Sigmund Freud

’s Essay, Research Paper

Sigmund Freud’s revolutionary ideas have set the standard for modern psychoanalysis that students of psychology can learn from, and his ideas spread from the field of medicine to daily living. His studies in areas such as unconsciousness, dreams, sexuality, the Oedipus complex, and sexual maladjustments laid the foundation for future studies and a better understanding of the small things that shape our lives. In 1873 Freud graduated from the Sperl Gymnasium and, inspired by a public reading of an essay on nature by Goethe, Freud decided to turn to medicine as a career(Gay, 10). He worked at the University of Vienna with one of the leading physiologists of his day, Ernst von Brucke, and in 1882 he entered the General Hospital in Vienna as a clinical assistant. After making several conclusions about the brain’s medulla, Freud was appointed lecturer in neuropathology. At this same time in Freud’s career, he developed an interest in the medical uses and benefits of cocaine(Britannica, 582). Even though some beneficial results were found in some forms of eye surgery, cocaine use was generally denied by the surgeons of his time. This interest in the narcotic hurt Freud’s medical reputation for a time. This episode in Freud’s life has beenlooked at as an example of his “willingness to attempt bold solutions to relieve human suffering(Wittels,98).” From 1885 to 1886 Freud spent nineteen weeks with Jean Martin Charcot, a world famous neurologist and the director of a Paris asylum. It was Charcot that first introduced Freud to the idea of hysteria and hysterics. Freud became intrigued by the idea of hypnotism as a method of therapy, but he was told that only hysterics could be treated with hypnotism(Appignanesi, 34). There was a firm belief that only women could be hysteric and that no man or non-hysteric woman could be affected by the use of hypnotism. Freud knew that hysteria could only develop where there is a degeneration of the brain, not just with women but with men too and that hypnotism could have an effect on normal people. Freud lost his interest in hysteria and hypnotism, but developed a liking of the psychoanalytic method of free association. This method encouraged the patient to express any random thoughts that came to the mind, which promoted a “stream of consciousness” that helped tap into the unconsciousness. The material that the patient said in this stream of consciousness was a link to the ideas of the unconscious mind that was normally hidden, forgotten or “unavailable to conscious reflection”(Freud, 47). Unlike his companion Charcot, Freud believed that based on his clinical studies, some mental disorders like hysteria were based on sexual manner. For example, Freud linked “the etiology of neurotic symptoms to the same struggle between a sexual feeling or urge and the psychic defenses against it.(Gay, 536)” He felt that being able to talk about such problems were crucial in helping the patient and using free association was the best way to confront and treat these feelings. After the death of Freud’s father in 1899, Freud decided on analyzing the last words of his father that seemed to have touched Freud. This led to an interest in the analyzation of dreams which were what Freud called “the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious”(Britannica, 585). Published in 1899, The Interpretation of Dreams which is considered his master work, Freud presented his findings. In the book, Freud used his own dreams and the dreams of some of his clinical patients as evidence and he concluded that dreams played a fundamental role in a person’s psyche. Freud called the mind’s energy the libido which was related directly to one’s sexual drive. This libido usesdreams in order to purge pleasurable or painful feelings as an outlet (Appignanesi, 64). According to Freud, all dreams, including nightmares, are outlets of this libido energy. In order to understand and fully interpret dreams, Freud devised a fourpoint system that is used to interpret dreams: The first point is called condensation, which operates through the fusion of several different ideas or elements into one vision. The second point, called displacement, involves substitution of one thing for another such as a king and a father. The third point, called representation, involves the transformation of thoughts into images. The final point involves looking at the dream from a different perspective and recollecting the thoughts in a conscious state(Wittels, 211). In 1904 Sigmund Freud published the book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life which explored everyday errors in speech which he believed were of interpretable importance. These “Freudian slip’s” were unlike dreams in the sense that they can arise from immediate hostile, jealous, or egotistic causes.

Just one year after publishing his book on psychopathology in everyday situations, Freud published Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. In this book, Freud compared jokes to dreams in the sense that like dreams, jokes had a double sided meaning. What he meant by this was that jokes were formed in the conscious, but had a base in the unconscious mind. In addition to publishing a book on jokes in 1905, Freud published Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. This book established Freud and some of his associates Richard von Kraft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Albert Moll, and Iwan Bloch as the “pioneering experts of sexology.”(Gay, 613) Sexual d