Biography

Sigmund Freud was born May 6, 1856, in a small town -- Freiberg -- in Moravia. His father was
a wool merchant with a keen mind and a good sense of humor. His mother was a lively woman,
her husband's second wife and 20 years younger. She was 21 years old when she gave birth to
her first son, her darling, Sigmund. Sigmund had two older half-brothers and six younger
siblings. When he was four or five -- he wasn't sure -- the family moved to Vienna, where he
lived most of his life.

A brilliant child, always at the head of his class, he went to medical school, one of the few viable
options for a bright Jewish boy in Vienna those days. There, he became involved in research
under the direction of a physiology professor named Ernst Brücke. Brücke believed in what was
then a popular, if radical, notion, which we now call reductionism: "No other forces than the
common physical-chemical ones are active within the organism." Freud would spend many years
trying to "reduce" personality to neurology, a cause he later gave up on.

Freud was very good at his research, concentrating on neurophysiology, even inventing a special
cell-staining technique. But only a limited number of positions were available, and there were
others ahead of him. Brücke helped him to get a grant to study, first with the great psychiatrist
Charcot in Paris, then with his rival Bernheim in Nancy. Both these gentlemen were
investigating the use of hypnosis with hysterics.

After spending a short time as a resident in neurology and director of a children's ward in Berlin,
he came back to Vienna, married his fiancée of many years Martha Bernays, and set up a
practice in neuropsychiatry, with the help of Joseph Breuer.

Freud's books and lectures brought him both fame and ostracism from the mainstream of the
medical community. He drew around him a number of very bright sympathizers who became the
core of the psychoanalytic movement. Unfortunately, Freud had a penchant for rejecting people
who did not totally agree with him. Some separated from him on friendly terms; others did not,
and went on to found competing schools of thought.

Freud emigrated to England just before World War II when Vienna became an increasing
dangerous place for Jews, especially ones as famous as Freud. Not long afterward, he died of the
cancer of the mouth and jaw that he had suffered from for the last 20 years of his life.

Dr. George Boeree’s Homepage. http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/

 Sigmund Freud
Austrian Originator of Psycho-Analysis

1856 - 1939

Men are strong only so long as they represent a strong idea.

They become powerless when they oppose it.

—Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud was born on May 6, 1856 at Freiberg, Moravia, now Pribor in the Czech
Republic. Freud developed the techniques of "Psychoanalysis" for the treatment of psychological
and emotional disorders.

Freud graduated as Doctor of Medicine from the Medical School of the University of Vienna in
1881. In September 1891 Freud moved to 19 Berggasse in Vienna where he lived and worked for
the next 47 years. In 1896 in his paper, "The Aetiology of Hysteria," Freud first used the term
"Psychoanalysis." In October of 1902 a circle of physicians grouped around Freud began a
weekly discussion of Psychoanalysis. From 1908 on the group called itself "Vienna Psycho-
Analytical Society." In 1910 the International Psychoanalytical Association was formed in
Nuremberg with Swiss psychologist Carl Jung as the first president. Psychoanalysis soon gained
acceptance all over the world as a scientific discipline and as a therapeutical approach.

On March 12, 1938 German troops marched into Austria and the Nazis assumed power. Freud's
daughter Anna was arrested on March 22 by the Gestapo and held for a day. On June 4,
following numerous international interventions, Freud was allowed to emigrate to London with
his wife, his youngest daughter Anna, his housekeeper Paula Fichtl and his medical caretaker
Josefine Stross. Freud's other children also managed to escape. His brother lost all his property
when he left Vienna, and four elderly and infirm sisters were forced to remain in Vienna and
killed in concentration camps in 1941. Freud moved to a house at 20 Maresfield Gardens in
London's Hampstead section.

Sigmund Freud died on September 23, 1939. "The Sigmund Freud Museum" was opened in his
former office at 19 Berggasse, Vienna in 1971.

