Freud, Sigmund

Freud, Sigmund (froid), 1856–1939, Austrian psychiatrist, founder of psychoanalysis. Born in Moravia, he lived most of his life in Vienna, receiving his medical degree from the Univ. of Vienna in 1881.

His medical career began with an apprenticeship (1885–86) under J. M. Charcot in Paris, and soon after his return to Vienna he began his famous collaboration with Josef Breuer on the use of hypnosis in the treatment of hysteria. Their paper, On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena (1893, tr. 1909), more fully developed in Studien über Hysterie (1895), marked the beginnings of psychoanalysis in the discovery that the symptoms of hysterical patients—directly traceable to psychic trauma in earlier life—represent undischarged emotional energy (conversion; see hysteria). The therapy, called the cathartic method, consisted of having the patient recall and reproduce the forgotten scenes while under hypnosis. The work was poorly received by the medical profession, and the two men soon separated over Freud's growing conviction that the undefined energy causing conversion was sexual in nature.

Freud then rejected hypnosis and devised a technique called free association (see association), which would allow emotionally charged material that the individual had repressed in the unconscious to emerge to conscious recognition. Further works, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900, tr. 1913), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1904, tr. 1914), and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905, tr. 1910), increased the bitter antagonism toward Freud, and he worked alone until 1906, when he was joined by the Swiss psychiatrists Eugen Bleuler and C. G. Jung, the Austrian Alfred Adler, and others.

In 1908, Bleuler, Freud, and Jung founded the journal Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen, and in 1909 the movement first received public recognition when Freud and Jung were invited to give a series of lectures at Clark Univ. in Worcester, Mass. In 1910 the International Psychoanalytical Association was formed with Jung as president, but the harmony of the movement was short-lived: between 1911 and 1913 both Jung and Adler resigned, forming their own schools in protest against Freud's emphasis on infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex. Although these men, and others who broke away later, objected to Freudian theories, the basic structure of psychoanalysis as the study of unconscious mental processes is still Freudian. Disagreement lies largely in the degree of emphasis placed on concepts largely originated by Freud.

He considered his last contribution to psychoanalytic theory to be The Ego and the Id (1923, tr. 1927), after which he reverted to earlier cultural preoccupations. Totem and Taboo (1913, tr. 1918), an investigation of the origins of religion and morality, and Moses and Monotheism (1939, tr. 1939) are the result of his application of psychoanalytic theory to cultural problems. With the National Socialist occupation of Austria, Freud fled (1938) to England, where he died the following year.

Freudian theory has had wide impact, influencing fields as diverse as anthropology, education, art, and literary criticism. His daughter, Anna Freud, was a major proponent of psychoanalysis, developing in particular the Freudian concept of the defense mechanism. Other works include A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1910, tr. 1920) and New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis (1933).

Bibliography

See his Basic Writings (tr. and ed. by A. A. Brill, 1938, repr., 1977); The Freud-Jung Letters, ed. by W. McGuire (1974, repr. 1988); biographies by E. Jones (3 vol., 1953–57, abr. ed. 1974) and P. Gay (1988); studies by P. Roazen (1975), H. Lewis (2 vol., 1981–83), S. Schneiderman (1987), O. Olson and S. Koppe (1988), I. Gubrich-Simitis (1993, tr. 1997), and L. Breger (2000).

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Freud, Sigmund

(born May 6, 1856, Freiberg, Moravia, Austrian Empire—died Sept. 23, 1939, London, Eng.) Austrian neuropsychologist, founder of psychoanalysis, and one of the major intellectual figures of the 20th century. Trained in Vienna as a neurologist, Freud went to Paris in 1885 to study with Jean-Martin Charcot, whose work on hysteria led Freud to conclude that mental disorders might be caused purely by psychological rather than organic factors. Returning to Vienna (1886), Freud collaborated with the physician Josef Breuer (1842–1925) in further studies on hysteria, resulting in the development of some key psychoanalytic concepts and techniques, including free association, the unconscious, resistance (later defense mechanisms), and neurosis. In 1899 he published The Interpretation of Dreams, in which he analyzed the complex symbolic processes underlying dream formation: he proposed that dreams are the disguised expression of unconscious wishes. In his controversial Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), he delineated the complicated stages of psychosexual development (oral, anal, and phallic) and the formation of the Oedipus complex. During World War I, he wrote papers that clarified his understanding of the relations between the unconscious and conscious portions of the mind and the workings of the id, ego, and superego. Freud eventually applied his psychoanalytic insights to such diverse phenomena as jokes and slips of the tongue, ethnographic data, religion and mythology, and modern civilization. Works of note include Totem and Taboo (1913), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), The Future of an Illusion (1927), and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Freud fled to England when the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938; he died shortly thereafter. Despite the relentless and often compelling challenges mounted against virtually all of his ideas, both in his lifetime and after, Freud has remained one of the most influential figures in contemporary thought.

