May 6, 1856 September 23, 1939

The harder you try to forget something, the more you think about it unconsciously.

BIOGRAPHY

The Austrian founder of psychoanalysis was born Sigismund Schlomo Freud* in the town of Freiberg (today's Pribor) in the Austro-Hungarian region of Moravia (now in the Czech Republic) on May 6, 1856. His Jewish parents are Kallamon Jacob Freud (his father) and Amalia Nathanson (his mother). Financial difficulties force the Freud family to move to Leipzig, Germany, and soon thereafter to the Austrian capital, settling in Vienna in 1860.
*When Freud turned 21, Freud simplified his first name to Sigmund.

Amalia Nathanson

He always considered himself first and foremost a scientist, endeavoring to extend the compass of human knowledge, and to this end he studied medicine at the medical school at the University of Vienna in 1873. He concentrated initially on biology, and thereafter specializing in neurology. He received his medical degree in 1881, and having become engaged to be married in 1882. He worked as a doctor at Vienna General Hospital and his wife, Martha Bernays, gave him six children after their marriage in 1886.

Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays during Anna, Mathilda, and Sophie their engagement, Wandsbeck, near Ernst, Hamburg, 1885Jean Martin, and Oliver

Freud set up a private practice in the treatment of psychological disorders and toward the close of the last century; he developed his depth psychology or psychoanalysis. In 1885, He worked with Charcot at the Salpetriere Hospital, Paris on hysteria and hypnosis. When he returned to Vienna, Freud experimented with hypnosis but found that its beneficial effects did not last. Later, Freud and his friend and mentor Dr. Josef Breuer introduced him to the case study of a patient known as Anna O.

Charcot demonstrates a case of 'hysteria' c. 1885

Salpetriere Hospital, Paris, France

Working with Breuer, Freud formulated and developed the idea that many neuroses (phobias, hysterical paralysis and pains) had their origins in deeply traumatic experiences which had occurred in the patients past but which were now forgotten hidden from consciousness. The treatment was to enable the patient to recall the experience to consciousness, to confront it in a deep way both intellectually and emotionally, and in thus discharging it, to remove the underlying psychological causes of the neurotic symptoms. This technique, and the theory from which it is derived, was given its classical expression in Studies in Hysteria, jointly published by Freud and Breuer in 1895.

Joseph Breuer

Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O.)

Sigmund Freud

When the first International Psychoanalytical Congress was held at Salzburg in 1908, Freuds importance began to be generally recognized. This was greatly facilitated in 1909, when he was invited to give a course of lectures in the United States, which were to form the basis of his 1916 book Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis.

Freud's lecture at the first Psychoanalytic Congress

Freuds Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis

He was also not averse to critically revising his views, or to making fundamental alterations to his most basic principles when he considered that the scientific evidence demanded itthis was most clearly evidenced by his advancement of a completely new tripartite (id, ego, and super-ego) model of the mind in his 1923 work The Ego and the Id. He was initially greatly heartened by attracting followers of the intellectual caliber of Adler and Jung, and was correspondingly disappointed when they both went on to found rival schools of psychoanalysis but he knew that such disagreement over basic principles had been part of the early development of every new science.

In 1937 the Nazis incorporated Austria as a territory, and Freud, who was Jewish, was forced to leave for England. Freud had been a heavy cigar smoker all his life. In 1939, after his cancer had been deemed inoperable, Freud asked his doctor to help him commit suicide. The doctor administered three separate doses of morphine and after a life of remarkable vigor and creative productivity, Freud died while exiled in England on September 23, 1939. From the very beginning, Freud's theories and practices have been subject to criticism and debate. That is still true today, but there can be no doubt concerning the tremendous influences of all things Freudian on the world.

Sculpture of Sigmund Freud in his museum at Vienna

May 6, 1856 September 23, 1939

Sigmund Freuds Statue in London

PUBLICATIONS BY SIGMUND FREUD

A selected list of Freuds significant works: On Coca, 1887 Studies on Hysteria, 1895 The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 1901 Totem and Taboo, 1913 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920 The Ego and the Id, 1923 Civilization and Its Discontents, 1929 Moses and Monotheism, 1939

PHILOSOPHY

Sigmund Freud taught that you could be angry and not know it. You can also be a philosopher and not know it. And Freud was just that, an unconscious philosopher of the unconscious. As a young man I longed for nothing else than philosophical knowledge, and I am now on the way to satisfy that longing by passing from medicine to psychology.
[Sigmund Freuds letter to a friend expressing his desire to become a philosopher in 1896]

He is a cultural philosopher. He developed psychoanalysis*. His theory of the unconscious is necessary to an understanding of what a human being is. He also discovered human drives. He held that there is a constant tension between man and his surroundings. In particular, there is a tension or conflict, between his drives and needs and the demands of society. According to him, our actions are not always guided by reason, and man is not really such a rational creature. Irrational impulses often determine what we think, what we dream, and what we do. Such irrational impulses can be an expression of basic drives or needs. The human sexual drive, for example, is just as basic as the babys instinct to suckle.
*Psychoanalysis is a description of the human mind in general as well as a therapy for nervous and mental disorders.

