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Sigmund Freud | |
|---|---|
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| Born | Sigismund Schlomo Freud 6 May 1856 Příbor, Austrian Empire |
| Died | 23 September 1939 (aged 83) London, England, United Kingdom |
| School tradition | Psychoanalysis |
| Nationality | Austrian |
Sigmund Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was a Jewish-Austrian neurologist and the founder of the idealist pseudoscience of psychoanalysis. He tried to generalize his observations of bourgeois families to all of humanity across all time periods.[1]
Freud popularized the idea that our behaviour is largely driven by thoughts, memories, and desires that exist outside our consciousness as opposed to our material conditions and social standing. Most of his theories have largely been debunked and discarded by modern health professionals, though he did popularize words like the ego, Freudian slip, and denial.[2]
Biography[edit | edit source]
Sigmund Freud entered the University of Vienna in Austria at 17 years old in 1873. After graduating from the University of Vienna Medical School, Freud began working as a neurologist and treated patients with mental illnesses. At that time, the quality of psychotherapy was lacking, and Freud began to explore and experiment.[2]
He went on two trips to France in order to study the emergence of hypnosis and suggestion therapy; he gradually came to recognize the lacking nature of the existing methods and became invested in the cathartic therapy his colleague and friend Breuer discovered. Freud continued to practice this and eventually coined the term "psychoanalysis" for this "cathartic therapy."[2]
The publication of "The Interpretation of Dreams" in 1900 marked the birth of psychoanalysis as a discipline.[2]
In 1938, Nazi Germany invaded Austria. Sigmund Freud, a Jew, fled to London with the help of his friends, only to die of jaw cancer a year later which he was diagnosed with in 1923.[2]
Psychology[edit | edit source]
Psychoanalysis is fundamentally idealist, as it posits that the mind is automatic and that human behaviour or neurosis is linked to immutable biological drives, such as Freud's Thanatos concept, in order to explain why people engage in harmful and aggressive behaviour. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud explains that repression and class conflict have little connection to economic or class relations, but rather that innate instincts of a biological character are of greater importance.[3]
He viewed consciousness as a reflection of inner biological drives rather than as a product of the social and material conditions of life that shape consciousness, resulting in subjectivism and idealism. With this preface complete, we now turn to his psychological perspective.[3]
Freud's first two theories were the "unconscious-preconscious-conscious" model and the theory of "other-ego-superego", both being studies of the unconscious structure of one's mind. Later, he developed theories regarding the development and changes of libido, alongside the "life-impulse and death-impulse" (or the Thanatos and Eros impulses), and finally, the concepts of repression, defence, and synthesis.[3]
Freud believed in the classical Euclidean and Newtonian geometry system, which incorrectly states that space is flat, infinite, and independent of time. It assumes that distance and angles are absolute, which might be the reason for the biological determinism evident in his theories.[3]
Freud's ambiguity regarding the nature of libido led to the misunderstanding that he meant pansexualism, since he argued that infants had sexuality and that libidinal energy fueled all human development. This is to be distinguished from modern pansexualism, as Freud or his critics used the term to mean attraction to all things, including objects and children.[3]
Psychoanalysis, since its inception, has not been taken seriously, which left Sigmund Freud unknown for decades. This changed with his visit to the United States in 1909, at the invitation of the president of Clark University; only then did psychoanalysis begin to spread in the English-speaking world. After this visit, he regretted it and referred to it as a gigantic mistake, as he viewed the U.S. negatively following this brief trip, despite its success.[3]