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The Life of Sigmund Freud Introduction: The contribution of Sigmund Freud to the development of psychology as science is enormous. It can only be fully understood if compared to the system of beliefs of those times. The society those days had not a single psychological way of observing individuals and their instincts. However, today the ideas of Freud, which were considered heresy before, are freely used in contemporary psychology. His thoughts and concepts seem to be logical and understandable. And it takes much more effort to think not in terms of Freud's formulas, then to rely on them.
The achievements of Dr. Freud can be considered to be valuable exploits for the whole humanity. They helped people to live their lives more concisely. Freud made the picture of the world deeper for everyone of us.
I want to analyze Sigmund Freud's life from many viewpoints including his own one. Childhood and Early Personality Development: My life is interesting only if is related to psychoanalysis", Freud said, giving thus us to understand that the events of his biography are not interesting in a biographer's view, but just his activity on the realm of psychoanalysis. But a different reading of this assertion suggests us something else: the fact that applying Freud's method to the study of the biographical events could bring forward another biography, which less cares about the biographical "truth", but particularly cares about the meaning and significance of the biographical events in the light of Freud's discoveries, among which we should first of all mention Oedipus complex. With Octave Mannoni's words: "The confessions Freud made about his youth are like a derived product of his discovery. " Sigismund Freud was born on May 6, 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia, which is now Prior in the Czech Republic.
People from here were Czechs, but Jewish people were talking German and were mostly assimilated to the Austro-Hungarian ruling class. Freud's father, Jacob, was a Jewish wool merchant who had been married once before he wed the boy's mother, Amalie Nathansohn. His father didnt seem to be very authoritarian person, however his mother certainly was. She was always close and emotionally available. When Sigmund Freud was four years old, his father met with a business failure. This made Freud and his family settle down in Vienna, a noisy and cosmopolitan metropolis, which will sensitively stand in contrast with the lawns and mountains from Moravia, to which Freud will forever feel attached. "Under deep sediments, it continue to live inside myself the happy child from Freiberg who has received from this air and this earth his first unforgettable impressions", Freud remarked and he will even state precisely: "I 've never felt within my depth in this city.
I believe nowadays that I've always regretted the marvellous forests of my childhood, and one of my remembrances evokes me the fact that I used to run as if I wanted to get off from my father, when I was scarcely able to walk" In Vienna he lived almost eighty years until the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938. Freud disliked Vienna for its citizens and frequent anti-Semitism. Freud's sensitivity to the vulnerability of paternal authority within the psyche may well have been stimulated by the decline in power suffered by his father's generation, often liberal rationalists, in the Habsburg Empire. So too his interest in the theme of the seduction of daughters was rooted in complicated ways in the context of Viennese attitudes toward female sexuality. Since early childhood, Sigmund Freud appeared to possess a smart mind and passion for reading. His multi-person family lived in a small flat and had very little money.
Regardless of that fact, Sigmund's parents tried to arrange everything for the education of their elder son. He lived in the separate room and had a lamp. Others had to use candles. Sigmund Freud inherited from his father the sense of humor, the scepticism before life incertitude, the habit of exemplifying by a Jewish anecdote when he wanted to bring out some moral feature, his liberalism and free thought.
From his mother he would have taken "the sentimentalism", an ambiguous word in German, which would mean that Freud was capable of intense emotional feelings. In his childhood, Freud enjoyed the unrestrained love of his mother, Amelia, who called him "my golden Sign." This unlimited love will make Freud notice: "When you were incontestably the favorite child of your mother, you keep during your lifetime this victor feeling, you keep feeling sure of success, which in reality seldom doesn't fulfill." Education: At age of seventeen, in 1873, Sigmund Freud graduated from the Sell Gymnasium with the academic reward. Then, inspired by the public reading of an essay by Goethe on nature, decided to turn to medicine as a career. Another reason for that was the Austria-Hungary anti-Semitic laws of those days. This, certainly, left a trail in the psychological development of a young scientist, limited his personal freedom of choice, and affected his habit of always being in opposition. Freud studied at the University of Vienna for eight years, which is three years more than usually needed.
