SIGMUND FREUD LIFE AND THEORY

Sigmund Freud Life and Theory



Sigmund Freud Life and Theory

Introduction

It is not necessary to engage in psychoanalyzing Sigmund Freud in order to understand the social, cultural and historical context in which he did his work, or the ways in which this social background may have influenced him. The Sigmund Freud's own personality affected the origins and developments of psychoanalysis are a truism. However, the consequences of this truism for assessing the intellectual merits of what Freud wrote are irrelevant. Freud's biography is no more, and no less important to understanding the development and the contribution he made to social thought than the biography of any other social scientist is to assessing their contributions.

Sigmund Freud was born on 6 May 1856, at Freiberg, Moravia at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The family settled in Vienna in 1860, where Freud went to school. In 1873, he went to the University of Vienna to study medicine. He received his degree in medicine, having specialized in anatomy and physiology, in 1881. Between 1884 and 1887, Freud was interested in the clinical uses of cocaine, and was appointed as a lecturer at the University, in neuropathology. He went to study in Paris on October 1885, where he studies under Charcot at the Salpetriere, a hospital for nervous diseases.

After Freud returned from Paris in 1886 he did all his valuable work in developing psychoanalysis, both clinically, and as a more general social theory, in Vienna. The trip to Paris has been important to Freud in shifting his primary concern from academic to clinical research. In particular hypnotism, which involved talking, to patients, observing them, interacting with them and not just examining drugged or dead bodies of animals or humans, became important. On returning to Vienna, he set up as a private clinical practitioner, specializing in nervous disease, as he needed money than he could obtain as a researcher in the university if he was to marry and raise a family. Freud was always conscious of his Jewish background, and antisemitism. His initial support and enthusiasm was to take psychoanalysis in to the wider world of European culture.

This paper discusses the life and theory of Sigmund Freud.

Discussion

The twentieth century is known as the Freudian century, and whatever the twenty-first century chooses to believe about the workings of the human mind, it will be, on some level, indebted to Freud. Freud's theory, psychoanalysis, suggested new ways of understanding, of other things, hate, love, family relations, childhood, religion, civilization, fantasy, sexuality and the conflicting emotions that make our daily lives. Today we all live in the shadow of Freud's controversial and innovative concepts. In their scope and subsequent impact Freud's writings embody a core of ideas that amount to more than the beliefs of a solitary thinker. Rather, they function like myths for our culture. He presented a way of looking at the world that has been powerfully transformative. (Lohmann, 1998)

Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is a method which explores the unconscious meaning of the ...