Copyright © 1995-2007 Robin Chew

Article written by Robin Chew - May 1996.
http://www.lucidcafe.com/library/96may/freud.html#resources
Monday, Mar. 29, 1999

Psychoanalyst
By Peter Gay

There are no neutrals in the Freud wars. Admiration, even downright adulation, on one side;
skepticism, even downright disdain, on the other. This is not hyperbole. A psychoanalyst who is
currently trying to enshrine Freud in the pantheon of cultural heroes must contend with a
relentless critic who devotes his days to exposing Freud as a charlatan. But on one thing the
contending parties agree: for good or ill, Sigmund Freud, more than any other explorer of the
psyche, has shaped the mind of the 20th century. The very fierceness and persistence of his
detractors are a wry tribute to the staying power of Freud's ideas.

There is nothing new about such embittered confrontations; they have dogged Freud's footsteps
since he developed the cluster of theories he would give the name of psychoanalysis. His
fundamental idea--that all humans are endowed with an unconscious in which potent sexual and
aggressive drives, and defenses against them, struggle for supremacy, as it were, behind a
person's back--has struck many as a romantic, scientifically unprovable notion. His contention
that the catalog of neurotic ailments to which humans are susceptible is nearly always the work
of sexual maladjustments, and that erotic desire starts not in puberty but in infancy, seemed to
the respectable nothing less than obscene. His dramatic evocation of a universal Oedipus
complex, in which (to put a complicated issue too simply) the little boy loves his mother and
hates his father, seems more like a literary conceit than a thesis worthy of a scientifically minded
psychologist.

Freud first used the term psychoanalysis in 1896, when he was already 40. He had been driven
by ambition from his earliest days and encouraged by his doting parents to think highly of
himself. Born in 1856 to an impecunious Jewish family in the Moravian hamlet of Freiberg (now
Pribor in the Czech Republic), he moved with the rest of a rapidly increasing brood to Vienna.
He was his mother's firstborn, her "golden Siggie." In recognition of his brilliance, his parents
privileged him over his siblings by giving him a room to himself, to study in peace. He did not
disappoint them. After an impressive career in school, he matriculated in 1873 in the University
of Vienna and drifted from one philosophical subject to another until he hit on medicine. His
choice was less that of a dedicated healer than of an inquisitive explorer determined to solve
some of nature's riddles.

As he pursued his medical researches, he came to the conclusion that the most intriguing
mysteries lay concealed in the complex operations of the mind. By the early 1890s, he was
specializing in "neurasthenics" (mainly severe hysterics); they taught him much, including the art
of patient listening. At the same time he was beginning to write down his dreams, increasingly
convinced that they might offer clues to the workings of the unconscious, a notion he borrowed
from the Romantics. He saw himself as a scientist taking material both from his patients and
from himself, through introspection. By the mid-1890s, he was launched on a full-blown self-
analysis, an enterprise for which he had no guidelines and no predecessors.

The book that made his reputation in the profession--although it sold poorly--was The
Interpretation of Dreams (1900), an indefinable masterpiece--part dream analysis, part
autobiography, part theory of the mind, part history of contemporary Vienna. The principle that
underlay this work was that mental experiences and entities, like physical ones, are part of
nature. This meant that Freud could admit no mere accidents in mental procedures. The most
nonsensical notion, the most casual slip of the tongue, the most fantastic dream, must have a
meaning and can be used to unriddle the often incomprehensible maneuvers we call thinking.

Although the second pillar of Freud's psychoanalytic structure, Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality (1905), further alienated him from the mainstream of contemporary psychiatry, he
soon found loyal recruits. They met weekly to hash out interesting case histories, converting
themselves into the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1908. Working on the frontiers of mental
science, these often eccentric pioneers had their quarrels. The two best known "defectors" were
Alfred Adler and Carl Jung. Adler, a Viennese physician and socialist, developed his own
psychology, which stressed the aggression with which those people lacking in some quality they
desire--say, manliness--express their discontent by acting out. "Inferiority complex," a much
abused term, is Adlerian. Freud did not regret losing Adler, but Jung was something else. Freud
was aware that most of his acolytes were Jews, and he did not want to turn psychoanalysis into a
"Jewish science." Jung, a Swiss from a pious Protestant background, struck Freud as his logical
successor, his "crown prince." The two men were close for several years, but Jung's ambition,
and his growing commitment to religion and mysticism--most unwelcome to Freud, an
aggressive atheist--finally drove them apart.

