Sigmund Freud

(1856-1939)

The most valuable source of information for understanding an individuals life experiences is
hos own writings but Freud systematically destroyed almost all letters, diaries, notes and
manuscripts at two points in his life: 28 and 51 and when doing so he was thinking about his
biographers who would chafe and that this endeavor wont make it too easy for them
1
.
He believed that he laid the foundations for a science of psychology, and he claimed to have
originated a method for permanently treating mentally ill patients. In the case of Freud it is
impossible to gain a proper insight into his lifes work without paying due regard to the man himself.
Much of his work is based, after all, on the analysis of his own person.
Freud was born on 6 May 1856 in Freiberg (Moravia, Austria), currently Pribor in the Czech
Republic into a Jewish family. His father, Jakob (born in 1815) before meeting Amelia Nathanson had
two children, Emanuel (1833-1814) and Philipp (1836-1911). Amelia was Jakobs third wife and was
20 years younger than him. Although she gave birth to seven more children, Sigmund was her
darling. It was a relationship of mutual adoration from the beginning. There were in fact a few
prophecies related to him one of which is that one day, an old woman who met the young mother
and son in a pastry shop declared that Freuds mother had brought a great man into the world. In
fact, his mother referred to him as mein goldener Sigi. In fact his relationship to her took quite an
erotic turn when in a letter to a confidant (1897) he said that when he was 2 his libido toward
matrem was awakened, namely, on the occasion of a journey with her from Leipzig to Vienna, during
which we must have spent the night together and there must have been an opportunity of seeing her
nudam. That event most likely took place when he was 4, while they moved from Leipzig at that
time. Amy Demorest considers that reporting his mothers nudity in Latin probably represents a
distancing or defense maneuver against this experience
2
. Growing up in an quite unusual family in
which his half-brothers were of the same age as the mother and in which he had a nephew one year
older than him may have influenced his later theories. He in fact had a complicated relationship vis a
vis his siblings, especially the firs two (born when he was 19 months and 2 years of age) a thing that
we find out from one of his letters and lets us know that he in fact remembers that time and that he
had negative feelings towards the new family members. In fact, he felt fearful not to be displaced by
these new rivals
3
.
When Sigismund was four years old his family moved to Vienna because his fathers wool
business was failing and this led to a gradual improvement of the familys economic situation but still
they lived a hard life. In fact in 1866, Sigmunds uncle was convicted for dealing in counterfeit
money
4
. In Vienna the young Sigmund went to the Sperl Gymnasium where he was at the top of the
class for seven years being especially well prepared in Latin, Greek, French and English. As the oldest
child he became the unchallenged leader of his siblings and was an outanding student thus able to
demand for his own study room, which was granted as well as receiveng the encouragement,
although his father was a struggling business man, to buy books. He was so drawn to studying that
with a friend started to learn Spanish in order to read Don Quixote in the original.
In 1873 he entered the University of Vienna studying medicine although he had more
interests in the Geisteswissenschaft area. He dabbled with Chemistry and Zoology but finally he
decided to work in the physiological area. His first influential teacher was Franz Brentano (1839-
1917) who thaught that motivational influences were extremelty important in determining the flow
of thought and that there wre profound differences between the objective reality of the physical
objects and the subjective reality of private thought and also considered wether unconscious ideas

1
Psychologys Grand Theorists, How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas, Amy Demorest, Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, Publishers, London-Mahwah-New Jersey, 2005, p. 43.
2
Psychologys Grand Theorists..., pp. 45-46.
3
Psychologys Grand Theorists..., p. 48.
4
Key Thinkers in Psychology, Rom Harr, Sage Publications, London-Thousand Oaks-New Delhi, 2006, p. 272.
exist concluding that they do not. The second was Ernst Brcke (1819-1892) in whose physiological
laboratory he worked for six years. Brcke was one of the founders of the mechanist movement (a
mechanistic way of thinking into physiology and medicine). He continued studying with Theodor
Meynert (1833-1893), the foremost brain anatomist in the world
5
. Freud finally took his degree in
1881 and the next year he took a job in Vienna General Hospital
6
where he still carried on research
and published on the topic of cerebral anatomy. At 29 he was appointed Privatdozent (lecturer) in
Neuropathology and awarded a travelling scholarship to Paris where he worked with Jean-Martin
Charcot (1825-1893)
7
, famous for his studies in hypnosis. Apparently here the interest in psychology
rather than physiology started.
At the age of 25 he met Martha Bernays and became engaged two months later (1882).
Because of his quite difficult financial situation, for the first 3 years of their relationship they lived
apart, in fact in different cities. During this period of time they exchanged around 900 letters. These
were motivated on one hand by his powerful passion but also by the fear of rivals. The first potential
rival appeared in the form of Fritz Wahle but he was in fact engaged to one of Marthas cousins.
Freud was to find out that he was right to fear him as he broke out in tears when he heard of their
engagement. Amy Demorest considers Martha to be the new mother in Freuds adult Oedipus
complex
8
. Only after 4 years since they met they got married, meaning upon his return from Paris
(late 1886). Soon after that he opened a private practice where he would treat patients with neurotic
behavior. He opened this neuropsychiatric practice with a well-established practitioner, Joseph
Breuer considered by Amy Demorest in the line of the Oedipian childhood experiences as the nee
father figure
9
. Freud was from his early years very investigative so that, for example, he experienced
with cocaine being interested in its ability to reduce pain and create lasting exhilaration but was not
able to realize its addictive properties. He used it on himself in order to fight with depression and
apathy. In his practice, as he studied in Paris, he used hypnosis but was not satisfied and, in fact, was
more interested in the method used by Josef Breuer (1842-1925), the talking therapy (cathartic
method) used to treat the majour neurotic disorders like hysteria (conversion disorder) that was
apparently culture and time bound as today it is quite difficult to find many ailing subjects. After
triying this catharthic method on her patien Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim, 1859-1936) he realised
(falsely) that she was cured. He continued using this method originarely used by Sir Francis Galton
but was chary in acknowledging his contribution. He took it further and started analysing himself
and his childhood placing emphasys on the sexual development
10
. Related to acknowledging the
others contributions and in fact, to how he treated his colaborators and some of his patients, Rom
Harr observes that it was far from admirable having consequences for the theories he proposed. He
also says that Freud was not above bullying patients into accepting his interpretations of their
troubles. Also, because he was driven by an intense passion to understand the human mind his
theories led to no small measure of self-deception
11
. His relations were also driven, Rom Harr says,
by the desperate need to be the leader. He needed to be recognized and honoured as the originator
of all the ideas that went into his growing theroretical account of the human mind. Unless a
colleague accepted his line in every detail, the relationship was soon broken off. This happened with
Carl Gustav Jung (considered by Amy Demorest as being Freuds adulthood brother
12
, 1875-1961),

