Sigmund Freud

"Freud" redirects here. For other uses, please see Freud (disambiguation).

Sigmund Freud
220*226
Born	May 5, 1856 Příbor, Moravia
Nationality	Moravian, (later) Austrian
Alma mater	University of Vienna
Known for	psychoanalysis
Awards	Goethe Prize
Scientific career
Fields	Neurology, Psychiatry, Psychology, Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis
Institutions	University of Vienna
Doctoral advisor	Jean-Martin Charcot, (later)Joseph Breuer
Doctoral students	Alfred Adler, Viktor Frankl, Anna Freud, Ernest Jones, Carl Jung, Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, Fritz Perls, Otto Rank; John Bowlby, Maud Mannoni, Donald Winnicott

The Man: Sigmund (May 6 1856–September 23 1939; IPA pronunciation: [ˈziːkmʊnt ˈfʁɔʏt] in German, [ˈsɪɡmənd ˈfɹɔɪd] in English) was a Jewish-Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who co-founded the psychoanalytic school of psychology. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind, especially involving the mechanism of repression; his redefinition of sexual desire as mobile and directed towards a wide variety of objects; and his therapeutic technique, especially his understanding of transference in the therapeutic relationship and the presumed value of dreams as sources of insight into unconscious desires.

He is commonly referred to as "the father of psychoanalysis" and his work has been highly influential in the masses' imagination — popularizing such notions as the unconscious, defense mechanisms, Freudian slips and dream symbolism — while also making a long-lasting impact on fields as diverse as literature, film, Marxist and feminist theories, literary criticism, philosophy and psychology. However, some of his theories remain widely disputed.

Life

Sigmund Freud was born in Freiberg, Austria-Hungary, (nowadays Příbor), Moravia, Czech Republic, 6 May 1856. Due to his talents, which were obvious from a very early stage of his childhood, his parents favored him over his other sisters and brothers, and even though they were very poor, they offered everything in order to feed his intellect. As a result of this, Freud did extremely well during his first 8 years of school, but at the age of 17, he had to move to the University in Vienna because of the strong anti-Semitism in Austria at the time.

He married in 1886, after the opening of a private clinic, specializing in nerve and brain damage. After using hypnosis on his neurotic patients for a long period, he abandoned this form of treatment, in favor of a better treatment, where he allowed the patients talk about anything they wanted.

Freud is often rumored to have had an affair with his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays (C. G. Jung alleged as much), possibly resulting in her pregnancy and an abortion. A hotel log dated August 13, 1898 seems to support the allegation of an affair.

In his 40s, Freud himself suffered from many cases of psychosomatic diseases as well as many kinds of fears, and during this period he applied many of his theories on himself, including psychoanalysis and dream interpretation. Through this self-analysis he managed to discover the cause of his psychical suffering.

After the publication of Freud's books in 1900 and 1901, interest in his theories began to grow, and a circle of supporters developed in the following period. Freud often chose to disregard the criticisms of those who were skeptical to his theories, however, and even gained a few direct opponents as a result, the most famous being Carl Jung.

In 1930 Freud received the Goethe Prize, as an appreciation towards his great contribution to psychology. Three years later the Nazis took control of Germany and most of his books were burned by the S.A. Because of the new regime, Freud also had to move with his family to London.

Freud was an intense smoker, and had to go through more than 30 operations during his life, due to mouth cancer. Eventually, he was so tired of the illness that he asked his doctor to help him with assisted suicide.

Innovations

Freud has been influential in two related but distinct ways. He simultaneously developed a theory of the human mind and human behavior, as well as clinical techniques for attempting to help cure psychopathology.

Early work

Due to Neurology and Psychiatry not being recognised as distinct medical fields at the time of Sigmund Freud's training, the medical degree he obtained after studying for six years at the University of Vienna board certified him in both Neurology and Psychiatry, despite being far more well-known for his work in the latter. As far as neurology went, Freud was an early researcher on the topic of neurophysiology, specifically cerebral palsy, which was then known as "cerebral paralysis." He published several medical papers on the topic, and showed that the disease existed far before other researchers in his day began to notice and study it. He also suggested that William Little, the man who first identified cerebral palsy, was wrong about lack of oxygen during the birth process being a cause. Instead, he suggested that complications in birth were only a symptom of the problem. It was not until the 1980s that Freud's speculations were confirmed by more modern research.

Freud was an early user and proponent of cocaine as a stimulant as well as analgesic. He wrote several articles on the antidepressant qualities of the drug and he was influenced by his friend and confidant Wilhelm Fliess, who recommended cocaine for the treatment of the "nasal reflex neurosis." Fliess operated on Freud and a number of Freud's patients whom he believed to be suffering from the disorder, including Emma Eckstein, whose surgery proved disastrous.

Freud felt that cocaine would work as a cure-all for many disorders and wrote a well-received paper, "On Coca," explaining its virtues. He prescribed it to his friend Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow to help him overcome a morphine addiction he had acquired while treating a disease of the nervous system. Freud also recommended it to many of his close family and friends. He narrowly missed out on obtaining scientific priority for discovering cocaine's anesthetic properties (of which Freud was aware but on which he had not written extensively), after Karl Koller, a colleague of Freud's in Vienna, presented a report to a medical society in 1884 outlining the ways in which cocaine could be used for delicate eye surgery. Freud was bruised by this, especially because this would turn out to be one of the few safe uses of cocaine, as reports of addiction and overdose began to filter in from many places in the world. Freud's medical reputation became somewhat tarnished because of this early enthusiasm. Furthermore, Freud's friend Fleischl-Marxow developed an acute case of "cocaine psychosis" as a result of Freud's prescriptions and died a few years later. Freud felt great regret over these events, which later biographers have dubbed "The Cocaine Incident."

