Sigmund_Freud

SIGMUND FREUD (1856-1939) Introduction Sigmund Freud was an Austrian physician and neurologist who’s best known for being the founder of psychoanalysis. Because of his combined skills as a scientist, physician and writer, he was able to come up with a major theory of psychology by merging ideas predominant during his time with his own observation in addition to his study. Most importantly he employed his ideas to medical practice for the treatment of mental illness. His treatment of human dreams, actions and of cultural artifacts as being implicitly symbolic has had considerable implications in many fields. However, his most important claim, that he had invented the science of mind with psychoanalysis, is the subject of critical debate. Background Freud was born on May 6, 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia to Jewish parents. His father, a man with a keen mind and a good sense of humor, was a wool merchant. His mother was her husband’s second wife and Freud was the first of their eight children. At the age of four, his family moved to Leipzig before finally settling in Vienna where he’d live until 1938 when the Germans annexed it. Although as a child Freud’s ambition had been a career in law he decided to take up medicine shortly before he joined Vienna University (1983). In his third year of study under the directions of German physician Ernst Wilhelm Von Brucke, he began research work on the central nervous system. He would become so absorbed in his work that he neglected his course work causing him to graduate three years late. He graduated in 1881 and remained in the university working in the physiology laboratory. At Brucke’s urging he then spent three years at the General Hospital of Vienna where he devoted himself to psychiatry, dermatology and neurology. In 1885, he received a government grant that allowed him to spend nineteen weeks in Paris working with French neurologist Jean Charcot. Charcot was at the time trying to understand and treat hysteria and other mental conditions with hypnosis. When he went back to Vienna, Freud began a private practice in neuropsychiatry where on experimentation he found that the beneficial effects of hypnosis did not last. He then worked with Josef Breuer, a Viennese doctor involved in the treatment of a young hysterical woman who after initial success with hypnosis gave way to disappointment. They realized that on talking to the woman about various reminiscences from the past her symptoms disappeared gradually. This led Freud to believe that many neuroses originated from emotionally charged events in past of the patient. In 1900 after he’d spent a period in self analysis, he published what is considered his greatest work, The Interpretation of Dreams. This was followed by The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1901 and 1905 respectively. His theory was not well received and it was not until 1908 that his importance began to be recognized. After a very productive life he died of cancer in 1939 while exiled in England. Theory of psychoanalysis Freud believed that the mind could be divided in two: the conscious and the unconscious. The conscious mind is what you are aware of at any particular instant. It also includes what he called the preconscious which he described as anything that you are not presently thinking of but that can be summoned to mind. He considered the unconscious to be the largest part where all things are not easily accessible. These include our instincts and drives along with memories and emotions associated with traumatic experiences. According to Freud, our urges e.g. the desire for food, neurotic compulsions or our behavior comes from the unconscious mind. For psychoanalysis, the unconscious includes that which is actively repressed from conscious thought. The laws of logic do not apply to unconscious mental productions meaning that images of certain objects may symbolically represent other objects. With this knowledge, therapists can therefore “tap into” and “interpret” the unconscious mind through special methods such as random association, meditation, dream analysis and verbal slips (commonly referred to as Freudian slips) which are conducted during psychoanalysis. He identified three functional systems designated as the id, ego and superego. The id operates in keeping with the pleasure principle i.e. a necessity to take care of needs immediately. The ego on the other hand operates according to the reality principle which demands that a need is taken care of as soon as an appropriate object is found. Thus it looks for objects to satisfy wishes the id has created. The superego works to control the ego compliant with the internalized standards of parental figures. It originates in the struggle to curb the Oedipal conflict and thus has power like an instinctual drive and can elicit guilt that’s unjustifiable by conscious offense. The ego has to mediate the between the demands of the id, the superego and the outside world and if it’s not strong enough to reconcile them it may succumb to the pressures. It can thus maintain its limited integrity at the price of symptom formation which manifests as neurotic symptoms. The concept of anxiety which institutes suitable defense mechanisms against danger situations is a cornerstone of prevailing psychoanalytic practice. Freud describes the danger situations as: fear of abandonment, loss of a loved one, hazard of retaliation and threat of reproach by the superego. Therefore, symptom formation, perversions, sublimations and character and impulse disorders represent forms of adaptive integration by the ego to reconcile conflicting forces in the head. Discussion Psychoanalysis with credit to Freud has exerted strong influence upon popular imagination and also been subject to a great deal of controversy. The criticism ranges from the contentions that Freud’s theory was generated due to logical disorder arising from his long standing use of cocaine (Cf. Thornton, E.M. Freud and Cocaine: The Freudian Fallacy) to the view that he made an empirical discovery that he concealed in favor of the less acceptable theory of unconscious mind (Cf. Masson, J. The Assault on Truth). However, we will stick to: evaluating Freud’s claim that his theory was scientific in nature, the coherence of the theory, and the efficacy and strengths of psychoanalysis in the treatment of neurotic illnesses. Freud not only viewed himself as a pioneering scientist he also asserted that the significance of psychoanalysis was that it was a new science that incorporated new scientific methods of getting to grips with the mind and mental illnesses. Karl Pooper’s criterion of demarcation is generally accepted as a means of proving that a theory is scientific in nature. The criterion proposes that genuine scientific theories must be testable and therefore falsifiable, at least in principle. Freud’s theory is seen to be compatible with every possible state of affairs; it therefore cannot be falsified since it asserts to explain everything. This leads one to conclude that the theory is not scientific, this does not however rob it of its value but it does diminish its intellectual status. The coherence of Freud’s theory can at the very least be said to be questionable. The proposition that neurosis are caused by unconscious conflicts that are buried deep within the unconscious mind in the form of repressed libidinal energy appears to offer a causal mechanism underlying the abnormal mental conditions as they are expressed in human behavior. However, this is questionable in that the theory offers entities said to be the unobservable causes of particular forms of behavior but fails to give correspondence rules for these alleged causes. This means that that the two, cause and behavioral effect, are not independently identifiable. This causes doubt on Freud’s explanations. Even though the efficacy of psychoanalysis as a way of treatment of mental disorders is still a controversial issue, it is evident that most therapy is still “the talking cure” that Freud and Breuer used combined with a calm and relaxed atmosphere. Theorists might not agree with transference but the personal nature of the therapy is accepted to be important for success. His theory’s proposal that all neuroses were as a cause of repressed psychological trauma may not hold in totality but it is evident that it may be true for some cases. In conclusion, it’s clear that some of Freud’s ideas may be tied to his era and culture. His other ideas may not be testable. But there is no doubt that Freud was a keen observer of the human condition and his findings on the human psyche have relevance to date and have greatly helped other theorists and will continue to do so. References Gay, Peters (1988). Freud: A Life for Our Time. Pp 65-76 Thornton, E.M. (1983). Freud and Cocaine: The Freudian Fallacy Sulloway, F. (1979). Biologist of the Mind.