Sigmund+Freud

Jonel Metaj


 * Sigmund Freud**

__**Early Life and Career**__

Sigmund Freud was born on May 6, 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia (now the Czech Republic). His family moved to Vienna, Austria when he was four years old. Freud thrived in eleme ntary school. He was a very ambitious and opinionated young boy. At the age of seventeen, he qualified to enter the University of Vienna after doing extremely well on his high school final examinations. “His parents saw the great potential in their son and gave him his own room to study even though his family consisted of eight people living in a four bedroom home” (Gay, 1988).

At the age of twenty-four, Freud received his doctorate in medicine. He did his residency in // Allgemeine Krankenhaus //, a general hospital in Vienna. There he became consumed with his research in neurology and towards the end of his residency in 1885, he decided to go abroad to Paris to study under Jean Martin Charcot, a famous French neurologists studying patients with hysteria. Doctor Charcot believed that hysteria could be cured without the use of medication. He believed in using psychological methods to help patients overcome this illness. This is where Freud first began to develop his theory of the unconscious and the role it plays in our daily lives. Freud believed that most of the issues that lead to psychological illness such as hysteria are rooted in the unconscious and the only way to resolve these problems is to make the patient aware of these unconscious issues. Upon returning to Vienna, Freud opened a clinic in which he developed a new way of treating patients; listening. This was the beginning of psychoanalysis (Gay, 1988).

__**Psychoanalysis**__

Sigmund Freud is considered the father of psychoanalysis. Freud explained that the human mind contains a conscious level and an unconscious level. We cannot actively reach thoughts and ideas in the unconscious level however; Freud believed that “human behavior is explicable only in terms of the (usually hidden) mental processes or states which determine it” (Thornton, 2010). Freud explained that our unconscious wishes and desires are what drive our behaviors and they are largely responsible for mental illness such as hysteria. Psychoanalysis consists of a patient freely talking to a therapist about their life and past memories. The therapist tries to investigate the mind of the patient while helping them recover past memories that are stored deep in the unconscious. Freud believed that, “through talking, the patient could bring repressed [unconscious] thoughts to the surface, and this way they can confront them” (Sternberg, 2007). According to Freud, this was the best way to be able to reduces anxiety and relieve the symptoms of hysteria caused by repressed thoughts and memories. Medication is not required.

Freud explained the mind using the image of an iceberg. The very tiny bit of mass that we see above the water is the conscious mind. The majority of an iceberg sits below the water and this is our unconscious mind. Freud believed that the unconscious mind houses all of our sexual desires and urges as well as painful memories from the past that would be debilitating if we consciously remembered them. This was a radical new form of treatment that was met with scorn in Austria. Critics saw his therapy as radical and unscientific. Freud practiced psychoanalysis during the Victorian age in Austria. This was a very puritanical society where “any expression of human sexuality was considered an outrage and respectable women only went to their doctors with a chaperone” (Sternberg, 2007). Freud challenged this view of society with psychoanalysis because patients in his office were able to discuss anything they wanted. No topic was taboo. He encouraged his patients to speak freely and this led to many patients bringing up past memories from childhood that involved molestation. This led Freud to mistakenly attribute hysteria to sexual abuse in childhood. Although this finding was not accurate, it led to a brand new form of science which is still helping patients today.

Although very controversial, Freud’s approach in psychoanalysis helped open up doors for communication between a patient and a therapist. This included sexual communication because for the first time, people were able to talk to someone about their sexual wishes and desires and also about painful sexual memories from the past. This was never before seen in and Freud dealt with a lot of criticism. Freud’s critics saw him as a sex obsessed individual and wanted to give him no credit for his work. Regardless of their claims, Freud was a pioneer in the work of psychoanalysis showing that not all mental disorders stem from physiological causes. His work with psychoanalysis was groundbreaking and it led to open communication about all topics including sex which was seen as something to never be discussed in the late 1800’s.

