PRESENTATION OUTLINE
1856 to 1939
Lived in Austria and Vienna.
He had more than 30 surgeries to treat mouth cancer.
Sigmund Freud Was Forced to Leave Vienna by the Nazis
Was the oldest of eight children.
Sigmund Freud Was the Founder of Psychoanalysis.
Freud Was Initially an Advocate and User of Cocaine.
explored the human mind more thoroughly than any other who became before him.
His contributions to psychology are vast. Freud was one of the most influential people of the twentieth century and his enduring legacy has influenced not only psychology, but art, literature and even the way people bring up their children.
Freud’s lexicon has become embedded within the vocabulary of western society. Words he introduced through his theories are now used by everyday people, such as anal (personality), libido, denial, repression, cathartic, Freudian slip, and neurotic.
Freud was the founding father of psychoanalysis, a method for treating mental illness and also a theory
Psychoanalysis is often known as the talking cure. Typically Freud would encourage his patient to talk freely (on his famous couch) regarding their symptoms and to describe exactly what was in their mind.
The case of Anna O (real name Bertha Pappenheim) marked a turning point in the career of a young Viennese neuropathologist by the name of Sigmund Freud. It even went on to influence the future direction of psychology as a whole.
Anna suffered from hysteria, a condition in which the patient exhibits physical symptoms (e.g. paralysis, convulsions, hallucinations, loss of speech) without apparent physical cause. Her doctor Josef Breuer succeeded in treating Anna by helping her to recall forgotten memories of traumatic events. Breuer discussed the case with his friend Freud. Out of these discussions came the germ of an idea that Freud was to pursue for the rest of his life.
In Studies in Hysteria (1895) Freud proposed that physical symptoms are often the surface manifestations of deeply repressed conflicts. However Freud was not just advancing an explanation of a particular illness. Implicitly he was proposing a revolutionary new theory of the human psyche itself.
This theory emerged “bit by bit” as a result of Freud’s clinical investigations and it led him to propose that there were at least three levels to the mind.
Freud (1900, 1905) developed a topographical model of the mind, whereby he described the features of mind’s structure and function.
In this model the conscious mind (everything we are aware of) is seen as the tip of the iceberg, with the unconscious mind a repository of a ‘cauldron’ of primitive wishes and impulse kept at bay and mediated by the preconscious area.
However, Freud found that some events and desires were often too frightening or painful for his patients to acknowledge. Freud believed such information was locked away in a region he called the unconscious mind. This happens through the process of repression.
Sigmund Freud emphasized the importance of the unconscious mind, and a primary assumption of Freudian theory is that the unconscious mind governs behavior to a greater degree than people suspect. Indeed, the goal of psychoanalysis is to make the unconscious conscious.
Freud (1923) later developed a more structural model of the mind comprising the entities id, ego and superego (what Freud called “the psychic apparatus”). These are not physical areas within the brain, but rather hypothetical conceptualizations of important mental functions.
Freud assumed the id operated at an unconscious level according to the pleasure principle. The id is contains two kinds of biological instincts (or dives) which Freud called Eros and Thanatos.
Freud (1900) considered dreams to be the 'royal road to the unconscious' as it is in dreams that the ego's defenses are lowered so that some of the repressed material comes through to awareness, albeit in distorted form.
Dreams perform important functions for the unconscious mind and serve as valuable clues to how the unconscious mind operates.
On 24 July 1895, Freud had his own dream that was to form the basis of his theory. He had been worried about a patient, Irma, who was not doing as well in treatment as he had hoped. Freud in fact blamed himself for this, and was feeling guilty.
Freud dreamed that he met Irma at a party and examined her. He then saw a chemical formula for a drug that another doctor had given Irma flash before his eyes and realized that her condition was caused by a dirty syringe used by the other doctor. Freud's guilt was thus relieved.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was a Viennese doctor who came to believe that the way parents dealt with children's basic sexual and aggressive desires would determine how their personalities developed and whether or not they would end up well-adjusted as adults. Freud described children as going through multiple stages of sexual development, which he labeled Oral, Anal, Phallic, Latency, and Genital.