Freud hoped that his research would provide a solid scientific basis for his therapeutic technique. The goal of Freudian therapy, or psychoanalysis, was to bring to consciousness repressed thoughts and feelings. According to some of his successors, including his daughter Anna Freud, the goal of therapy is to allow the patient to develop a stronger ego; according to others, notably Jacques Lacan, the goal of therapy is to lead the analysand to a full acknowledgement of his or her inability to satisfy the most basic desires.

Classically, the bringing of unconscious thoughts and feelings to consciousness is brought about by encouraging the patient to talk in free association and to talk about dreams. Another important element of psychoanalysis is a relative lack of direct involvement on the part of the analyst, which is meant to encourage the patient to project thoughts and feelings onto the analyst. Through this process, transference, the patient can reenact and resolve repressed conflicts, especially childhood conflicts with (or about) parents.

The origin of Freud's early work with psychoanalysis can be linked to Joseph Breuer. Freud actually credits Breuer with the discovery of the psychoanalytical method. One case started this phenomenon that would shape the field of psychology for decades to come, the case of Anna O. In 1880 a young girl came to Breuer with symptoms of what was then called female hysteria. Anna O. was a 21 year old highly intelligent young girl. She presented with symptoms such as paralysis of the limbs, split personality and amnesia; today these symptoms are known as conversion disorder. After many doctors had given up and accused Anna O. of faking her symptoms, Breuer decided to treat her sympathetically, which he did with all of his patients. He started to hear her mumble words during what he called states of absence. Eventually Breuer started to recognize some of the words and wrote them down. He then hypnotized her and repeated the words to her; Breuer found out that the words were associated with her father's illness and death. Anna O. coined the term 'talk therapy' to describe this process.

In the early 1890s Freud used a form of treatment based on the one that Breuer had described to him, modified by what he called his "pressure technique". The traditional story, based on Freud's later accounts of this period, is that as a result of his use of this procedure most of his patients in the mid-1890s reported early childhood sexual abuse. He believed these stories, but then came to realize that for the most part his patients were fantasizing the abuse scenes.

However in recent decades several researchers have returned to the original documents and found that the received story, based on Freud's late retrospective account of the episode, is false in many respects. In 1896 Freud posited that the symptoms of 'hysteria' and obsessional neurosis derived from unconscious memories of sexual abuse in infancy, and claimed that he had uncovered such incidents for every single one of his current patients (one third of whom were men). However a close reading of his papers and letters from this period indicates that these patients did not report early childhood sexual abuse as he later claimed: rather, he arrived at his findings by analytically inferring the supposed incidents, using a procedure that was heavily dependent on the symbolic interpretation of somatic symptoms.

The Unconscious

It has often been claimed that the most significant contribution Freud made to Western thought was his argument for the existence of an unconscious mind. During the 19th century, the dominant trend in Western thought was positivism, which subscribed to the belief that people could ascertain real knowledge concerning themselves and their environment and judiciously exercise control over both. Freud, however, suggested that such declarations of free will are in fact delusions; that we are not entirely aware of what we think and often act for reasons that have little to do with our conscious thoughts. The concept of the unconscious as proposed by Freud was allegedly groundbreaking in that he proposed that awareness existed in layers and that some thoughts occurred "below the surface." Nevertheless, as psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer, among others, pointed out, "contrary to what most people believe, the unconscious was not discovered by Freud. In 1890, when psychoanalysis was still unheard of, William James, in his monumental treatise on psychology, examined the way Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, Janet, Binet and others had used the term 'unconscious' and 'subconscious'". Moreover, the historian of psychology Mark Altschule writes: "It is difficult - or perhaps impossible - to find a nineteenth century psychologist or medical psychologist who did not recognize unconscious cerebration as not only real but of the highest importance."

Dreams, which he called the "royal road to the unconscious," provided the best access to our unconscious life and the best illustration of its "logic," which was different from the logic of conscious thought. Freud developed his first topology of the psyche in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) in which he proposed the argument that the unconscious exists and described a method for gaining access to it. The preconscious was described as a layer between conscious and unconscious thought—that which we could access with a little effort. Thus for Freud, the ideals of the Enlightenment, positivism and rationalism, could be achieved through understanding, transforming, and mastering the unconscious, rather than through denying or repressing it.

Crucial to the operation of the unconscious is "repression." According to Freud, people often experience thoughts and feelings that are so painful that they cannot bear them. Such thoughts and feelings—and associated memories—could not, Freud argued, be banished from the mind, but could be banished from consciousness. Thus they come to constitute the unconscious. Although Freud later attempted to find patterns of repression among his patients in order to derive a general model of the mind, he also observed that individual patients repress different things. Moreover, Freud observed that the process of repression is itself a non-conscious act (in other words, it did not occur through people willing away certain thoughts or feelings). Freud supposed that what people repressed was in part determined by their unconscious. In other words, the unconscious was for Freud both a cause and effect of repression.

