Sigmund Freud - Short Biography, Theories, Contributions and Quotes

Sigmund Freud
Sigismund Shlomo Freud
(May 6, 1856, Freiberg, Austro-Hungary (now Příbor, Czech Republic) - September 23, 1939, London, England) (aged 83)
Nationality: Austria
Category: Scientists
Occupation: Psychoanalysis, Psychologists,
Unique distinction: Founder of Psychoanalysis. He made tremendous impact on psychology, psychotherapy, art and on the culture in general.
Gender: Male

Quotes: 1. The ego is not master in its own house. 2.Where id is, there shall ego be. 3. When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it. 4. Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious. 5. The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water. 6. Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me. 7. Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy. 8. Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness. 9. The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?”

Achievements:

Social and professional position: Austrian psychologist and psychiatrist
The main contribution to (what is known): Freud was the Founder of Psychoanalysis which remains influential within many contemporary schools of psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy, and across the humanities. Freud's work has suffused contemporary Western thought and popular culture. Many modern psychologists and psychotherapists follow Freud's approach, even if they reject his theories. Nevertheless they remains some of the most influential academic concepts of the 20th century.
Contributions:

1. Theory of Psychoanalysis which is based on:
a) theory of the unconscious mind (also he didn't invent this idea, but put it into clinical practice and made it popular).
b) statement that libido or sexual instinct and desire (Eros or libido) is the primary motivational energy of human life and later in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)- death drive (Thanatos) was added;
c) theory of sublimation, as the process of deflecting sexual instincts into acts of higher social valuation;
d) interpretation of dreams as sources of insight into unconscious desires. Freud called dreams the "royal road to the unconscious". Dream mechanisms: condensation, displacement, identification, composition, inversion, secondary elaboration;
e) "repression" as the key factor in the operation of the unconscious and defence mechanism, which together with other mechanisms (denial, idealization, splitting, identification, rationalization) manipulate, deny, or distort reality to protect the ego;
f) theory of unconscious primary process and conscious secondary process;
g) economic, homeostatic model of the psyche, the tendency of mental apparatus "to keep as low as possible the total amount of the excitations".
2. Topology of the psyche. In 1899 Freud developed his first topology of the psyche or previous topographic schema: conscious, unconscious, and preconscious. In his later work (1920, 1923), he proposed that the human psyche could be divided into three parts: ego which operates on the Reality Principle, super-ego (moral component of the psyche), and Id, which operates on the Pleasure Principle, satisfying urges for food and sex.
3. Development of psychics. a) Personality is developed by the person's childhood experiences; b) personality develops during childhood through a series of psychosexual stages: 1) oral (birth-1 year), 2) anal (1-3), 3) phallic (3-6), 4) latent (6-12). 5) genital (12 -); c) the stage at which a person becomes fixated in childhood has a decisive influence on adult personality; d) Oedipus complex - boys passed through the phallic stage in which they fixated on the mother as a sexual object and on the father as a rival (In girls - Electra complex).
4. Clinical practice of psychoanalysis. a) Freud created the clinical practice of psychoanalysis as a dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst or “talking cure”; b) the goal of psychoanalysis, was to bring subconsciously repressed thoughts and feelings into consciousness in order to free the patient from the painful thoughts and feelings; c) major points of Freudian therapy: Relaxed atmosphere, resistance, transference, catharsis, insight; d) he developed the therapeutic techniques, including the use of Free association and Dream analysis.
5. Culture. Freud as a materialist and naturalist conceived civilization basically in terms of the basic human instinct or drive.
6. Religion. He perceived religion, with its suppression of man's violent nature, restraint of the death drive, aggression and violence,
7. Creativity. a) Creativity is identified with the work of the unconscious, with the manifestation of the energy of the id and the power of libido by means of most beneficial defence mechanism- sublimation; b) Freud, following Schiller, wrote that we can gain access to "involuntary ideas" by relaxing our rational control over the imagination; c) fantasies are considered as Fulfilments of ambitious and erotic wishes, as an escape from inner conflict, as a "neutral zone", free space of pure imagination; d) creative writer is borderline neurotics and creativity is a substitute for neurotic symptoms; e) there is a strong analogy between artistic creation, child’s play, dreams, day-dreaming, fantasy and humour.

Honors and Awards: Goethe Prize (1930)
Major works: Studies on Hysteria (with Josef Breuer) (1895), The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901),Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming (Der Dichter und das Phantasieren, 1908), Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, (1910), A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1910), Totem and Taboo (1913), On Narcissism (1914), Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1917), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), The Ego and the Id (1923), The Future of an Illusion (1927), Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Moses and Monotheism (1939), An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940)

Life:

Origin: His father Jakob, a wool merchant, was 41 and mother Amalié (née Nathansohn), the third wife of Jakob, was 21. Sigmund was the first of eight children in family. Both of his parents were from Galicia, in modern-day Ukraine.
Education: Freud went to the University of Vienna aged 17. He received his M.D. degree in 1881 at the age of 25.
Influenced by: Brentano, Breuer, Darwin, Hartmann, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Goethe, Dostoyevsky.
Career highlights:

Sigmund Freud qualified as a doctor of medicine in 1881 at the University of Vienna. Upon completing his habilitation in 1885, he took up work as a doctor at Vienna General Hospital and was appointed a docent in neuropathology and became an affiliated professor in 1902.
Freud lived and worked in Vienna. In 1886 Freud resigned his hospital post, and entered private practice specializing in "nervous disorders".
Freud fled Austria to escape the Nazis in 1938.

Personal life:

In 1882 He married Martha Bernays, the granddaughter of Isaac Bernays, a Chief Rabbi in Hamburg. The couple had six children.
With Nazi occupation of Austria in 1938 Freud with his wife and daughter fled to England. Four of Freud's five sisters died in concentration camps.
Freud battled mouth cancer the last several years of his life, but continued to smoke cigars.
He died at the age of 83 in the United Kingdom in 1939.

Links:

wikipedia.org, iep.utm.edu, biography.com, simplypsychology.org

Located in: Psychoanalysis | Psychologists | Scientists