Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939) was a neurologist who developed the theory of psychoanalysis, which is based on the idea that thoughts and feelings can be explained by how the brain works. Freud was a very important thinker during his time, and he had a lot of influence on laws and policy.
Psychoanalysis while being a theory of the human mind, is also a treatment for the relief of mental health problems, and a way of looking at culture and society. Despite the many criticisms and attempts to refute Freud’s work, it has continued to have a powerful influence even after his death. This influence can be seen in fields other than psychology, which is more narrowly defined.
In 1859, the Freud family had to move to different cities because of money problems. They moved to Leipzig, and then a year later to Vienna. Freud lived in Vienna until the Nazis took over Austria. Freud didn’t like the imperial city because of the way its citizens treated each other, but his work in psychoanalysis reflects the cultural and political context of its time. Freud may have been particularly sensitive to the vulnerability of paternal authority because of the way that the authority of his father’s generation, often liberal rationalists, was declining in the Habsburg empire.
In 1873, Freud graduated from the Sperl Gymnasium. After reading an essay by Goethe about nature, he decided to become a doctor. He worked at the University of Vienna with a leading physiologist named Ernst von Brücke. In 1882, Dr. Sigmund Freud started working as a clinical assistant at the General Hospital in Vienna. He was training to become a psychiatrist with Theodor Meynert and Hermann Nothnagel, a professor of internal medicine.
Freud was appointed a lecturer in neuropathology in 1885. He had studied the brain’s medulla during this time and had some very important findings to share. Freud’s education in science helped shape the way he thought about psychology. Freud believed that he could find the physical and material causes of mental processes by studying the brain and body. There were two different types of models of the brain: a mechanistic model, which explained how the brain worked, and a more organismic, phylogenetic model, which showed how the brain was related to other animal groups. Freud was influenced by both models – his work is a complicated debt to the field of psychology to this day.
Freud left Vienna in 1885 to study neuropathology at the Salpêtrière clinic in Paris. He worked under the guidance of Jean-Martin Charcot, who was a famous doctor. Freud’s time in Paris was very important for his career, as he learned from Professor Charles-Édouard Charcot that some people who are called “hysterics” might have mental problems, rather than physical problems. Charcot’s demonstration showed that people with hysterical symptoms, such as paralysis of a limb, can also be caused by hypnotic suggestion. This means that the disease is probably caused by something else, like the person’s mental state. Freud began thinking about how to use hypnosis in 1886, but he eventually stopped believing in it.
However, he kept the idea in his mind, and in February of that year, he arrived in Vienna. Freud turned to clinical practice in neuropsychology and opened his office at Berggasse 19 for almost half a century.
Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899. Freud applied his theories to everyday life in books like “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life” and “Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious.” Freud wrote a book in 1905 about the theory of sexuality. He described how infantile sexuality can be very strange and perverse, and how it can lead to different desires and thoughts about sex. In 1847, Dr. Sigmund Freud published a paper called “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.” This paper is famous because it is one of Dr. Freud’s more famous and controversial case studies.
The “Dora” case study is a famous example of how Freud understood how hysteria can be a symptom and how important it is to consider transference in therapy. Freud looked at the symptoms of obsessional neurosis and phobia in “The Little Hans” study. After years of work and legacy, Freud died with cancer in 1939.