Later, Freud distinguished between three concepts of the unconscious: the descriptive unconscious, the dynamic unconscious, and the system unconscious. The descriptive unconscious referred to all those features of mental life of which people are not subjectively aware. The dynamic unconscious, a more specific construct, referred to mental process and contents which are defensively removed from consciousness as a result of conflictual forces or "dynamics". The system unconscious denoted the idea that when mental processes are repressed, they become organized by principles different from those of the conscious mind, such as condensation and displacement.

Eventually, Freud abandoned the idea of the system unconscious, replacing it with the concept of the Ego, super-ego, and id (discussed below). Throughout his career, however, he retained the descriptive and dynamic conceptions of the unconscious.

Psychosexual development

Main article: Psychosexual development

Freud hoped to prove that his model was universally valid and thus turned to ancient mythology and contemporary ethnography for comparative material. Freud named his new theory the Oedipus complex after the famous Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. “I found in myself a constant love for my mother, and jealousy of my father. I now consider this to be a universal event in childhood,” Freud said. Freud sought to anchor this pattern of development in the dynamics of the mind. Each stage is a progression into adult sexual maturity, characterized by a strong ego and the ability to delay gratification (cf. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality). He used the Oedipus conflict to point out how much he believed that people desire incest and must repress that desire. The Oedipus conflict was described as a state of psychosexual development and awareness. He also turned to anthropological studies of totemism and argued that totemism reflected a ritualized enactment of a tribal Oedipal conflict.

Freud originally posited childhood sexual abuse as a general explanation for the origin of neuroses, but he abandoned this so-called "seduction theory" as insufficiently explanatory, noting that he had found many cases in which apparent memories of childhood sexual abuse were based more on imagination than on real events. During the late 1890s Freud, who never abandoned his belief in the sexual etiology of neuroses, began to emphasize fantasies built around the Oedipus complex as the primary cause of hysteria and other neurotic symptoms. Despite this change in his explanatory model, Freud always recognized that some neurotics had been sexually abused by their fathers, and was quite explicit about discussing several patients that he knew to have been abused.

Freud also believed that the libido developed in individuals by changing its object, a process designed by the concept of sublimation. He argued that humans are born "polymorphously perverse", meaning that any number of objects could be a source of pleasure. He further argued that, as humans develop, they become fixated on different and specific objects through their stages of development—first in the oral stage (exemplified by an infant's pleasure in nursing), then in the anal stage (exemplified by a toddler's pleasure in emptying his or her bowels), then in the phallic stage. Freud argued that children then passed through a stage in which they fixated on the mother as a sexual object (known as the Oedipus Complex) but that the child eventually overcame and repressed this desire because of its taboo nature. (The lesser known Electra complex refers to such a fixation upon the father.) The repressive or dormant [latency stage] of psychosexual development preceded the sexually mature genital stage of psychosexual development.

Freud's way of interpretation has been called phallocentric by many contemporary thinkers. This is because, for Freud, the unconscious always desires the phallus (penis). Males are afraid of castration - losing their phallus or masculinity to another male. Females always desire to have a phallus - an unfulfillable desire. Thus boys resent their father (fear of castration) and girls desire theirs. For Freud, desire is always defined in the negative term of lack - you always desire what you don't have or what you are not, and it is very unlikely that you will fulfill this desire. Thus his psychoanalysis treatment is meant to teach the patient to cope with his unsatisfiable desires.

Ego, super-ego, and id

Main article: Ego, super-ego, and id

In his later work, Freud proposed that the psyche was divided into three parts: Ego, super-ego, and id. Freud discussed this structural model of the mind in the 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and fully elaborated it in The Ego and The Id (1923), where he developed it as an alternative to his previous topographic schema (conscious, unconscious, preconscious).

Defense Mechanisms

According to Kirrilee, the defense mechanisms are the method by which the ego can solve the conflicts between the super-ego and the id. The use of defense mechanisms may attenuate the conflict between the id and super-ego, but their overuse or reuse rather than confrontation can lead to either anxiety or guilt which may result in psychological disorders such as depression. His daughter Anna Freud had done the most significant work on this field, yet she credited Sigmund with defense mechanisms, as he began the work. The defense mechanisms include: denial, reaction formation, displacement, repression/suppression (the proper term), projection, intellectualisation, rationalisation, compensation, sublimation and regressive emotionality.

• Denial occurs when someone fends off awareness of an unpleasant truth or of a reality that is a threat to the ego. For example, a student may have received a bad grade on a report card but tells himself that grades don't matter. (Some early writers argued for a striking parallel between Freudian denial and Nietzsche's ideas of ressentiment and the revaluation of values that he attributed to "herd" or "slave" morality.)
• Reaction formation takes place when a person takes the opposite approach consciously compared to what that person wants unconsciously. For example, someone may engage in violence against another race because, that person claims, the members of the race are inferior, when unconsciously it is that very person who feels inferior.
• Displacement takes place when someone redirects emotion from a "dangerous" object to a "safe" one, such as punching a pillow when one is angry at a friend.
• Repression occurs when an experience is so painful (such as war trauma) that it is unconsciously forced from consciousness, while suppression is a conscious effort to do the same.
• Psychological projection occurs when a person "projects" his or her own undesirable thoughts, motivations, desires, feelings — basically parts of oneself — onto someone or something else. Since the person is experiencing particular desires, feelings, thoughts, or anxieties, s/he is more prone to attribute those same characteristics into the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of others.
• Intellectualisation involves removing one's self, emotionally, from a stressful event, by focusing on rational and factual components of the situation.
• Rationalization involves constructing a logical justification for a decision that was originally arrived at through a different mental process. For example, Jim may drink red wine because he is an alcoholic, but he tells himself he drinks it because it has some health benefits, in order to avoid facing his alcoholism.
• Compensation occurs when someone takes up one behaviour because one cannot accomplish another behaviour. For example, the second born child may clown around to get attention since the older child is already an accomplished scholar.
• Sublimation is the channeling of impulses to socially accepted behaviours. For instance, an aggressive or homicidal person may join the military as a cover for their violent behavior.

