Sigmund Freud

 (German pronunciation: [ˈziːɡmʊnt ˈfʁɔʏt]), born Sigismund Schlomo Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939), was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the mechanism of repression, and for creating the clinical method of psychoanalysis for investigating the mind and treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient (or "analysand") and a psychoanalyst. Freud established sexual drives as the primary motivational forces of human life, developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association, discovered the phenomenon of transference in the therapeutic relationship and established its central role in the analytic process; he interpreted dreams as sources of insight into unconscious desires. He was an early neurological researcher into cerebral palsy, aphasia and microscopic neuroanatomy, and a prolific essayist, drawing on psychoanalysis to contribute to the history, interpretation and critique of culture.

Contents [hide]

1 Early life

2 Development of psychoanalysis

3 Patients

4 Followers

5 Cancer

6 Escape from Nazism and final years

7 Ideas

7.1 Early work

7.2 Cocaine

7.3 The Unconscious

7.4 Psychosexual development

7.5 Id, ego, and super-ego

7.6 Life and death drives

7.7 Religion

8 Legacy

8.1 Psychotherapy

8.2 Philosophy

8.3 Science

8.4 Feminism

9 Works

9.1 Major works by Freud

9.2 Correspondence

10 See also

11 References

12 Further reading

13 External links

[edit]Early life

Sigismund Schlomo Freud was born on 6 May 1856, to Jewish Galician parents in the Moravian town of Freiburg, in the Austrian Empire (1804–1867), now Příbor, in the Czech Republic.[1] His 41-year-old father, Jacob Freud, was a wool merchant, already the father of two children from a previous marriage.[2] Sigismund’s 21-year-old mother, Amalié Freud (née Nathansohn), was second wife to Jacob Freud. In the event, Sigismund Schlomo Freud was the first of eight children, and, per Moravian tradition, father and mother favoured him over his seven brothers and sisters. The boy Sigismund was born with a caul, a cap of amniotic sac, which, to the family, was a positive omen.[3] Despite relative poverty, the Freud’s ensured Sigmund’s schooling and education. Moreover, consequent to the U.S. financial panic of 1857 and its international economic failings, Jacob Freud went out of business; he then moved family and home from Freiburg, Moravia, first to Leipzig, then to Vienna, the Imperial Austrian capital city.

In 1865, the 9-year-old student Sigmund Freud entered the respected secondary school Leopoldstädter Kommunal-Realgymnasium, where he proved an outstanding pupil, and was graduated with honours from the Matura examinations, in 1873. After having initially planned to attend law school, Freud instead joined the medical faculty at the University of Vienna to study under Prof. Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Claus, who was a noted Darwinist.[4] In that time, the eel life cycle was unknown; for a month, Freud dissected eels at the Austrian zoological research station in Trieste, in an unsuccessful effort to locate the genitalia of the male eel.

His intellectual interests included the philosopher Franz Brentano, known for his theory of perception, and Theodor Lipps, a principal supporter of “the unconscious” and “empathy” as psychologic constructs.[5] Concerning the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche, whom he had read at university, and bought the collected works in 1900, the year Nietzsche died, Freud told Wilhelm Fliess that he hoped to find in Nietzsche “the words for much that remains mute in me”; however, biographer Peter Gay counter-reports that Dr. Freud treated the philospher Nietzsche’s works “as texts to be resisted, far more than to be studied”. In telling Fliess of having bought the collected works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Freud noted he had yet to open a tome.[6] In the event, the intellectual followers of Dr. Freud began noting analogies among his works and those of Nietzsche.[7]

Freud was a "partially assimilated, mostly secular Jew."[8] 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."[9] 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".[10]

In his personal life, Sigmund Freud began smoking tobacco at age 24; initially a cigarette smoker, he became a cigar smoker. Freud believed that smoking enhanced his capacity to work, and believed he could exercise self-discipline in moderating his tobacco-smoking; yet, despite health warnings from Wilhelm Fliess, and to the detriment of his health, Freud remained a smoker, eventually suffering a bucal cancer.[11]