There he worked in the laboratory with one of the leading physiologists of his day, Ernst von Brucke, an exponent of the materialist, anti vitalist science of Hermann von Helmholtz. Freud conducted his own research of histology, published several anatomy articles, and in the age of twenty-six he achieved his doctoral degree in medical science. Fifty years later Freud wrote: Neither that time, nor later have I ever felt the desire to be a doctor. I was ruled by curiosity to the problems of humanity, rather than to the social sciences. First Medical Practice Experiments: After graduation, Freud was unable to get a placement in the laboratory of Brucke, and following his advice decided to give himself to the medical practice. In 1882 he entered the General Hospital in Vienna as a clinical assistant to train with the psychiatrist Theodor Meynert and the professor of internal medicine Hermann Nothnagel. 1885 Freud was appointed lecturer in neuropathology, having concluded important research on the brain's medulla.
At this time he also developed an interest in the pharmaceutical benefits of cocaine, which he pursued for several years. Although some beneficial results were found in eye surgery, which have been credited to Freud's friend Carl Koller, the general outcome was disastrous. Not only did Freud's advocacy lead to a mortal addiction in another close friend, Ernst Fleischl von Marrow, but it also tarnished his medical reputation for a time. Whether or not one interprets this episode in terms that call into question Freud's prudence as a scientist, it was of a piece with his lifelong willingness to attempt bold solutions to relieve human suffering. Freud's scientific training remained of cardinal importance in his work, or at least in his own conception of it. In such writings as his Entwurf einer Psychologie (written 1895, published 1950; Project for a Scientific Psychology) he affirmed his intention to find a physiological and materialist basis for his theories of the psyche.
Here a mechanistic neurophysiological model vied with a more organismic, phylogenetic one in ways that demonstrate Freud's complicated debt to the science of his days. In late 1885 Freud left Vienna to continue his studies of neuropathology at the Salpetriere clinic in Paris, where he worked under the guidance of Jean-Martin Charcot. His 19 weeks in the French capital proved a turning point in his career, for Charcot's work with patients classified as hysterics introduced Freud to the possibility that psychological disorders might have their source in the mind rather than the brain. Charcot's demonstration of a link between hysterical symptoms, such as paralysis of a limb, and hypnotic suggestion implied the power of mental states rather than nerves in the etiology of disease. Although Freud was soon to abandon his faith in hypnosis, he returned to Vienna in February 1886 with the seed of his revolutionary psychological method implanted. Marriage and Personal Life: Several months after his return Freud married Martha Bernays, the daughter of a prominent Jewish family whose ancestors included a chief rabbi of Hamburg and Heinrich Heine.
She was to bear six children, one of whom, Anna Freud, was to become a distinguished psychoanalyst in her own right. Although the glowing picture of their marriage painted by Ernest Jones in his biography of Freud has been nuanced by later scholars, it is clear that Martha Bernays Freud was a deeply sustaining presence during her husband's tumultuous career. There was much said about personal life of Sigmund Freud. It can be assumed that Sigmund had no personal life at all. He lived in one and the same city for more than seventy years, and more than forty years in the same house. He accepted patients in that house.
There he also read literature in one and the same rocking chair, worked on one and the same desk. He had no attractions aside from those to his ideas and work. Freud wasnt egoistic and never tried to show his temper or pretended to be the first in any field. His rhythm of life is totally subordinated to the unstoppable and steady work process. Every week from his seventy years made up a piece of his activity. His days of every week were carefully scheduled and were all alike.
Social activities took major time, then, what was left was spent on analysis, reading, development of new questions and theories. This calendar had no blank pages for more than half century. The Unique Way of Thinking. The Making of a Genius: Freud was always busy with intellectual work. Never-ending activity was normal for Freud, just like beating is normal for heart. Freud analyses ten patients a day and works thoroughly with every one of them.