The life and death instincts

Freud believed that humans were driven by two conflicting central desires: the life drive (Eros) (incorporating the sex drive) and the death drive (Thanatos). Freud's description of Eros and Libido included all creative, life-producing drives. The Death Drive (or death instinct) represented an urge inherent in all living things to return to a state of calm, or, ultimately, of non-existence. The presence of the Death Drive was only recognized in his later years, and the contrast between the two represents a revolution in his manner of thinking. The death instinct is also referred to as the Nirvana Principle.

Social psychology

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Freud leaves Vienna for exile in London, 1938 (Memorial to the German Resistance, Berlin)

Freud gave explanations of the genesis of religion in his writings, included in a reflection on crowd psychology. In Totem and Taboo (1913), he proposed that humans originally banded together in “primal hordes”, consisting of a male, a number of females and the offspring of this polygamous arrangement. According to Freud’s psychoanalytical theory, a male child early in life has sexual desires for his mother – the Oedipus Complex – which he held to be universal. Ethnologists would later criticize this point, leading to ethno-psychoanalytic studies. According to Freud, the father is protective, so his sons love him, but they are also jealous of their father for his relationship with their mothers. Finding that individually they cannot defeat the father-leader, they band together, kill and eat him in a ritual meal, thereby ingesting the substance of the father’s hated power – but their subsequent guilt leads the sons to elevate their father's memory and to worship him. The super-ego then takes the place of the father as the source of internalized authority. A ban was then put upon incest and upon marriage within the clan, and symbolic animal sacrifice was substituted for the ritual killing of a human being.

In Moses and Monotheism (1939) Freud reconstructed biblical history in accord with his general theory, but many biblical scholars and historians would not accept his account since it defied commonly accepted views on the history of Judaism and of dynastic Egypt. However, this book remains interesting as an interpretation of leadership based on charisma and mass psychology, using the Prophetic figure of Moses. His ideas about religion were also developed in The Future of an Illusion (1927). When Freud spoke of religion as an illusion, he maintained that it is fantastic structure from which a man must be set free if he is to grow to maturity; and in his treatment of the unconscious he moved toward atheism. In this sense, Freud approached the Marxist theory of alienation. Freud isolated two main principles: Thanatos is the drive towards the dissolution of all life, whereas Eros is to strive towards stopping that drive. When one goal is reached, the other becomes out-of-reach, and vice versa.

In "Group Psychology and Ego Analysis" (Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analysis, 1920), Freud explored crowd psychology, continuing Gustave Le Bon's early work. When the individual joins a crowd, he ceases repressing his instincts, and thus relapses into primitive culture, according to Freud's analysis. However, crowds must be distinguished into natural and organized crowds, following William McDougall's distinction. Thus, if intellectual skills (the capacity to doubt and to distance oneself) are systematically reduced when the individual joins a mass, he may eventually be "morally enlightened". Prefiguring Moses and Monotheism and The Future of an Illusion, he states that the love relationship between the leader and the masses, in the Church or in the Army, are only an "idealist transformation of the conditions existing in the primitive horde". Freud then compares leader's relationship with the crowd to a relation of hypnosis, a force to which he relates Mana. Pessimistic about humanity's chances of liberty, Freud writes that "the leader of the crowd always incarnates the dreaded primitive father, the crowd always wants to be dominated by an unlimited power, it is grasping at the highest degree for authority or, to use Le Bon's expression, it is hungry for subservience".

According to Freud, self-identification to a common figure, the leader, explained the phenomenon of masses' obedience. Each individual connected themselves vertically to the same ideal figure (or idea), each one thus has the same self-ideal, and hence identify together (horizontal relation). Freud also quoted Wilfred Trotter's The Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1914). Along with Moses and Monotheism, Massenpsychologie... would be one of the articles most quoted by Wilhelm Reich and the Frankfurt School in its Freudo-Marxist synthesis.

Freud's legacy

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Freud on the Austrian 50-Schilling Note

Psychotherapy

Main article: Psychotherapy

Freud's theories and research methods were controversial during his life and still are so today, but few dispute his huge impact on psychologists and the academically inclined.

Most importantly, Freud popularized the "talking-cure"--an idea that a person could solve problems simply by talking over them, something that was almost unheard of in the 19th century. Even though many psychotherapists today tend to reject the specifics of Freud's theories, this basic mode of treatment comes largely from his work.

Most of Freud's specific theories--like his stages of psychosexual development--and especially his methodology, have fallen out of favor in modern experimental psychology.

Some psychotherapists, however, still follow an approximately Freudian system of treatment. Many more have modified his approach, or joined one of the schools that branched from his original theories (see Neo-Freudian). Still others reject his theories entirely, although their practice may still reflect his influence.

Psychoanalysis today maintains the same ambivalent relationship with medicine and academia that Freud experienced during his life.