[edit]Development of psychoanalysis

In October 1885, Freud went to Paris on a fellowship to study with Jean-Martin Charcot, a renowned neurologist and hypnosis researcher; he later considered that study experience as intellectually catalytic in guiding him towards a medical psychopathology practice, and away from the less profitable career of a research neurologist.[12] Dr. Charcot specialised in the study of hysteria and the patient’s susceptibility to hypnosis, which he often demonstrated in public, onstage, before an audience. In the event, in his medical practice, Dr. Freud discarded hypnosis as a cure for mental illness, instead favouring free association and dream analysis.[13] Moreover, concerning hypnosis, towards the end of his life, Dr. Charcot later doubted the validity of his own works on hysteria.[14]

The approach to the Bergstrasse consulting rooms.

After establishing a neurologic specialty medical practice, Dr. Sigmund Freud married Martha Bernays in 1886, the grand-daughter of Isaac Bernays, the chief rabbi of Hamburg. In practice, after attempting hypnosis therapy with neurotic patients, he abandoned it as ineffective, and favoured the “talking cure” treatment wherein the analysand (patient) talked through his or her problems with the psychoanalyst; the goal being the location and release of the powerful emotional energy that the unconscious mind had initially rejected and imprisoned. Freud named such psychic action “repression” that impeded the normal functioning of the psyche, and capable of causing physical retardation, described as psychosomatic. Moreover, it was the patient Anna O. who coined the “talking cure” term; she was treated by Josef Breuer, a colleague of Freud. In the field of psychoanalysis, “the talking cure” is considered the clinical basis of psychoanalysis.[15]

Berggasse 19.

After the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), professional interest in his theories of psychologic development increased, and he accrued a circle of supporters. Nonetheless, he often strongly disagreed with supporters who criticized his theories, the most famous being Carl Jung. Their interpretative disagreement was partly because of Jung’s interest in and commitment to religion — which Freud perceived as unscientific.[16] Moreover, Karen Horney, a pupil of Freud-collaborator Karl Abraham, criticized Freud’s psychosexual theory of femininity, leading to his defence of it against her criticisms. Horney’s intellectual challenge to his femininity theory, and the challenge of Melanie Klein, produced the first psychoanalytic debate on the nature of the psychological development of femininity. Ernest Jones, although usually an “ultra-orthodox” Freudian, sided with Horney and Klein in the femininity-theory debate. Karen Horney was the most outspoken critic of Sigmund Freud, although Jones’s and her disagreement with Freud was about how to interpret penis envy, not if such a psychological complex existed. Horney understood the Freudian castration complex as a psychological theory about the biological nature of women — wherein women are castrated men — which she rejected as scientifically inadequate.[17]

In his forties, Dr. Freud’s health suffered — the problems, likely psychosomatic, included psychologic depression and heart irregularities (arrhythmia) that evinced in him the superstition that he would die at the age of 51.[18] Moreover, in that time of his life, he explored and interpreted his own dreams, memories, and the developmental dynamics of his personality. Resultantly, such self-analysis allowed his acknowledgement of the hostility he felt towards his father, Jacob Freud, who had died in 1896. He also acknowledged his infantile sexual feelings towards his mother, Martha Freud, occurred at the age “between two, and two-and-a-half years”.[19] In Why Freud Was Wrong (1995), Richard Webster proposes that Freud’s account of his self-analysis 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 Freud’s memory was an artificial reconstruction.[20] Nonetheless, the psychologist Sigmund Freud considered that emotionally difficult period of his forties to have been the most creative period of his life.

Occasionally, the public and the private spheres of his life overlapped, thus why Carl Jung initiated the rumour that Dr. Freud had a love affair with Minna Bernays, his sister-in-law, who resided in the Freud household at 19 Berggasse, Vienna, since 1896.[21] The psychologist Hans Eysenck suggested that the love affair occurred and resulted in an aborted pregnancy.[22] Some Freud scholars, including biographer Peter Gay, consider the publication, in 2006, of a Swiss hotel guest register, dated 13 August 1898, as proof of Carl Jung’s rumour.[23]

[edit]Patients

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);[24] 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.