He tries to get his patients identity and feel what is inside and unseen. He watches thousands of human fates trying to find cause and effect of different psychological diseases, performing the great work nobody could perform before. His outstanding hyperactivity and life strength didnt know any decline. When the normal daily activity was ended, Freud started to analyze the results in the most creative way. The whole world considers this very type of his activity to be the major one, the one for which he is famous. This giant work that touches fates of millions of people today was performed for the half century without secretaries and assistants.
Every letter was written with his own hand; every scientific work was totally researched and finished by himself alone. And this makes up the characteristic of a genius. Sigmund Freud is considered the founder of a sexual science without which we cannot live today. The peculiarity of his way of life was the fact that he always seemed to find something new, opening new horizons without having clear objectives and knowledge of what he actually wanted to find out. The fact that Freud started to touch sexual questions appeared not as a result of his own desire to research that issue.
That problem appeared just by itself on the way of his scientific thinking. Final Works, the Last Days: Freud's final major work, Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion (1938; Moses and Monotheism), was more than just the historical novel he had initially thought to subtitle it. Moses had long been a figure of capital importance for Freud; indeed Michelangelo's famous statue of Moses had been the subject of an essay written in 1914. The book itself sought to solve the mystery of Moses' origins by claiming that he was actually an aristocratic Egyptian by birth that had chosen the Jewish people to keep alive an earlier monotheistic religion. Too stern and demanding a taskmaster, Moses was slain in a Jewish revolt, and a second, more pliant leader, also called Moses, rose in his place. The guilt engendered by the parricidal act was, however, too much to endure, and the Jews ultimately returned to the religion given them by the original Moses as the two figures were merged into one in their memories.
Here Freud's ambivalence about his religious roots and his father's authority was allowed to pervade a highly fanciful story that reveals more about its author than its ostensible subject. Moses and Monotheism was published in the year Hitler invaded Austria. Freud was forced to flee to England. His books were among the first to be burned, as the fruits of a Jewish science, when the Nazis took over Germany. Although psychotherapy was not banned in the Third Reich, where Field Marshall Hermann Goring's cousin headed an official institute, psychoanalysis essentially went into exile, most notably to North America and England. Freud himself died only a few weeks after World War II broke out, at a time when his worst fears about the irrationality lurking behind the facade of civilization were being realized.
Freud's death did not, however, hinder the reception and dissemination of his ideas. A plethora of Freudian schools emerged to develop psychoanalysis in different directions. In fact, despite the relentless and often compelling challenges mounted against virtually all of his ideas, Freud has remained one of the most potent figures in the intellectual landscape of the 20 th century. Discussing the achievements of Freud, it must be said that at the same time in history two major discoveries were made.
An unknown before that scientist, a physician Wilhelm Roentgen invents the new method to see through the human body that was considered impossible to look through before. In Vienna, an unknown scientist, a doctor Sigmund Freud invents the same possibility with only difference that his method opened up the possibility for the humanity to see through the human soul. Both explorations made the world of medicine progress with increasing rate. For the first time, physical and psychological branches of medicine started to cooperate achieving great results from that cooperation. Before Freud, psychology as a science was nothing but a school discipline based solely on unproved theories that couldnt depict the real situation. Those studying it knew nothing about themselves and the laws of individuality.
This field of science was compared to philosophy and considered to be abstract one. Freud transferred the accent of this science from theories to practical applications making the human personality the subject of research. Now, applying his methods people can be cured from neurosis, reasons for mistakes of people can be found and creative potentials may be given exits. By turning the psychological science to researching the individual Freud made a great favour for the next century of individualism. Regardless of the constant critique his works were fruitful. And as Goethe said: What is fruitful is the only truth.
Works Cited: O. Mannoni, "Freud", Du Sell, 1968. Britannica Encyclopaedia, Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud's Self-Analysis by Jean Chirac. Sigmund Freud by Stephen Zweig.
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Research essay sample on The Life Of Sigmund Freud