Philosophy

While he saw himself as a scientist, he greatly admired Theodor Lipps, a philosopher and main supporter of the ideas of the subconcious and empathy. Freud's theories have had a tremendous impact on the humanities--especially on the Frankfurt school and critical theory. In addition, many philosophers have discussed his theories and their implications, in the broader context of Western thought. Freud's model of the mind is often seen as a critical challenge to the enlightenment model of rational agency, which was a key element of much modern philosophy.

• Rationality. While many enlightenment thinkers viewed rationality as both an unproblematic ideal and a defining feature of man, Freud's model of the mind drastically reduced the scope and power of reason. In Freud's view, reasoning occurs in the conscious mind--the ego--but this is only a small part of the whole. The mind also contains the hidden, irrational elements of id and superego, which lie outside of conscious control, drive behavior, and motivate conscious activities. As a result, these structures call into question humans' ability to act purely on the basis of reason, since lurking motives are also always at play. Moreover, this model of the mind makes rationality itself suspect, since it may be motivated by hidden urges or societal forces (e.g. defense mechanisms, where reasoning becomes "rationalizing").

• Transparency of Self. Another common assumption in pre-Freudian philosophy was that people have immediate and unproblematic access to themselves. Emblematic of this position is René Descartes' famous dictum, "Cogito ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am"). For Freud, however, many central aspects of a person remain radically inaccessible to the conscious mind (without the aid of psychotherapy), which undermines the once unquestionable status of first-person knowledge.

Pop Culture

Freud has also had a remarkably powerful and lasting impact on popular culture. Many of his general psychological ideas have made their way into people's everyday thinking--for example, the idea that someone can be motivated by unconscious impulses, or the general idea that man contains a "beast" within, restrained only by the institutions of society. Some of his more specific ideas have also been popularized--"Freudian slips," "Oedipal complexes," and "anal" personality traits, for example, are frequently mentioned in non-technical discourse.

Since the early 1900s, Freud's ideas have often been represented explicitly or implicitly in a wide variety of art, literature, and film. Artistic figures famous for their Freudian overtones include: Salvador Dali, Alfred Hitchcock, Thomas Mann, and many others.

Critical reactions

Although Freud's theories were quite influential, they have also come under widespread criticism during his lifetime and afterward. A paper by Lydiard H. Horton, read in 1915 at a joint meeting of the American Psychological Association and the New York Academy of Sciences, called Freud's dream theory "dangerously inaccurate" and noted that "rank confabulations...appear to hold water, psychoanalytically". A. C. Grayling, writing in The Guardian in 2002, said "Philosophies that capture the imagination never wholly fade....But as to Freud's claims upon truth, the judgment of time seems to be running against him." Peter D. Kramer, a psychiatrist and faculty member of Brown Medical School, said "I'm afraid [Freud] doesn't hold up very well at all. It almost feels like a personal betrayal to say that. But every particular is wrong: the universality of the Oedipus complex, penis envy, infantile sexuality." A 2006 article in Newsweek magazine called him "history's most debunked doctor."

According to Richard Webster, author of Why Freud Was Wrong (1995):

“Freud made no substantial intellectual discoveries. He was the creator of a complex pseudo-science which should be recognised as one of the great follies of Western civilisation. In creating his particular pseudo-science, Freud developed an autocratic, anti-empirical intellectual style which has contributed immeasurably to the intellectual ills of our own era. His original theoretical system, his habits of thought and his entire attitude to scientific research are so far removed from any responsible method of inquiry that no intellectual approach basing itself upon these is likely to endure.”

Other critics, like Dr. Frederick C. Crews, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California at Berkeley, and author of The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute (1995), are even more blunt:

"He was a charlatan. In 1896 he published three papers on the ideology of hysteria claiming that he had cured X number of patients. First it was thirteen and then it was eighteen. And he had cured them all by presenting them, or rather by obliging them to remember, that they had been sexually abused as children. In 1897 he lost faith in this theory, but he'd told his colleagues that this was the way to cure hysteria. So he had a scientific obligation to tell people about his change of mind. But he didn't. He didn't even hint at it until 1905, and even then he wasn't clear. Meanwhile, where were the thirteen patients? Where were the eighteen patients? You read the Freud - Fleiss letters and you find that Freud's patients were leaving at the time. By 1897 he didn't have any patients worth mentioning, and he hadn't cured any of them, and he knew it perfectly well. Well, if a scientist did that today, of course he would be stripped of his job. He would be stripped of his research funds. He would be disgraced for life. But Freud was so brilliant at controlling his own legend that people can hear charges like this, and even admit that they're true, and yet not have their faith in the system of thought affected in any way."

Some critics, rather than attacking the body of Freud's work, have delved into individual topics. For instance, Juliet Mitchell, has suggested that Freud's basic claim — that many of our conscious thoughts and actions are driven by unconscious desires and fears — should be rejected because it implicitly challenges the possibility of making universal and objective claims about the world. Some proponents of science conclude that this invalidates Freudian theory as a means of interpreting and explaining human behavior.

Another frequently criticized aspect of Freud's theories is his model of psychosexual development. Some have attacked Freud's claim that infants are sexual beings, and, implicitly, Freud's expanded notion of sexuality. Others have accepted Freud's expanded notion of sexuality, but have argued that this pattern of development is not universal, nor necessary for the development of a healthy adult. Instead, they have emphasized the social and environmental sources of patterns of development. Moreover, they call attention to social dynamics Freud de-emphasized or ignored, such as class relations. This branch of Freudian critique owes a great deal to the work of Herbert Marcuse.

