Who is Sigmund Freud? What are they great Works?
Sigmund Freud was a famous neurologist and psychiatrist was born on May 16, 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia (now Czech Republic) to Jewish parents. His father a was a wool merchant. His family moved to Vienna, Austria when Freud was 4 years old. He spent his whole life there.
In 1873 he became a student of medical school in the University of Vienna. He was interested in the study of science and human psychology. He obtained his degree in medicine in 1881. Later he served as an intern and resident physician in a hospital.
He specialized in neurology and psychopathology. In 1885 he was given a fellowship for a year’s study in Paris. There he studied under Jean-Martin Charcot, a famous authority on hysteria.
The Father of psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis opened a new window on human psyche and reveled and the mysteries of the unconscious. Unconscious is the totality of psychic processes, acts and states conditioned by realities of which the individual is unaware of.
It is the region of the psyche containing pleasant and threatening urges and impulses. It is the unconscious, the battle ground where various impulses and urges like anger, passion, lust, greed, repression etc. battle for supremacy and dominance.
Freud’s deep studies into the unconscious and sexual urges helped thousands of people whose mental depression and distress had long had been without any help, cure and understanding. It was Freud who as great psychiatrist unconscious biological drives as the source of human behavior.
It was he who influenced most of the mind of the people of his time. Freudianism, a trend name after him, explains a personality’s development and structure by irrational oneness. It uses psychotherapy based on these.
Truth behind of Neurosis, Oedipus complex, the Interpretation of Dream
Sigmund tried to analysis the unconscious mind of his patients in terms of competing forces- the ego, the super ego and the id. He diagnosed phobias, hysteria, obsession, suppression etc. in his patients and gave them a common name of neurosis- the result of suppression of urges and thoughts considered unsocial and unacceptable.
Freud began in practice in Vienna in 1886 as a psychiatrist and neurologist. The case histories of his patients made him conclude that sexual suppression ad problems were the main cause of many forms of neurosis. He worked out a theory known as the Oedipus complex.
It is a Freudian concept basted on complex of ideas and urges chiefly unconscious arising in early childhood involving a sexual drive towards a parent of the opposite sex and the desire to physically eliminate the parent of the same sex. He fully described it in one of his important works entitled- The Interpretation of Dream (1899.)
How Sigmund Treated with Their Patients
Freud found hypnosis inadequate in treating his patients and adopted the methods of “free association”, urging his patients to express their feelings and thoughts in a state of relaxed consciousness.
He developed this psychoanalytic technique and asked the patients to tell everything that came into their mind. He also argued that dreams are disguised manifestations of suppressed and unfulfilled sexual desires and dealt with the subject in his famous book “The interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung)”. He looked into dreams of his patients and analyzed them which he thought offered definite clues to the working of the unconscious mind.
Theories of Sexuality, Psychoanalytical Association, Alfred Adler and Carl Jung
Three Essays on the theory of Sexuality (1905) was his another major work. In 1902 he had become a professor in Vienna and had many disciples. With his disciples he set up the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society in 1908 and later founded international Psychoanalytical Association in 1910.
The two best known of his associates were Alfred Adler and Carl Jung. But by 1911 differences grew bitter among them and the society began to fall apart. Later they both became his strong rivals and developed their own theories and techniques of psychoanalysis.
Achievements and Hitler Dictatorship in Sigmund Life’s
He was awarded Goethe Prize in recognition of his services in the field of psychoanalysis which was mainly based on study of the unconscious through the analysis of free association and interpretation of dreams.
In 1933 Hitler banned psycho analysis and invaded Austria in 1938. The Nazis burned his books and banned his theories. After Austria had fallen to Hitler, Freud and his family were taken out of Vienna to England. He settled in Hemptead, London and died there on September 23, 1939 of the Jaw and Palate Cancer.