Freud
Sigmund Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud (May 6, 1856 September 23, 1939), was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who founded the psychoanalytic school of psychology. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind, especially involving the mechanism of repression; his redefinition of sexual desire as mobile and directed towards a wide variety of objects; and his therapeutic techniques, especially his theory of transference in the therapeutic relationship and the presumed value of dreams as sources of insight into unconscious desires. He is commonly referred to as "the father of psychoanalysis" and his work has been highly influential -- popularizing such notions as the unconscious, the Oedipus complex, defense mechanisms, Freudian slips and dream symbolism--while also making a long-lasting impact on fields as diverse as literature, film, Marxist and feminist theories, philosophy, and psychology. However, his theories remain controversial and disputed by numerous critics, among them one who called him the "creator of a complex pseudo-science which should be recognized as one of the great follies of Western civilisation".
Early life
Sigmund Freud was born on 6 May 1856 to Galician Jewish parents in Pbor, Moravia, Austrian Empire, now Czech Republic. His father Jacob was 41, a wool merchant, and had two children by a previous marriage. His mother Amalia was 21. Owing to his intellect, which was obvious from an early stage of his childhood, his parents favored him over his siblings, and even though they were poor they offered everything to give him a proper education. Due to the economic crisis of 1857, father Freud lost his business, and the family moved first to Leipzig, Germany before settling in Vienna, Austria. In 1865, Sigmund entered the Leopoldstdter CommunalRealgymnasium, a prominent high school. Freud was an outstanding pupil and graduated the Matura in 1873 with honors. In his Lectures on Physiology, Brcke set forth the radical view that the living organism is a dynamic system to which the laws of chemistry and physics apply. This was the starting point for Freud's dynamic psychology of the mind and its relation to the unconscious.
Later life
Freud married Martha Bernays in 1886, after opening his own medical practice, specializing in neurology. After experimenting with hypnosis on his neurotic patients, Freud abandoned this form of treatment, in favor of a treatment where the patient talked through his or her problems. This came to be known as the "talking cure. The "talking cure" is widely seen as the basis of psychoanalysis. Freud held the opinion (based on personal experience and observation) that sexual activity was incompatible with the accomplishing of any great work. Since he felt that the great work of creating and establishing psychotherapy was his destiny, he told his wife that they could no
longer engage in sexual relations. Indeed from about the age of forty until his death Freud was absolutely celibate in order to sublimate the libido for creative purposes, according to his biographer Ernest Jones. In his 40s, Freud "had numerous psychosomatic disorders as well as exaggerated fears of dying and other phobias" (Corey 2001, p. 67). During this time Freud was involved in the task of exploring his own dreams, memories, and the dynamics of his personality development. During this self-analysis, he came to realize the hostility he felt towards his father (Jacob Freud), and "he also recalled his childhood sexual feelings for his mother (Amalia Freud), who was attractive, warm, and protective" (Corey 2001, p. 67). Corey (2001) considers this time of emotional difficulty to be the most creative time in Freud's life. In 1930 Freud received the Goethe Prize in appreciation of his contribution to psychology and to German literary culture. Three years later the Nazis took control of Germany and Freud's books featured prominently amongst those burned by the Nazis. 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". He and his family left Vienna in June 1938 and traveled to London. A heavy cigar smoker, Freud endured more than 30 operations during his life due to mouth cancer. In September 1939 he prevailed on his doctor and friend Max Schur to assist him in suicide. After reading Balzac's La Peau de chagrin in a single sitting he said, "My dear Schur, you certainly remember our first talk. You promised me then not to forsake me when my time comes. Now it is nothing but torture and makes no sense any more." Schur administered three doses of morphine over many hours that resulted in Freud's death on September 23, 1939.
Freud's ideas
Freud has been influential in two related but distinct ways. He simultaneously developed a theory of how the human mind is organized and operates internally, and how human behavior both conditions and results from this particular theoretical understanding. This led him to favor certain clinical techniques for attempting to help cure psychopathology.