He had also seen how numerous forms of neurosis or psychological disorders could be traced back to conflicts during childhood. He gradually developed a type of therapy that we could call the archaeology of the soul*. An archaeologist searches for traces of the distant past by digging through layers of cultural history. In a similar way, the psychoanalyst, with the patients help, can dig deep into the patients mind and bring to light the experiences that have caused the patients psychological disorder, since according to Freud; we store the memory of all our experiences deep inside us.
(By bringing a traumatic experience into the conscious mindand holding it up to the patient, so to speakhe or she can help the patient be done with it, and get well again.)

Layers of The Mind

IdEgo (pleasure principle) a selfish, primitive, childish, Superego it isprinciple) internalized societal and parental (reality the moderator pleasure-oriented part of the personality with no standards of good or bad and right or wrong between the Id and Superego which ability to delay gratification: behavior. seeks compromises to pacify both. Instinctive impulses manifest as primordial desire Even when we are grown up, we retain the The Idofis repressed through social standards echo moral demands and judgments. It imposed childhood seems from as though the worlds moral This creates a psychic conflict part between instinct and expectations have become of us. the force of repression We may repress our desires. That means we He that sexual desires and needs are tryshowed to push them away and forget about them. natural and vital human beings Conscience isfor a component of the superego. Ex. physical contact and body warmth

Freuds description of the human mind

There is a stage for a lifelong conflict between desire and guilt. One of his many women patients, for example, was secretly in love with her brother-in-law. When her sister died of an illness, she thought: Now he is free to marry me! This thought was on course for a frontal collision with her superego, and was so monstrous an idea that she immediately repressed it, Freud tells us. In other words, she buried it deep in her unconscious. The iceberg metaphor is often used to explain the psyche's parts in relation to one another.

The Iceberg Metaphor

Freud concluded that the conscious constitutes only a small part of the human mind. The conscious is like the tip of the iceberg above sea level. Below sea levelor below the threshold of the consciousis the subconscious, or the unconscious that contains our biologically based instincts (Eroslove, libido, or life force and Thanatosdeath force) for the primitive urges for sex and aggression. We dont have all our experiences consciously present all the time. But the kinds of things we have thought or experienced and which we can recall if we put our mind to it, Freud termed the preconscious. He reserved the term unconscious for things we have repressed.
Click to see again The Ice Berg Metaphor

Freud operates with several repressed thoughts that are trying to fight their way up from the unconscious. One is what he called parapraxes slips of the tongue or pen. In other words, we accidentally say or do things that we once tried to repress. These bungled actions can in fact reveal the most intimate secrets. Also, when we project, we transfer the characteristics we are trying to repress in ourselves onto other people.

Free association
In this technique, he let the patient lie in a relaxed position and just talks about whatever came into his or her mindhowever irrelevant, random, unpleasant, or embarrassing it might sound. The idea was to break through the lid or control that had grown over the traumas, because it was these traumas that were causing the patient concern. They are active all the time, just not consciously.
The harder you try to forget something, the more you think about it unconsciously. That is why it is so important to be aware of the signals from the unconscious.

Door between Unconscious and the Conscious Mind

It is actually quite healthy to leave the door ajar between the conscious and the unconscious. If you lock that door you can get mentally sick. A neurotic is just such a person, who uses too much energy trying to keep the unpleasant out of his consciousness. But then suddenly its as if all doors and all drawers fly open. Everything comes tumbling out by itself, and we can find all the words and images we need. This is when we have lifted the lid of the unconscious. We can call it inspiration. It feels as if what we are drawing or writing is coming from some

DREAMS

According to Freud, the royal road to the unconscious is our dreams. Our unconscious tries to communicate with our conscious through dreams. He believed that the dream was a disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish. Dreams consist of two parts: The "manifest" dream and the "latent" dream. The "manifest" dream consists of what the dream appears to be about, the surface meaning. The "latent" dream is the "deeper," more disguised, meaning of the dream. The actual process of converting the latent dream thoughts to the manifest dream aspect was termed by Freud as the dream work.

Other major thinkers have contributed work that grew out of Freud's legacy, while others developed new theories out of opposition to his ideas. Freud is referred as one of the most important thinkers of the last century. While his theories have been the subject of considerable controversy and debate, his impact on psychology, philosophy, therapy, and culture is undeniable.

THE END!

If often he was wrong and at times absurd To us he is no more a person Now but a climate of opinion. W.H. Auden, in "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" (1940)