__**Psychosexual Stages of Development**__

Perhaps one of the most controversial theories proposed by Freud is the Psychosexual Stages of Development. Freud believed the sex drive is the most important motivating force in humans. Not only did he believe that it was the primary motivating force for adults, he also believed it to be a primary motivator for infants. Freud believed that infants are very sexual beings. He came up with his Psychosexual Stages of Development to describe the five pleasure seeking stages that humans go through from birth to death (oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital) (Stevenson, 2001). He stated that through each stage, humans focus their pleasure on a certain erogenous zones and if a child does not complete a stage properly, (if he/she experiences anxiety in any one of the stages) then that child will not grow up to be a well adjusted adult. The anxiety faced will manifest into a mental disorder or neurosis (Boeree, 2009).


 * 1) **Oral Stage (birth – 18 months):** This is the stage where an infant gets the most pleasure from breast feeding and bring foreign objects into contact with the mouth. Future implications regarding personality and attitudes toward sex depend on whether the infant was breast-fed too much or not enough.
 * 2) **Anal Stage (18 months – 3 years):** This is the stage where infants find pleasure in holding in or releasing their bowels. Future implications for personality depend on whether the infant finds pleasure from holding in or pleasure from releasing.
 * 3) **Phallic Stage (3 years – 6 years):** The area of focus is on the genitals. We get pleasure from playing with our genitals. It is also the stage where boys and girls discover differences between sexes. It is in this stage that Freud proposed his very controversial Oedipus complex. The Oedipus complex says that at this age, boys develop a strong love and attachment for their mothers and see their fathers as a rival in competition for her love. This was very controversial because Freud claimed that all men have a deep desire to sleep with their mothers and kill their fathers that begins early in life.
 * 4) **Latency Stage (6 years – puberty):** This is the time where Freud proposed that sexual desires are dormant and children focus this energy on asexual activities such as sports, school, and same-sex relationships. This lasts until they hit puberty and they refocus their energy on the pleasure they get through genitals; specifically through sexual intercourse.
 * 5) **Genital Stage (puberty – death):** In this stage, humans get the most pleasure from sexual intercourse. This is the stage where humans have developed sexually and depending on whether they developed normally in the other stages, they will have a well developed personality.

According to Freud, “how the child responds in each stage will form their personality as an adult as well as their attitudes towards sex and their emotional reactions to sex” (Boeree, 2009). Freud was able to link his stages of development to his new science of psychoanalysis because unresolved conflicts in the developing stages manifest to mental disorders that are rooted in the unconscious. Freud believed that having his patients talk about their past, they will be able to bring up those painful childhood sexual memories to the surface and be able to resolve their disorder.

It is clear to see that communication about infants as sexual beings is very controversial. People living in the Victorian age were “hardly prepared to talk about sexuality in adults, much less in infant” ( Beystenhner, 1998). Freud was the first to talk about sex openly in a society that scorned it. He showed that sex is our most basic drive, after hunger, and we find a lot of pleasure in it; however it can cause a lot of unresolved issues as a child that manifest into mental disorders into adulthood. The best way to resolve those issues, according to Freud, is to have open communication with a therapist, regardless of how controversial the topic is.

__**References**__

Beystenhner, K. M. (1998, August). Psychoanalysis: Freud's revolutionary approach to human personality. In // Personality Papers //. Retrieved April 09, 2011, from []

Boeree, G.C. (2009). Persoanality Theories: Sigmund Freud. Retrieved April 09, 2011 from []

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

Sternberg, A. (Producer). Parsons, J. (Narrator). (2007). //Sigmund Freud: Explaining the unconsciou// [Online video]. Lucas Films. Retrieved April 11, 2011

Stevenson, D. B. (1992, May 27). Freud's psychosexual stages of development. In The Victorian web. Retrieved April 9, 2011, from http://www.victorianweb.org/science/freud/develop.html

Thornton, S. P. (2010, December 29). Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). In // Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy //. Retrieved April 10, 2011, from []

Vidani, P. Freud’s Mental Iceberg [Online Image]. Retrieved April 09, 2011, from []