Early work
As far as neurology went, Freud was an early researcher on the topic of neurophysiology, specifically cerebral palsy, which was then known as "cerebral paralysis." Freud hoped that his research would provide a solid scientific basis for his therapeutic technique. The goal of Freudian therapy, or psychoanalysis, was to bring to consciousness repressed thoughts and feelings. According to some of his successors, including his daughter Anna Freud, the goal of therapy is to allow the patient to develop a stronger ego; Classically, the bringing of unconscious thoughts and feelings to consciousness is brought about by encouraging the patient to talk in free association and to talk about dreams. Another important element of psychoanalysis is a relative lack of direct involvement on the part of the analyst,
which is meant to encourage the patient to project thoughts and feelings onto the analyst. Through this process, transference, the patient can reenact and resolve repressed conflicts, especially childhood conflicts with (or about) parents. In the early 1890s Freud used a form of treatment based on the one that Breuer had described to him, modified by what he called his "pressure technique". The traditional story, based on Freud's later accounts of this period, is that as a result of his use of this procedure most of his patients in the mid-1890s reported early childhood sexual abuse. He believed these stories, but after having heard a patient tell the story about Freud's personal friend being the victimizer, Freud concluded that his patients were fantasizing the abuse scenes. In 1896 Freud posited that the symptoms of 'hysteria' and obsessional neurosis derived from unconscious memories of sexual abuse in infancy, and claimed that he had uncovered such incidents for every single one of his current patients (one third of whom were men). However a close reading of his papers and letters from this period indicates that these patients did not report early childhood sexual abuse as he later claimed: rather, he arrived at his findings by analytically inferring the supposed incidents, using a procedure that was heavily dependent on the symbolic interpretation of somatic symptoms.
The unconscious
Perhaps the most significant contribution Freud made to Western thought was his argument for the existence of an unconscious mind. During the 19th century, the dominant trend in Western thought was positivism, which subscribed to the belief that people could ascertain real knowledge concerning themselves and their environment and judiciously exercise control over both = people can control their thoughts and actions and their environment Freud, however, suggested that such declarations of free will are in fact delusions; that we are not entirely aware of what we think and often act for reasons that have little to do with our conscious thoughts. The concept of the unconscious as proposed by Freud was considered by some to be groundbreaking in that he proposed that awareness existed in layers and that some thoughts occurred "below the surface." as Nevertheless, psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer, among others, pointed out, "contrary to what most people believe, the unconscious was not discovered by Freud. Moreover, the historian of psychology Mark Altschule wrote: "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's advance was not, then, to uncover the unconscious but to devise a method for systematically studying it. Dreams, which he called the "royal road to the unconscious," provided the best access to our unconscious life and the best illustration of its "logic," which was different from the logic of conscious thought. Freud developed his first topology of the psyche in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) in which he proposed the argument that the unconscious exists and described a
method for gaining access to it. The preconscious was described as a layer between conscious and unconscious thought--that which we could access with a little effort. Thus for Freud, the ideals of the Enlightenment, positivism and rationalism, could be achieved through understanding, transforming, and mastering the unconscious, rather than through denying or repressing it. Crucial to the operation of the unconscious is "repression." According to Freud, people often experience thoughts and feelings that are so painful that they cannot bear them. Such thoughts and feelings--and associated memories--could not, Freud argued, be banished from the mind, but could be banished from consciousness. Thus they come to constitute the unconscious. Although Freud later attempted to find patterns of repression among his patients in order to derive a general model of the mind, he also observed that individual patients repress different things. Moreover, Freud observed that the process of repression is itself a non-conscious act (in other words, it did not occur through people willing away certain thoughts or feelings). Freud supposed that what people repressed was in part determined by their unconscious. In other words, the unconscious was for Freud both a cause and effect of repression. Eventually, Freud abandoned the idea of the system unconscious, replacing it with the concept of the Ego, super-ego, and id (discussed below). Throughout his career, however, he retained the descriptive and dynamic conceptions of the unconscious.
Psychosexual development Ego, super-ego, and id
-refer to picture
Freud's legacy
Psychotherapy
Freud's theories and research methods were controversial during his life and still are so today, but few dispute his huge impact on psychologists and the academically inclined. Most importantly, Freud popularized the "talking-cure"--an idea that a person could solve problems simply by talking over them, something that was almost unheard of in the 19th century. Even though many psychotherapists today tend to reject the specifics of Freud's theories, this basic mode of treatment comes largely from his work. Most of Freud's specific theories--like his stages of psychosexual development--and especially his methodology, have fallen out of favor in modern experimental psychology.