Freud was intent not merely on originating a sweeping theory of mental functioning and
malfunctioning. He also wanted to develop the rules of psychoanalytic therapy and expand his
picture of human nature to encompass not just the couch but the whole culture. As to the first, he
created the largely silent listener who encourages the analysand to say whatever comes to mind,
no matter how foolish, repetitive or outrageous, and who intervenes occasionally to interpret
what the patient on the couch is struggling to say. While some adventurous early psychoanalysts
thought they could quantify just what proportion of their analysands went away cured, improved
or untouched by analytic therapy, such confident enumerations have more recently shown
themselves untenable. The efficacy of analysis remains a matter of controversy, though the
possibility of mixing psychoanalysis and drug therapy is gaining support.

Freud's ventures into culture--history, anthropology, literature, art, sociology, the study of
religion--have proved little less controversial, though they retain their fascination and plausibility
and continue to enjoy a widespread reputation. As a loyal follower of 19th century positivists,
Freud drew a sharp distinction between religious faith (which is not checkable or correctable)
and scientific inquiry (which is both). For himself, this meant the denial of truth-value to any
religion whatever, including Judaism. As for politics, he left little doubt and said so plainly in his
late--and still best known--essay, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), noting that the human
animal, with its insatiable needs, must always remain an enemy to organized society, which
exists largely to tamp down sexual and aggressive desires. At best, civilized living is a
compromise between wishes and repression--not a comfortable doctrine. It ensures that Freud,
taken straight, will never become truly popular, even if today we all speak Freud.

In mid-March 1938, when Freud was 81, the Nazis took over Austria, and after some reluctance,
he immigrated to England with his wife and his favorite daughter and colleague Anna "to die in
freedom." He got his wish, dying not long after the Nazis unleashed World War II by invading
Poland. Listening to an idealistic broadcaster proclaiming this to be the last war, Freud, his
stoical humor intact, commented wryly, "My last war."

Yale historian Peter Gay's 22 books include Freud: A Life for Our Times.
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,990609,00.html
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. 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." Nevertheless, as psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer, among others,
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 his monumental
treatise on psychology, examined the way Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, Janet, Binet and others
had used the term 'unconscious' and 'subconscious'".[7] Boris Sidis, a Jewish Russian who escaped
to the USA 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.

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."[8] 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.
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 which 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 Ego, super-ego, and id (discussed below). Throughout his career, however, he retained the
descriptive and dynamic conceptions of the unconscious.

Ego, super-ego, and id

Main article: Ego, super-ego, and id

In his later work, Freud proposed that the psyche could be divided into three parts: Ego, super-
ego, and id. Freud discussed this structural model of the mind in the 1920 essay Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, and fully elaborated it in The Ego and The Id (1923), where he developed it
as an alternative to his previous topographic schema (conscious, unconscious, preconscious).

Freud acknowledges that his use of the term Id (or the It) derives from the writings of Georg
Grodeck. It is interesting to note that the term Id appears in the earliest writing of Boris Sidis,
attributed to William James, as early as 1898.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud#The_unconscious
The Id

The Id (Latin, "it" in English, "Es" in the original German) represented primary process thinking
-- our most primitive need gratification type thoughts. The Id, Freud stated, constitutes part of
one's unconscious mind. It acts on primitive instinctual urges (sex, hunger, anger, etc.).

The Superego

The Superego ("?er-ich" in the original German) represented our conscience and counteracted
the Id with moral and ethical thoughts. The Superego, Freud stated, is the moral agent that links
both our conscious and unconscious minds. The Superego stands in opposition to the desires of
the Id. The Superego is itself part of the unconscious mind; it is the internalization of the world
view and norms and mores a child absorbs from parents and peers. As the conscience, it is
knowledge of right and wrong; as world view it is knowledge of what is real.

The Ego

In Freud's view the Ego stands in between the Id and the Superego to balance our primitive needs
and our moral/ethical beliefs. ("Ego" means "I" in Latin; the original German word Freud coined
was "Ich".) He stated that the Ego resides almost entirely in our conscious mind. Relying on
experience, a healthy Ego provides the ability to adapt to reality and interact with the outside
world in a way that accommodates both Id and Superego.

http://www.wacklepedia.com/e/eg/ego__superego_and_id.html