Sigmund Freud

Austrian neurologist and psychoanalyst

• Born: May 6, 1856
• Birthplace: Freiberg, Moravia, Austrian Empire (now Příbor, Czech Republic)
• Died: September 23, 1939
• Place of death: London, England

Freud was the founder of psychoanalysis and as such has had a tremendous impact on contemporary thought and popular culture by baring the irrational and subconscious roots of much human action.

Early Life

Sigmund Freud (froyd) was born in Freiberg, a small Moravian town within the Austrian Empire. Freud, who was named Sigismund Schlomo at birth, was the son of a rather poor, nonreligious Jewish wool merchant, Jacob Freud, and his third wife, Amalia Nathansohn. Young Freud had two half brothers, who were older than his mother, and a nephew, simultaneously his best friend and archrival, who was his senior by a year. Freud’s later recall and analysis of his ambivalent feelings toward his tangled web of relationships served as the basis for the discovery and elaboration of his psychoanalytic theories.

In 1860, Freud’s family, after a brief stay in Leipzig, settled in Leopoldstadt, the old Jewish section of Vienna. There, the family’s poverty was exacerbated by the birth of seven children between 1857 and 1866. Such hardships in Vienna, in contrast to romantic memories of Freiberg, left in Freud an ambivalence toward the city, which he loved but in which he never felt comfortable. The period of liberal ascendancy in Vienna, which accompanied his youth and early adulthood, was both a stimulation and an encouragement. Despite the family’s relative poverty, Freud, always the favorite of whom great things were expected, was pampered. By the time Freud entered the University of Vienna in 1873 to study medicine, his family’s fortunes had improved.

Freud began his university studies shortly after a stock market crash. In the wave of anti-Semitism that followed the collapse, Freud, although intensely antireligious, became acutely aware of his own Jewishness, an experience that prompted the development of a critical independence. Freud was drawn to medicine as a means of channeling his insatiable curiosity and love of nature along more empirical and less speculative lines. The normal five-year course was extended by Freud’s broad curiosity and fascination for research, and he did not receive his degree until 1881. Among the most influential of his professors was the physiologist Ernst Brücke, a positivist who aspired to a complete understanding of humankind through scientific investigation.

Freud spent another year in Brücke’s laboratory before taking a junior position at Vienna’s General Hospital to gain the clinical experience necessary for a medical practice. The compelling reason for Freud’s beginning his practical career was the twenty-one-year-old daughter of a prominent Hamburg Jewish family, Martha Bernays, whom he met in April, 1882, and to whom he became engaged in June. In October, 1885, Freud went to Paris for several months to study under Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpětrière Clinic. Freud was strongly influenced by the personality and skill of Charcot, who indicated the psychological rather than organic origins of hysteria and demonstrated the therapeutic value of hypnosis. It was Charcot who nudged Freud down the path, which had already attracted him, to psychology. A particular legacy of Charcot was a dedication to theory rooted in observable facts.

Life’s Work

In April 1886, Freud, having returned to Vienna, established his private medical practice and, in September, married Bernays. The first of six children was born in October 1887. Dissatisfied with the results of hypnosis in the treatment of his neurotic patients and influenced by his friend and mentor Josef Breuer, Freud turned to the “talking cure” as a means of evoking a catharsis in his patients. In 1895, Freud and Breuer published Studien über Hysterie (Studies in Hysteria , 1936), the founding statement of psychoanalysis, in which they described their success with this technique.

Freud’s professional and personal relationship with Breuer was ruptured, as were those with a number of subsequent associates, because of theoretical and personal differences. By the mid-1890s, Freud was convinced that problems in sexual development were the dominant factor in neuroses. He particularly emphasized the importance of infantile sexuality and what he called “the Oedipus complex.” Although he rejected his earlier belief that neuroses were rooted in the sexual abuse of children, Freud unflinchingly stressed the role that early sexual desires, repressed into the unconscious, play in the formation of the personality. He developed the technique of analyzing dreams to extract these childhood memories from the unconscious mind.

In 1897, Freud undertook a pioneering analysis of himself, utilizing dream analysis. His closest intellectual associate during this period was the German physician Wilhelm Fliess. Freud used Fliess as a sounding board for his ideas and for emotional support while developing his revolutionary ideas. As their friendship was approaching its end, Freud published the results of his self-analysis and theory on dreams. Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams , 1913), published in 1900, was Freud’s most significant work. In it, Freud demonstrated that dreams serve as a window to the unconscious, and, by interpreting dreams, the unconscious determinants of behavior could be understood and addressed. His exposition of the notion of infantile sexuality and its impact on the personality was published as Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality , 1910) in 1905. In this work, Freud used the term “Oedipus complex” for the “nuclear complex” of all neuroses, which he had described in The Interpretation of Dreams. The Oedipus complex, which Freud believed all humans experienced, consisted of deep love for one parent and a feeling of hatred for the other.

