FREUD'S CLASSICAL PSYCHOANALYSIS

Sigmund Freud's Classical Psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud's Classical Psychoanalysis

Introduction

Biographical Sketch

Sigmund Freud was born on 6 May, 1856. Son of Jewish parents, he was born in Freiberg (Moravia), where his father was a resident and a businessman. The family moved to Vienna in 1860, where Freud lived and worked until the occupation of Austria by Hitler in 1938. He attended high school, studied medicine and worked as an assistant in the physiological laboratory of Professor Ernst Brücke from 1876 - 1882, where he dealt primarily with the nervous system of lower species.

He then served as physician at the General Hospital, but continued his research - in particular on the central nervous system of humans. In 1885 he went to Paris to work with Professor Charcot, the first man in the field of neurology. Freud returned to Vienna in 1886 and set up a facility where he started his physician practice as well as research work on psychoanalysis.

In Vienna, Freud gathered a circle of interested physicians and started the psychoanalytic movement with them and in collaboration with Bleuler and CG Jung in Zurich,. He had a long fight for recognition of their scientific research and developed also strong authoritarian, sometimes even fanatical traits. His writings, however, are characterized by detached scientific objectivity and a classical language. After the occupation of Austria by Hitler, he immigrated to London, where he died in 1939 (Valencia, 2000, pp. 233-233).

Freud's Classical Psychoanalysis

At the end of the nineteenth century, there is a breakthrough in research into the growing field of science - psychology. During this time period, Sigmund Freud formulated his revolutionary theory, which was a task to explain the pathological behaviour of patients. On this basis, Freud developed a form of psychotherapy treatment for emotional disorders, which was subsequently called the Freudian psychoanalysis. At the core of psychoanalysis lay desire to know the psychic structure of man, the desire to explore the development and functioning of his personality, as well as cultural and social phenomena that are the product of his consciousness of action and having an influence on it (Frosh, 2004, pp. 309-30).

Freud started with the idea that the ancestral human development is essential in an individual development that is a consequence of a constant problem of choosing between impulses and behaviour, which are imposed by culture. Psychoanalysis has been, thus, aimed at contributing to a better knowledge and understanding of human behaviour. Freud believed that human behaviour is guided by the sexual instincts that dominate the behaviour in the first few years of life. It's the parents and the society from which the person learns how to control them. According to Freud, the fact that children learn that innate instincts are wrong leads to a strong concern in life and thus to suppress these instincts in the psyche.

Repressed thoughts and feelings are in our subconscious and embody in the form of irrational behaviour, from the seemingly meaningless, forgetting, of switching to the obvious symptoms of mental ...