The psychoanalytic couch.

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.[22] 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".[25] 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."[26]

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".[27] 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".[28][why?]

[edit]Followers

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Alfred Adler

Carl Jung

Freud spent most of his life in Vienna, where a 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 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.

[edit]Cancer

In February 1923, Freud detected in his mouth a leukoplakia, a benign growth associated with heavy tobacco smoking. Initially, he kept it secret, but, in April 1923, informed Ernest Jones, telling him that the leukoplakia had been removed. Freud consulted with the dermatologist Maximilian Steiner, who advised him to quit smoking, but lied to him about the medical seriousness of the leukoplakia, by minimizing its importance. Later, Freud consulted with Felix Deutsch, who identified the leukoplakia as cancerous; he, too, lied to his patient Sigmund Freud, by euphemistically identifying it was “a bad leukoplakia”, rather than as a malignant epithelioma (carcinoma), the formal, diagnostic medical term; likewise, Deutsch, too, advised Freud to stop smoking, and to have the growth extirpated. Freud had the cancerous leukoplakia extirpated by Marcus Hajek, a rhinologist whose medical competence he earlier had questioned, for having performed an unnecessary cosmetic surgery in his clinic’s outpatient department. Freud bled during and after the mouth surgery, and might narrowly have escaped death. Freud returned to consult with Deutsch, who noted that he required further surgery; yet Deutsch did not tell his patient Sigmund Freud that he had bucal cancer, because he feared Freud might commit suicide in response.[29]

[edit]Escape from Nazism and final years

In 1930, Freud was awarded the literary Goethepreis der Stadt Frankfurt (Frankfurt City Goethe Prize) recognizing his intellectual contributions to German literature and psychology. Three years later, on 30 January 1933, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party were elected to power in Germany, they publicly identified the books of Dr. Sigmund Freud for burning; about which Freud quipped: “What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now, they are content with burning my books.”[30] Five years later, on 12 March 1938, Nazi Germany (1933–45) militarily occupied and annexed Austria with the Anschluss Österreichs, which licensed the Austrian Nazis for open, violent anti-Semitism in Vienna. After being visited by the Gestapo, Freud decided to go into exile “to die in freedom”, and, in that goal, he was fortuitously assisted by the Luftwaffe officer Anton Sauerwald, the Nazi official assigned confiscate 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.”[31] Nonetheless, despite his fortunate escape from Nazi Germany, Freud’s four sisters perished in Nazi concentration camps.

At the University of Vienna, Anton Sauerwald had been a student of Prof Josef Herzig, who often played cards with Sigmund Freud. Sauerwald did not inform his Nazi superiors that Dr. Freud had many secret bank accounts, moreover, he also disobeyed a Nazi directive to destroy Freud’s psychoanalysis books; instead, he and an accomplice hid the books in the Austrian national library. [31] Finally, dismayed at being ordered to transform the Freud residence to an institute for the study of Aryan racial superiority, Sauerwald signed Sigmund Freud’s exit visa.[31] In June 1938, Freud and family took the Orient Express train from Nazi Vienna, and eventually settled in London, at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead. In the U.K., Freud told a newspaper that “all my money and property in Vienna is gone”; he did not mention his secret bank accounts. Furthermore, at the end of the Second World War (1939–45), when the Nazi official Anton Sauerwald was tried for stealing the secret wealth of Dr. Sigmund Freud, it was daughter Anna Freud who interceded in behalf of Sauerwald, by informing her cousin, Harry Freud, a U.S. Army officer who 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”; the U.S. military authorities then released Sauerwald.[31]

