Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was an Austrian psychiatrist and originator of psychoanalysis, born of Jewish parents in Freiburg, Moravia. Brought to Vienna at the age of four, he remained there—except for brief intervals devoted to study, lecturing, and conferences elsewhere—until 1938. That year, Freud, by then in his 80's, moved to London, the Nazis having annexed Austria as part of the Third Reich and confiscated most of Freud's belongings. He might have been placed in a concentration camp or killed had not the intercession of prominent persons in England, France, and the United States enabled him to leave Nazi territory.Having graduated from the medical school at the University of Vienna, studied physiology at Vienna's General Hospital, and shared in the discovery of the anesthetic properties of cocaine, Freud might have devoted his life to the practice of medicine if he had not come under the influence of Charcot, the great French neuropsychiatrist. Returning to Vienna in 1886 after a year's study under Charcot at the Salpétriére Hospital in Paris, he became a
general practitioner of medicine but specialized in neuropathology. Shortly thereafter he became greatly interested in a case of hysteria in a young girl being treated by Josef Breuer. The temporary relief effected through catharsis, or hypnotizing the girl and persuading her while under hypnosis to recall the circumstances under which her symptoms of hysteria originated, impressed Freud tremendously. It led Freud to investigate and think through closely the problem of hysteria, and in 1895, in collaboration with Breuer, he published in German a book which years later was brought out in English under the title Selected Papers on Hysteria.
Because catharsis brought only temporary relief, Freud delved deeper in search of some means of effecting permanent relief from or the permanent cure of mental ailments and personality disturbances. He found that personality disturbance, though occasioned by some sharp conflict in later Ufe, is rooted in an early experience connected with sex during infancy. Noting the basic role which repression plays in causing personality disturbance or psychoneurosis, he studied its manner of functioning very closely. As a result he divided the mind into three subdivisions: the conscious, the unconscious, and the preconscious.
To carry his system of therapy beyond catharsis, he evolved psychoanalysis. To describe how psychoanalysis works, he first explained that a psychoneurosis comes into being as follows: A person discovers that he has a deep-seated wish, a wish related to something experienced or desired in childhood. Experienced in the conscious mind, it is "ejected with strong repulsion by what Freud later named the super-ego (partly conscious, partly unconscious), or the conscience, as unworthy or immoral. The result is that it is repressed into the unconscious, whence it causes morbid physical and mental symptoms, which often cause a general disturbance of the personality.
The cure of such ailments, when brought about through psychoanalysis, Freud explained, is effected largely through free association. That is, the afflicted one is given ampie opportunity to talk freely. After a time, he draws back into the conscious mind what has been repressed into the unconscious. Then, through the interpretation of his dreams and other similar means, he is helped to examine the repressed wish rationally in the conscious mind and to view it realistically, thus eliminating the focal point of morbid behavior or the psychoneurosis.
Incidental to all this was Freud's eventual explanation of the role of the unconscious in, and its relationship to, "normal" behavior, art, religion, mythology, literature, folkways, anthropology, language, wit and humor, dreams. The publication in 1900 of his book Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) marked the end of his career as a physician and the beginning of his broadened and intensified activity as an uncompromising prober of the unconscious and human conduct in general.
In 1906 a number of distinguished psychiatrists joined Freud as colleagues, notably Alfred Adler, A. A. Brill, Sandor Ferenczi, Ernest Jones, Carl G. Jung, and Wilhelm Stekel. They met at the first International Congress of Psychoanalysis, which subsequently became a biennial institution. Later, Adler broke with Freud to found individual psychology, and Jung broke with Freud to found analytical psychology. Both of them maintained that Freud over-emphasized the sexual instinct as compared with other factors in human life. About two years after the first International Congress, an international association of psychoanalysts was formed. It has or has had branches in most countries of the world. Freud visited the United States in 1909 and delivered a number of noteworthy lectures in this country. In 1930 the city of Frankfort awarded him the Goethe prize, then regarded as Germany's supreme scientific and literary honor. In 1936 he was made a member of the Royal Society of London.
Influence of Freud. Freud's theories, findings, and deductions aroused strong opposition and ridicule from the beginning. Gradually, however, they won respectful recognition and found adherents even in old, conservative universities, institutions for the mentally ill, and among old-school psychologists and medical men. The ever-growing popularity of psychosomatic medicine is in large part due to the influence of psychoanalysis and such related schools of thought and therapy as individual psychology and analytical psychology.
Freudian psychology and psychiatry, Freudian concepts of the basic elements in human conduct, religion, art, love, and family relations are still regarded as fantastic in many quarters. Nevertheless, new adherents continue to be won for Freudianism and new books continue to be written about the influence of Freudian ideas, not alone in psychiatry, psychology, and medicine, but also in literature, art, anthropology, social thinking. Thomas Mann, for example, has hailed Freud as a "natural scientist," a great writer, an intellectual force of top importance. He has made much of the fact that many Freudian findings were anticipated intuitively by Schopenhauer. Others have made much of similar anticipations in the works of writers so different from Schopenhauer and each other as Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Shakespeare, and authors of books of the Bible.
