyond the Unconscious: Essays of Henri F. Ellenberger in the History of Psychiatry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
• Ellenberger, Henri. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books, 1970.
• Esterson, Allen. Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud. Chicago: Open Court, 1993.
• Gay, Peter. Freud: A Life for Our Time. London: Papermac, 1988
• Gellner, Ernest. The Psychoanalytic Movement: The Cunning of Unreason. London: Fontana Press, 1993.
• Grünbaum, Adolf. The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
• Grünbaum, Adolf. Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanalysis: A Study in the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis. Madison, Connecticut: International Universities Press, 1993.
• Hale, Nathan G., Jr. Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876–1917. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.
• Hale, Nathan G., Jr. The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud and the Americans, 1917–1985. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
• Hirschmüller, Albrecht. The Life and Work of Josef Breuer. New York University Press, 1989.
• Jones, Ernest. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. 3 vols. New York: Basic Books, 1953–1957
• Jung, Carl Gustav. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung Volume 4: Freud and Psychoanalysis. Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1961.
• Macmillan, Malcolm. Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1997.
• Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory. New York: Pocket Books, 1998
• Puner, Helen Walker. Freud: His Life and His Mind. New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1947
• Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.
• Rieff, Philip. Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1961
• Roazen, Paul. Freud and His Followers. New York: Knopf, 1975.
• Roazen, Paul. Freud: Political and Social Thought. London: Hogarth Press, 1969.
• Roth, Michael, ed. Freud: Conflict and Culture. New York: Vintage, 1998.
• Stannard, David E. Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.
• Sulloway, Frank J. Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend. London: Basic Books, 1979
• Webster, Richard. Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis. Oxford: The Orwell Press, 2005.
• Wollheim, Richard. Freud. Fontana, 1971.
• Wollheim, Richard, and James Hopkins, eds. Philosophical Essays on Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

External links

• A BBC recording of Freud speaking, made in 1938
• Dream Psychology by Sigmund Freud
• Essays by Freud at Quotidiana.org
• Freud Archives at Library of Congress
• Freud Museum, Maresfield Gardens, London
• International Network of Freud Critics
• International Psychoanalytical Association, founded by Freud in 1910
• Sigmund Freud Collection at Bartleby.com (15 works in English)
• Sigmund Freud Life and Work
• Works by Sigmund Freud (public domain in Canada)
• Template:Gutenberg author
• Works by Sigmund Freud in audio format from LibriVox

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