In September 1939, Freud, was suffering much pain from the jaw cancer, and persuaded his physician and friend Max Schur to help him commit suicide. After reading the novel La Peau de chagrin (The Magic Skin, 1831), by Honoré de Balzac, in one sitting, Freud asked him, “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.”[32] When Schur replied 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.”[32] Anna Freud wanted to postpone her father’s death, but Dr. Schur convinced her it was futile to keep him alive, and on 21 and 22 September administered doses of morphine that effected the mercy killing of Sigmund Freud on 23 September 1939, at 83 years of age.[32] Three days after his death, Sigmund Freud’s body was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium in England in a funeral attended by Austrian refugees, including the writer Stefan Zweig. The ashes of Sigmund Freud were placed in the crematorium’s columbarium, contained by an ancient Greek urn, a gift from Marie Bonaparte, which he had kept in his study in Vienna and taken with him to London; later, when wife Martha Freud died in 1951, her ashes were also placed in the urn.

[edit]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.

[edit]Early work

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.[33] 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.[34] 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.[35]

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.[36][37] In the years immediately following Breuer's treatment, Anna O. spent three short periods in sanatoria with the diagnosis "hysteria" with "somatic symptoms,"[38] and some authors have challenged Breuer's published account of a cure.[39][40][41] (A contrary view has been published by Richard Skues.)[42]

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.[43]

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.[44] 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.[45] 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.[46] 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.[47]

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.[48] 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.[49]

[edit]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.[50] (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.[51] 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.[52]

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.[53]

After the "Cocaine Episode"[54] 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.[55] 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.[56]

Some critics[who?] have suggested that much of Freud's early psychoanalytical theory was a by-product of his cocaine use.[57]

[edit]The Unconscious

Main article: Unconscious mind

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'".[58] 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."[59]

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",[60] 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."[61] Freud's dream theory was criticized during his life by Lydiard H. Horton, who in 1915 read a paper at a joint meeting of the American Psychological Association and the New York Academy of Sciences that called Freud's dream theory "dangerously inaccurate" and suggested that "rank confabulations...appear to hold water, psychoanalytically".[62]

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.

[edit]Psychosexual development

Main article: 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.[63]

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.

[edit]Id, ego, and super-ego

Main article: 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.

[edit]Life and death drives

Main articles: Libido and Death drive

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.[64]

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.[65]

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.[65]

[edit]Religion

Main article: Freud and religion

As a psychologist, Sigmund Freud regarded the monotheistic god as an illusion based upon the infantile emotional need for a powerful, supernatural pater familias; and that religion — once necessary to restrain man’s violent nature in the early stages of civilization — in modern times, can be set aside in favor of reason and science. The essay “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” (1907) notes the likeness between faith (religious belief) and neurotic obsession.[66] The book of essays Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913) proposes that society and religion begin with the patricide and eating of the powerful paternal figure, who then becomes a revered collective memory.[67] In the book Civilisation and its Discontents (1930), he describes religion as an “oceanic sensation” he never experienced, (despite being a self-identified cultural Jew). [68] The book Moses and Monotheism (1937) proposes that Moses was the tribal pater familias, killed by the Jews, who psychologically coped with the patricide with a reaction formation conducive to their establishing monotheist Judaism; analogously, he described the Roman Catholic rite of Holy Communion as cultural evidence of the killing and devouring of the sacred father.[69] [70] Moreover, he perceived religion, with its suppression of violence, as mediator of the societal and personal, the public and the private, conflicts between Eros and Thanatos, the forces of life and death. Later works indicate Freud’s pessimism about the future of civilization, which he noted in the 1931 edition of Civilisation and its Discontents.[71]

[edit]Legacy

At Clark University: (f.) Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, Carl Jung; (r.): Abraham A. Brill, Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi in 1909.