Freud has also come under fire from many feminist critics. Freud was an early champion of both sexual freedom and education for women (Freud, "Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness"). Some feminists, however, have argued that at worst his views of women's sexual development set the progress of women in Western culture back decades, and that at best they lent themselves to the ideology of female inferiority. Believing as he did that women are a kind of mutilated male, who must learn to accept their "deformity" (the "lack" of a penis) and submit to some imagined biological imperative, he contributed to the vocabulary of misogyny. Terms such as "penis envy" and "castration anxiety" contributed to discouraging women from obtaining education or entering any field dominated by men, until the 1970s. Some of Freud's most criticized statements appear in his 'Fragment of Analysis' on Ida Bauer such as "This was surely just the situation to call up distinct feelings of sexual excitement in a girl of fourteen" in reference to Dora being kissed by a 'young man of prepossessing appearance' implying the passivity of female sexuality and his statement "I should without question consider a person hysterical in whom an occasion for sexual excitement elicited feelings that were preponderantly or exclusively unpleasurable"

On the other hand, feminist theorists such as Juliet Mitchell, Nancy Chodorow, Jessica Benjamin, Jane Gallop, and Jane Flax have argued that psychoanalytic theory is essentially related to the feminist project and must, like other theoretical traditions, be adapted by women to free it from vestiges of sexism. Freud's views are still being questioned by people concerned about women's equality. Another feminist who finds potential use of Freud's theories in the feminist movement is Shulamith Firestone. In "Freudianism: The Misguided Feminism", she discusses how Freudianism is essentially completely accurate, with the exception of one crucial detail: everywhere that Freud writes "penis", the word should be replaced with "power".

Dr. J. Von Schneidt speculated that most of Freud's psychoanalytical theory was a byproduct of his cocaine use. Cocaine enhances dopaminergic neurotransmission increasing sexual interest and obsessive thinking. Chronic cocaine use can produce unusual thinking patterns due to the depletion of dopamine levels in the prefrontal cortex.

Finally, Freud's theories are often criticized for not being real science. This objection was raised most famously by Karl Popper, who claimed that all proper scientific theories must be potentially falsifiable. Popper argued that no experiment or observation could ever falsify Freud's theories of psychology (e.g. someone who denies having an Oedipal complex is interpreted as repressing it), and thus they could not be considered scientific.

Patients

This is a partial list of patients whose case studies were published by Freud, with pseudonyms substituted for their names:

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Freud's couch used during psychoanalytic sessions

• Anna O. = Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936)
• Cäcilie M. = Anna von Lieben
• Dora = Ida Bauer (1882–1945)
• Frau Emmy von N. = Fanny Moser
• Fräulein Elizabeth von R.
• Fräulein Katharina = Aurelia Kronich
• Fräulein Lucy R.
• Little Hans = Herbert Graf (1903–1973)
• Rat Man = Ernst Lanzer (1878–1914)
• Wolf Man = Sergei Pankejeff (1887–1979)

People on whom psychoanalytic observations were published but who were not patients:

• Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911)
• Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) (co-authored with and primarily written by William Bullitt)

Other patients:

• H.D. (1886–1961)
• Emma Eckstein (1865–1924)
• Gustav Mahler (1860–1911)

References

• Scheidt, Jürgen vom (1973). ["Sigmund Freud and cocaine"]. Psyche. pp. 385–430.

Bibliography

Major works by Freud

• Studies on Hysteria (with Josef Breuer) (Studien über Hysterie, 1895)

• The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung, 1899 [1900])

• The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens, 1901)

• Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, 1905)

• Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten, 1905)

• Totem and Taboo (Totem und Tabu, 1913)

• On Narcissism (Zur Einführung des Narzißmus, 1914)

• Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips, 1920)

• The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es, 1923)

• The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion, 1927)

• Civilization and Its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, 1930)

• Moses and Monotheism (Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion, 1939)

• An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (Abriß der Psychoanalyse, 1940)

Books about Freud and psychoanalysis

• Ernest Jones : "The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud.", Publisher: Basic Books, 1981, ISBN 0-465-04015-2
• "The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, 1908-1939, R. Andrew Paskauskas (Editor), Riccardo Steiner (Introduction), Publisher: Belknap Press; Reprint edition 1995, ISBN 0-674-15424-X
• "The Language of Psycho-Analysis" , Jean Laplanche et J.B. Pontalis, Editeur: W. W. Norton & Company, 1974, ISBN 0-393-01105-4
• "Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salome" : Letters" Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (November 1985), ISBN 0-393-30261-X
• Lou Andreas-Salome : "The Freud Journal" , Publisher: Texas Bookman, 1996, ISBN 0-7043-0022-2
• Sabina Spielrein : "Destruction as cause of becoming", 1993, ASIN B0006RF20A
• Marthe Robert : "The Psychoanalytic Revolution", Publisher: Avon Books; Discus ed edition, 1968, ASIN B0007EMI90
• Bruno Bettelheim : "Freud and Man's Soul: An Important Re-Interpretation of Freudian Theory" Publisher: Vintage; Vintage edition, 1983, ISBN 0-394-71036-3
• André Green: "The Work of the Negative" by Andre Green, Andrew Weller (Translator), Publisher: Free Association Books, 1999, ISBN 1-85343-470-1
• André Green: "On Private Madness", Publisher: International Universities Press, 1997, ISBN 0-8236-3853-7
• André Green: "The Chains of Eros", Publisher: Karnac Books, 2002, ISBN 1-85575-960-8
• André Green: "Psychoanalysis: A Paradigm For Clinical Thinking" Publisher: Free Association Books, 2005, ISBN 1-85343-773-5
• John Farrell. Freud's Paranoid Quest: Psychoanalysis and Modern Suspicion (NYU Press, 1996). A vigorous account of the relations between Freud's logic, rhetoric, and personality, as well as his relations with literary sources like Cervantes, Goethe, and Swift.
• Rieff, Philip. Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, 3d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
• Roazen, Paul. Freud and His Followers (Random House, 1975). A rich study of the development of psychoanalysis, based upon many personal interviews.
• Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth (1992). Freud on Women: A Reader. Norton. ISBN 0-393-30870-7.
• Anthony Bateman and Jeremy Holmes, Introduction to Psychoanalysis: Contemporary Theory & Practice (London: Routledge, 1995)
• Isbister, J. N. "Freud, An Introduction to his Life and Work" Publisher: Polity Press: Cambridge, Oxford. (1985)
• Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory, Ballantine Books (November 2003), ISBN 0-345-45279-8

