Sigmund Freud

Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939)

Sigmund Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis, was born in Moravia, Czechoslovakia, in 1856. His family moved to Vienna in 1860, where Freud remained until forced to flee to Britain in the aftermath of the 1938 Anschluss. Freud published his first work of psychoanalysis, Studies in Hysteria (with Josef Breuer) in 1895, after a career in neurological research and medical practice.

In his 1917 “A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis,” Freud described psychoanalysis as the third great blow to human narcissism. The first was Nicolaus Copernicus's refutation of the centrality of the earth; the second was Charles Darwin's refutation of the centrality of mankind to creation. The third was Freud's discovery that people were not even central to their own mental processes: The mind cannot be equated with consciousness because most mental functioning occurs unconsciously. Against philosophical and psychological orthodoxy, Freud insisted that consciousness occurs only in part of the mind—what Freud termed 'das Ich' (usually translated as the ego) which only ever attains “incomplete and untrustworthy perceptions” of unconscious mental processes. Thus, the conscious, rational ego is “not master in its own house,” a fact for Freud that both summarized the enormity of his discovery and explained why so many people were unwilling to accept it. Despite such resistance, psychoanalysis became one of the most influential psychological schools of the twentieth century.

Conflict and Repression

From its conception, psychoanalysis is a theory of psychic conflict. Studies in Hysteria were groundbreaking in attributing hysterical symptoms (a range of conditions like fainting fits, paralysis, and fugue states), not to inherited biological defects, but to psychological conflict between a person's unconscious sexual drives and his or her cultural and ethical ideals. Freud introduced “repression” as they attempt to repel from consciousness the thoughts and memories connected to such intolerable drives. The hysterical symptom emerges as a defense against the return of repressed desire; it is a “compromise formation” that allows both the desire's expression and its repudiation at once. Freud proposed that these symptoms are relieved if the unconscious conflict at the source of a symptom is made conscious. This relief was achieved through new techniques of listening to patients that were alert to symbolic meanings within symptomatic complaints. It was a “talking cure,” as one of the patients in Studies in Hysteria, “Anna O,” succinctly dubbed it.

Dreams and Two Principles of Mental Functioning

Freud's 1900 Interpretation of Dreams launched the psychoanalytic theory of mind. Freud's theory of dream interpretation demonstrates continual conflict between the unconscious sexual drives and the conscious ego's resistance to them. A dream is a symbolic representation of the dreamer's unconscious desire, rooted in repressed infantile sexuality. Freud's method did not employ universal symbols, but stressed rather the contingency and specificity of dreaming to the life of the dreamer; it is less concerned with the promulgation of a methodology by which the truth of all dreams is discovered, than with exploration of the unconscious processes by which the mind works. Chapter 7 of the Interpretation introduces Freud's ...