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Freud, Sigmund 

Born May 6, 1856, in Freiberg, Austria-Hungary, now Příbor, Czechoslovakia; died Sept. 23, 1939, in Hampstead, near London. Austrian neuropathologist, psychiatrist, and psychologist. Founder of psychoanalysis.

Freud studied medicine at the University of Vienna, where he received his M. D. in 1881. From 1876 to 1882 he worked under E. Brücke in the Vienna Institute of Physiology; there Freud became acquainted with the ideas of H. von Helmholtz, whose views on energy he later applied to psychology. In 1885–86, Freud worked under J. Charcot in the Salpětrière Hospital in Paris. He was a professor at the University of Vienna from 1902. In 1908, together with E. Bleuler and C. G. Jung, Freud founded a yearbook of psychoanalytical and psychopathological research, and in 1910 he founded the International Psychoanalytical Association. He was awarded the Goethe Prize in 1930. After fascist Germany’s seizure of Austria in 1938, Freud emigrated to Great Britain.

Freud’s early works were devoted to the aphasias (1891), infantile paralysis (1891–97), and the physiology and anatomy of the brain, including the localization of brain functions. He was one of the first to discover, in 1884, the pain-relieving effect of cocaine; this discovery stimulated research on the use of local anesthesia—as applied, for example, by the Viennese ophthalmologist C. Keller. In the early 1890’s, under the influence of the French school of psychotherapy (Charcot and Bernheim), Freud began to study the neuroses—and especially hysteria—as diseases that had no apparent organic substratum. He also studied psychiatric treatment methods and their psychological bases. Together with J. Breuer, Freud studied the psychological mechanisms of hysteria, and he proposed the cathartic method of psychotherapy, based on abreaction—that is, the release of unconscious traumatic experiences under hypnosis.

In 1895, Freud began to work on the treatment of neuroses by the psychoanalytic method, based on the technique of free association and the analysis of errors and dreams as a way of penetrating into the unconscious. Freud was among the first to investigate the psychological aspects of sexuality. He viewed sexual development as consisting of several qualitatively different stages, each being the potential source of unconscious conflicts that are manifested in such forms as neuroses or perversions. According to Freud’s general theory of psychology, proposed by him in the early 1900’s, the structure of the psyche may be compared to an energy system; underlying this system is the conflict between different psychic levels—primarily between consciousness and the elemental unconscious drives.

In a mistaken attempt to broaden the sphere of application of psychoanalysis, Freud sought to extend its principles to such areas of human culture as mythology (Totem and Taboo, 1913; Russian translation, 1923), folklore, and the creative arts; he even explained religion as a special form of collective neurosis (The Future of an Illusion, 1927; Russian translation, 1930). Freud’s views, considered in their overall ideological development, evolved from “physiological materialism” and the mechanism of the Helmholtz school to the assertion of psychic autonomy and to anthropological constructs that are akin to naturalistic variants of the philosophy of life. The influence of Freud’s ideas ranges over a very broad spectrum of thought in bourgeois philosophy and sociology.

WORKS

Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–18. Stuttgart, 1966–69.
In Russian translation:
Psikhopatologiia obydennoi zhizni. Moscow, 1910.
Tri stat’i o teorii polovogo vlecheniia. Moscow, 1911.
Tolkovaniesnovidenii. Moscow, 1913.
Lektsiipo vvedeniiu v psikhoanaliz, vols. 1–2. Moscow, 1922.
Osnovnye psikhologicheskie teorii v psikhoanalize. Moscow-Petrograd, 1923.
Ocherki po psikhologii seksual’nosti. Moscow-Petrograd [no date].
Ostroumie i ego otnoshenie k bessoznatel’nomu. Moscow, 1925.
Izbrannoe, vol. 1. London, 1969.

REFERENCES

Wittels, F. Freid: Ego lichnost’, uchenie i shkola. Leningrad, 1925. (Translated from German.)
Zweig, S. Sobr. soch., vol. 11. Leningrad, 1932.
Wells, H. K. Pavlov i Freid. Moscow, 1959. (Translated from English.)
Jones, E. The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud, vols. 1–3. New York, 1953–57.

A. V. BRUENOK and D. N. LIALIKOV