Philosophy
Rationality While many enlightenment thinkers viewed rationality as both an unproblematic ideal and a defining feature of man, Freud's model of the mind drastically reduced the scope and power of reason. In Freud's view, reasoning occurs in the conscious mind--the ego-but this is only a small part of the whole. The mind also contains the hidden, irrational elements of id and superego, which lie outside of conscious control, drive behavior, and motivate conscious activities. As a result, these structures call into question humans' ability to act purely on the basis of reason, since lurking motives are also always at play. Moreover, this model of the mind makes rationality itself suspect, since it may be motivated by hidden urges or societal forces (e.g. defense mechanisms, where reasoning becomes "rationalizing"). Transparency of Self Freud challenged the idea of empiricists such as John Locke and David Hume that the workings of the mind can be understood by introspection. He considered many central aspects of a person remain radically inaccessible to the conscious mind (without the aid of psychotherapy), which undermines the status of first-person knowledge.
Critical reactions
Although Freud's theories were influential, they came under widespread criticism during his lifetime and afterward. A paper by Lydiard H. Horton, read in 1915 at a joint meeting of the American Psychological Association and the New York Academy of Sciences, called Freud's dream theory "dangerously inaccurate" and noted that "rank confabulations...appear to hold water, psycho analytically" [17]. The philosopher A. C. Grayling has said that "Philosophies that capture the imagination never wholly fade....But as to Freud's claims upon truth, the judgment of time seems to be running against him."[18] Peter D. Kramer, a psychiatrist and faculty member of Brown Medical School, said "I'm afraid [Freud] doesn't hold up very well at all. It almost feels like a personal betrayal to say that. But every particular is wrong: the universality of the Oedipus complex, penis envy, infantile sexuality." A 2006 article in Newsweek magazine called him "history's most debunked doctor."[19] Freud's theories are often criticized for not being real science. [20] This objection was raised by Karl Popper, who claimed that all proper scientific theories must be potentially falsifiable. Popper argued that no experiment or observation could ever falsify Freud's theories of psychology (e.g. someone who denies having an Oedipal complex is interpreted as repressing it), and thus they could not be considered scientific. [21] Among adherents of Freudian thought, a frequently criticized aspect of Freud's belief system is his model of psychosexual development, including Freud's claim that infants are sexual beings. Others have accepted Freud's expanded notion of sexuality, but have argued that this pattern of development is not universal, nor necessary for the development of a healthy adult. Instead, they have emphasized the social and environmental sources of patterns of development. Moreover, they call attention to social dynamics Freud de-emphasized or ignored, such as class relations. This branch of Freudian critique owes a great deal to the work of Herbert Marcuse.
Freud has also come under fire from many feminist critics. Freud was an early champion of both sexual freedom and education for women (Freud, "Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness"). Some feminists have argued that at worst his views of women's sexual development set the progress of women in Western culture back decades, and that at best they lent themselves to the ideology of female inferiority. Believing as he did that women are a kind of mutilated male, who must learn to accept their "deformity" (the "lack" of a penis) and submit to some imagined biological imperative, he contributed to the vocabulary of misogyny. Terms such as "penis envy" and "castration anxiety" contributed to discouraging women from entering any field dominated by men, until the 1970s. Some of Freud's most criticized statements appear in his 'Fragment of Analysis' on Ida Bauer such as "This was surely just the situation to call up distinct feelings of sexual excitement in a girl of fourteen" in reference to Dora being kissed by a 'young man of prepossessing appearance' implying the passivity of female sexuality and his statement "I should without question consider a person hysterical in whom an occasion for sexual excitement elicited feelings that were preponderantly or exclusively unpleasurable" QUESTIONS What is Freud's view of the self? Does the view that we are all sexual beings wanting to gratify ourselves play a part in your life? What role does the Oedipus complex play in Freud's theories? Does it play a part in your own life? How does Freud's theory of the self compare or contrast to the other authors we have read? Why was there so much objection to his work?