Freud’s ideas met with much resistance. He had long desired the largely honorary appointment as extraordinary professor at the University of Vienna but was denied it because of anti-Semitism and opposition to his theories. Through the intervention of a prominent former patient, however, he overcame the political obstacles. He received the prestigious appointment in 1902 and as a consequence was able to spread his ideas through uncompensated but well-received Saturday lectures at the university.

That same year, Freud organized a small weekly discussion group, which developed into the Vienna Psychoanalytical Association. It promoted the development and spread of psychoanalytic theory, and in 1908 it spawned the International Psychoanalytical Association. Both groups, however, were eventually focal points for theoretical and personal divergence and animosity. There was a bitter split in 1911 between Freud and Alfred Adler over Adler’s emphasis on environmental determinism and biologically inherited psychological traits. This split foreshadowed an even more bitter divergence in 1914 between Freud and his heir apparent, Carl Jung, over Jung’s doubts concerning the primacy of sexual factors in psychological disorders and Jung’s mystical and religious proclivities.

Freud was constantly engaged in elaborating and expressing his theories. His writings explored the broad-ranging impact of the unconscious, from its manifestations in everyday life in such works as Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens (1904; Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 1914) and Der Witz und Seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten (1905; Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, 1905) to the development and expression of culture in such works as Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci (1910; Leonardo da Vinci: A Psychosexual Study of an Infantile Reminiscence, 1916) and Totem und Tabu (1913; Totem and Taboo, 1955). After World War I, his application of psychoanalytic theory to social life continued and was accompanied by the elaboration of his theory of personality and its components (the id, or unconscious, the seat of sexual and aggressive instincts, striving for self-satisfaction and release; the ego, or reason, which controlled the drives of the id; and the superego, or conscience, which sought to subject the id completely to its ideals). Freud, during this period, also emphasized the importance of the aggressive drive in human behavior. The instinct for self-preservation and creation, the libido, was in counterposition to a death drive, which sought expression through self-destruction or outward hatred and aggression. His principal works during this period were Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1922), Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1922), Das Ich und das Es (1923; The Ego and the Id, 1926), Hemmung, Symptom, und Angst (1926; Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, 1936), Die Zukunft einer Illusion (1927; The Future of an Illusion, 1928), Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930; Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930), and Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion (1939; Moses and Monotheism, 1939).

In June, 1938, Freud and his family, through the intervention of influential foreigners, were allowed to leave Austria, which had been annexed by Nazi Germany in March of that year. The alert and still-productive eighty-two-year-old Freud, who was dying from the cancer that, despite thirty-three operations, had been developing since 1923, was permitted to trade house arrest for exile in England, where he died on September 23, 1939.

Significance

The psychoanalytic treatment developed by Freud sought to expose memories and emotions that the individual, in an effort of self-protection, has buried in the unconscious. To allow the patient to come to terms with the repressed material, it was to be bared with the aid of a therapist employing dream analysis and free association, the uninhibited eliciting of images, emotions, and memories.

Some critics have taken Freud to task for overemphasizing the role of sex in the development of the personality and for giving to subconscious forces a degree of determination that overrides the ability of the individual to act freely. There are many academics that now reject the large body of Freud's theories and many that consider some of his views, particularly those regarding homosexuality and female sexuality, to be both incorrect and damaging. In addition, from the viewpoint of modern science, much of Freud's work has been called into question because it does not have empirical evidence to back it up. Freud’s ideas, however, have had an impact that transcends the discipline of psychology. There is, wide acceptance of his notions of the role of the unconscious in motivating human behavior, the importance of childhood experiences in forming the adult personality, and the function of defense mechanisms.

Bibliography

Clark, Ronald W. Freud: The Man and the Cause: A Biography. New York: Random, 1980. Print.

Cohen, Josh. How to Read Freud. New York: Norton, 2005. Print.

Dvorsky, George. "Why Freud Still Matters, When He Was Wrong About Almost Everything." io9. Gawker, 7 Aug. 2013. Web. 7 Dec. 2015.

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by Joyce Crick. New ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.

Fromm, Erich. Greatness and Limitations of Freud’s Thought. New York: Harper, 1980. Print.

Gay, Peter. Freud: A Life for Our Time. New York: Norton, 1988. Print.

Kramer, Peter D. Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind. New York: Atlas, 2006. Print.

Landau, Elizabeth. "Do Psychologists Still Listen to Freud?" CNN. Cable News Network, 8 June 2010. Web. 7 Dec. 2015.