Conceptual critiques

• Robert Aziz, The Syndetic Paradigm:The Untrodden Path Beyond Freud and Jung (2007), a refereed publication of The State University of New York Press. ISBN-13:978-0-7914-6982-8.
• Adler, Mortimer J., What Man Has Made of Man: A Study of the Consequences of Platonism and Positivism in Psychology (New York: Longmans, Green, 1937). (A philosophical critique from an Aristotelian/Thomistic point of view.)

• Cioffi, Frank. Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience. Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1998.

• Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London and New York: Continuum, 2004). (This first volume of the famous two-part work (also subtitled Capitalism and Schizophrenia) polemicises Freud's argument that the Oedipal complex determines subjectivity. It is also, therefore, a staunch critique of the Lacanian 'return to Freud.)

• Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: the History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (London: Penguin, 1970). (An extensive account and sensitive critique of Freudian metapsychology.) (Swiss link: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_F._Ellenberger)

• Esterson, Allen, "Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud." Chicago: Open Court, 1993.

• Eysenck, H. J. and Wilson, G. D. The Experimental Study of Freudian Theories, Methuen, London (1973).

• Eysenck, Hans, Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1986).

• Hobson, J. Allan Hobson, Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). ISBN 0-19-280482-0. (Critique of Freud's dream theory in terms of current neuroscience)

• Johnston, Thomas, Freud and Political Thought (New York: Citadel, 1965). (One of the more accessible accounts of the import of Freudianism for political theory.)

• Kofman, Sarah, The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud's Writings (Ithaca, NY, & London: Cornell University Press, 1985).

• Marcuse, Herbert, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1974). (Mentioned above. For a good review, see Stirk, Peter M. R., ‘Eros and Civilization revisited’, History of the Human Sciences, 12 (1), 1999, pp. 73–90.)

• Mitchell, Juliet. Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis Originally published in 1974; Basic Books reissue (2000) ISBN 0-465-04608-8

• Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine & Grunberger, Béla. Freud or Reich? Psychoanalysis and Illusion. (London: Free Association Books, 1986)

• Neu, Jerome (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Freud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). (A good conceptual overview.)

• Ricoeur, Paul, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1972).

• —, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde (London: Continuum, 2004). (A critical examination of the import of Freud for philosophy.)

• Roazen, Paul. Freud and His Followers (New York: Random House, 1975).

• Szasz, Thomas. Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry, Syracuse University Press, 1990, ISBN 0-8156-0247-2.

• Torrey, E. Fuller (1992). Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effect of Freud's Theory on American Thought and Culture. New York, NY : HarperCollins.
• Voloshinov, Valentin. Freudianism: A Marxist critique, Academic Press (1976) ISBN 0-12-723250-8

• Wollheim, Richard, Freud, 2nd edn. (London: Fontana, 1991). (A good starting point.)

Biographies

The area of biography has been especially contentious in the historiography of psychoanalysis, for two primary reasons: first, following his death, significant portions of his personal papers were for several decades made available only at the permission of his biological and intellectual heirs (his daughter, Anna Freud, was extremely protective of her father's reputation); second, much of the data and theory of Freudian psychoanalysis hinges upon the personal testimony of Freud himself, and so to challenge Freud's legitimacy or honesty has been seen by many as an attack on the roots of his enduring work.

The first biographies of Freud were written by Freud himself: his On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement (1914) and An Autobiographical Study (1924) provided much of the basis for discussions by later biographers, including "debunkers" (as they contain a number of prominent omissions and potential misrepresentations). A few of the major biographies on Freud to come out over the 20th century were:

• Helen Walker Puner, Freud: His Life and His Mind (1947) — Puner's "facts" were often shaky at best but she was remarkably insightful with regard to Freud's unanalyzed relationship to his mother, Amalia.

• Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols. (1953–1958) — the first "authorized" biography of Freud, made by one of his former students with the authorization and assistance of Anna Freud, with the hope of "dispelling the myths" from earlier biographies. Though this is the most comprehensive biography of Freud, Jones has been accused of writing more of a hagiography than a history of Freud. Among his questionable assertions, Jones diagnosed his own analyst, Ferenczi, as "psychotic." In the same breath, Jones also maligned Otto Rank, Ferenczi's close friend and Jones's most important rival for leadership of the movement in the 1920s.

• Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970) — was the first book to, in a compelling way, attempt to situate Freud within the context of his time and intellectual thought, arguing that he was the intellectual heir of Franz Mesmer and that the genesis of his theory owed a large amount to the political context of turn of the 19th century Vienna. (Swiss link: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_F._Ellenberger)

• Frank Sulloway, Freud: Biologist of the Mind (1979) — Sulloway, one of the first professional/academic historians to write a biography of Freud, positioned Freud within the larger context of the history of science, arguing specifically that Freud was, in fact, a biologist in disguise (a "crypto-biologist", in Sulloway's terms), and sought to actively hide this.

• Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988) — Gay's impressively scholarly work was published in part as a response to the anti-Freudian literature and the "Freud Wars" of the 1980s (see below). Gay's book is probably the best pro-Freud biography available, though he is not completely uncritical of his hero. His "Bibliographical Essay" at the end of the volume provides astute evaluations of the voluminous literature on Freud up to the mid-1980s.

• Breger, Louis. "Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision." (New York: Wiley, 2000). Though written from a psychoanalytic point of view (the author is a former President of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis), this is a "warts and all" life of Sigmund Freud. It corrects, in the light of historical research of recent decades, many (though not quite all) of several disputed traditional historical accounts of events uncritically recycled by Peter Gay.

The creation of Freud biographies has itself even been written about at some length—see, for example, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, "A History of Freud Biographies," in Discovering the History of Psychiatry, edited by Mark S. Micale and Roy Porter (Oxford University Press, 1994).

Biographical critiques

• Bakan, David. Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition, D. Van Nostrand Company, 1958; New York, Schocken Books, 1965; Dover Publications, 2004. ISBN 0-486-43767-1

• Crews, F. C. Unauthorized Freud : doubters confront a legend, New York, Viking 1998. ISBN 0-670-87221-0

• Dolnick, Edward. Madness on the Couch: Blaming the Victim in the Heyday of Psychoanalysis ISBN 0-684-82497-3

• Dufresne, T. Killing Freud, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003.

• Esterson, Allen, "Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud." Chicago: Open Court, 1993.

• Eysenck, H. J. The Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire, Scott-Townsend Publishers, Washington D. C., (1990)

• Jurjevich, R. M. The Hoax of Freudism: A study of Brainwashing the American Professionals and Laymen Dorrance (1974) ISBN 0-8059-1856-6

• LaPiere, R. T. The Freudian Ethic: An Analysis of the Subversion of Western Character Greenwood Press (1974) ISBN 0-8371-7543-7

• Lear, Jonathan. Freud Routledge (2005) ISBN 0-415-31451-8

• MacDonald, Kevin B. The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements Authorhouse (2002) ISBN 0-7596-7222-9

• Macmillan, Malcolm. Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc MIT Press, 1996 ISBN 0-262-63171-7 [originally published by New Holland, 1991]

• Scharnberg, Max. The non-authentic nature of Freud's observations, Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1993 ISBN 91-554-3122-4

• Stannard, D. E. Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory Oxford University Press, Oxford (1980) ISBN 0-19-503044-3

• Thornton, E. M. Freud and Cocaine: The Freudian Fallacy, Blond & Briggs, London (1983) ISBN 0-85634-139-8

• Webster, Richard. Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science, and Psychoanalysis BasicBooks, 1995. ISBN 0-465-09579-8

See also

Topics

• American Psychoanalytic Association
• Freudian slip
• Freudo-Marxism
• Neo-Freudian
• Penis envy
• Psychic energy
• Psychoanalysis

• Psychoanalysis and Hypnotherapy
• Psychoanalytic literary criticism
• Psychoanalytic theory
• Psychodynamics
• Psychological projection
• Psychology of religion

• Psychosexual development
  • Oral stage
  • Anal stage
  • Phallic stage
  • Genital stage
• Psychotherapy
• Shame
• Unconscious mind

People

• Adler, Alfred
• Breuer, Josef
• Edward Bernays
• Charcot, Jean-Martin
• Erikson, Erik
• Fliess, Wilhelm

• Viktor Frankl
• Groddeck, Georg
• Horney, Karen
• Jones, Ernest
• Jung, Carl
• Klein, Melanie

• Lacan, Jacques
• Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff
• Rank, Otto
• Reich, Wilhelm
• Silberer, Herbert

External links

• Freud Museum in London
• Sigmund Freud Life and Work
• Scientific Method in the Interpretation of Dreams
• International Psychoanalytical Association, founded by Freud in 1910
• Scientist or storyteller?
• International Network of Freud Critics
• Freud's Philosophy
• Sigmund Freud Museum, Berggasse 19, Vienna
• Sigmund Freud Movie about Berggasse 19
• One Hundred Years of Sigmund Freud
• Sigmund Freud Biography and Quotations
• Sigmund Freud's article on Psychoanalysis from the 1926 (Thirteenth) edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Sigmund-Freud-Institut
• Freud Archives at Library of Congress
• Freud's Unwritten Case: The Patient "E." by Douglas A. Davis
• The Darwin of the Mind
• An Interview With Dr. Peter D. Kramer on his biography of Sigmund Freud California Literary Review
• Works by Sigmund Freud at Project Gutenberg
• Website of leading Freud-Jungian scholar/ author, Dr. Robert Aziz