[edit]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."[72] For Joel Kovel, "Freud with his methods and central insight remains the progenitor of modern therapy", even though psychoanalysis itself has "sunk to a relatively minor role so far as actual therapeutic practice goes."[73]

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.[74]

Arthur Janov's primal therapy has been an influential post-Freudian psychotherapy. 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.[73] Mark Pendergrast writes that Janov provided the prototype for the current trauma therapist.[75]

[edit]Philosophy

Freud's theories have influenced the Frankfurt School and critical theory.[76]

Paul Ricoeur called Freud one of the masters of the "school of suspicion", alongside Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche.[77] Ricoeur's hermeneutic interpretation of Freud has been criticized by Adolf Grünbaum.[78]

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."[79]

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.[80]

[edit]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."[81] H. J. Eysenck claims 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" [82]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.[83]

Philosophers have debated the scientific status of psychoanalysis. Karl Popper, who argued that all proper scientific theories must be potentially falsifiable, claimed that Freud's psychoanalytic theories were presented in unfalsifiable form, meaning that no experiment or observation could ever prove them wrong.[84] Adolf Grünbaum considers Popper's critique of Freud flawed, 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, thereby disproving Popper's claim that psychoanalytic propositions can never be proven wrong.[78]

Freud critic Richard Webster calls psychoanalysis "perhaps the most complex and successful" pseudoscience in history.[85] In 1923 Freud published his main theory of id, ego and super-ego. Because Kierkegaard in 1849 described the division of human psyche in cellar, ground-floor and first-floor, the concept of a division of the psyche in 3 parts was not new. Freud does not quote Kierkegaard and Freuds theory can be considered a copy of Kiekegaards writings – Plagiarism and scientific misconduct[86].

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.[87][88] Founded by South African neuroscientist Mark Solms,[89] neuro-psychoanalysis has received contributions from researchers including Oliver Sacks,[90] Jaak Panksepp,[91] Douglas Watt, Eric Kandel, and Joseph E. LeDoux.[92] 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.[93] The theory of ego defense mechanisms has received empirical validation,[94] and the nature of repression, in particular, became one of the more fiercely debated areas of psychology in the 1990s.[95]

[edit]Feminism

Paul Robinson, observing that "Everyone knows that Freud has fallen from grace", suggests that the disenchantment with Freud can be traced to the revival of feminism.[78] Simone de Beauvoir criticized Freud and psychoanalysis in The Second Sex.[96] Betty Friedan criticized Freud and what she considered his Victorian view of women in The Feminine Mystique.[97] Freud's concept of penis envy was attacked by Kate Millett, whose Sexual Politics accused him of confusion and oversights.[98] Naomi Weisstein writes that Freud and his followers erroneously thought that his "years of intensive clinical experience" added up to scientific rigor.[99] Freud was also criticized by Shulamith Firestone and Eva Figes. In The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone argued that Freud was a "poet" who produced metaphors rather than literal truths; in her view, Freud, like feminists, recognized that sexuality was the crucial problem of modern life, but ignored the social context and failed to question society itself. Firestone interpreted Freudian "metaphors" in terms of the literal facts of power within the family. Juliet Mitchell defended Freud against de Beauvoir, Friedan, Millett, Figes, and Firestone in Psychoanalysis and Feminism, accusing them of misreading him and misunderstanding the implications of psychoanalytic theory for feminism.[96] Mitchell's views were in turn criticized by Jane Gallop in The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis.[100]

French feminists, among them Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, have been influenced by Freud as interpreted by Jacques Lacan.[101] Irigaray has produced a theoretical challenge to Freud and Lacan, using their theories against them to "put forward a coherent psychoanalytic explanation for theoretical bias. She claims that the cultural unconscious only recognizes the male sex, and details the effects of this unconscious belief on accounts of the psychology of women."[102]

Carol Gilligan writes that "The penchant of developmental theorists to project a masculine image, and one that appears frightening to women, goes back at least to Freud..." She sees Freud's criticism of women's sense of justice reappearing in the work of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg. Gilligan notes that Nancy Chodorow, in contrast to Freud, attributes differences between the sexes not to anatomy but to the fact that "the early social environment differs for and is experienced differently by male and female children." Chodorow writes "against the masculine bias of psychoanalytic theory" and "replaces Freud's negative and derivative description of female psychology with a positive and direct account of her own."[103]

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