5
Pioneers of Psychology, Raymond E. Fancher, W.W.Norton&Company, New York, 1979, pp. 209-211.
6
Key Thinkers in Psychology, p. 272.
7
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Martin_Charcot, 03.05.14, 18:35. He is also known as the founder of modern
neurology. His work greatly influenced the developing fields of neurology and psychology, also modern psychiatry owes
mucht to the work of Charcot and his direct followers. He was the foremost neurologist of the late nineteenth-century
France and called the Napoleon of neuroses.
8
Psychologys Grand Theorists..., pp. 51-54.
9
Psychologys Grand Theorists..., p. 59.
10
Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire, H.J. Eysenck, 1985,Viking, pp. 19-41.
11
Key Thinkers in Psychology, pp. 270-271.
12
Psychologys Grand Theorists..., p. 59.
Adolf Adler (1870-1937, founder of the school of individual psychology) and Wilhelm Flie (1858-
1928)
13
.
As Amy Demorest goes on, she notices that the ties that Freud developed in his adulthood
follow the same pattern of Oedipian envy of his childhood
14
.
Throughout his career, Freud always sought to place his clinical discoveries within a wider
theoretical context. He asked himself about the nature of the structures and functions that must
exist within the human organism, especiall the brain, to produce psychological phenomena.
Practically he sought to construct a theoretical model of the mind. His earliest attempts in the 1890s
ended witht he unpublished paper Project for a Scientific Psychology. He was facing some problems
as the nervous system was not understood well enough to allow him to sepcify in sufficient detail
which neurological mechanisms were responsible for which psychological terms. His last model of
the mind was published in 1923 in the Ego and the Id, where he intreduced the division of the mind
into id, ego and superego. Acoording to his conception, the mind was pre-eminently an organ
responsible for the resolution of conflict. According to Freud, the mind is beset by these different
kinds of demands that usually conflict and require a compromise solution.
In 1923 Freud was forced to acknowledge that he had developed a growth in the back of his
mouth and was advised to remove it. The operation was botched but he survived. In 1933 the Nazi
party set to flames massive numbers of books, among those were the writings of Sigmund Freud.
Five years later, Vienna was occupied and Freud escaped to England (4 June 1938) where one year
later, on the 23
rd
of September 1939 died at the age of 83
15
.
As for his legacy, the clearest input is that of his concepts (or at least versions of them) that
have entered folk psychology. People use notions as the uncounscious, repression, complexes, the
id and so on in trying to explain their experiences
16
.






















13
Key Thinkers in Psychology, p. 273. Freud was convinced that hysteria is the result o a forgotten sexual experience,
claiming that all his patients had been sexually assaulted as children. This theory was let aside for the Oedipus complex and
realization that the stories of childhood seduction were not true and that these fantasies. It might seem that in fact these
stories were influenced by Freud who might have bullied the patients into telling them. By writing about this, he claimed the
status of being the prime innovator of a new approach to psychology but his took this idea almost whole from Flie.
14
Psychologys Grand Theorists..., p. 51.
15
Psychologys Grand Theorists..., p. 66.
16
cf. Key Thinkers in Psychology, p. 271
Chronology

1815 Birth of Jakob Freud.
1835 Birth fo Amelia Nathanson.
1856 Birth of Sigismund Freud.
1860 The family moves to Vienna.
1865 Sigismund enters Highschool.
1873 He enrolls in the University of Vienna.
1877 First scientific publication (On the origin of the posterior nerve roots in the
spinal cord of Amnocoetes).
1878 Sigismund changes his name into Sigmund.
1876-1882 Research in the Brcke laboratories.
1882 He meets Martha Bernays.
17 June Engagement.
31 July He enters Vienna General Hospital.
1883 Sept. He specializes in neurology.
1884 June Study on cocaine.
1885 He is granted a scholarship.
13 Oct. He arrives in Paris.
1886 25 Apr. Start of his medical practice.
14 Sept. Marriage.
1887 He meets Flie.
1895 Break up with Breuer.
1896 March First use of the word psychoanalasys.
1900 August Break up with Flie.
1902 Oct. Beginning of the Psychological Society of Wednsday that will become in April
1908 the Psychoanalitical Society of Vienna.
1910 Foundation of the International Psychoanalasys Foundation.
1913 Oct. Break up with Jung.
1916-17 Last connferences at the University.
1923 Surgery.
1926 Meeting wint Einstein in Berlin.
1927 The future of an illusion
1938 March Occupation of Vienna.
June He leaves for London.
Sept. Last surgery.
1939 Feb. Reccurence of cancer. Inoperable.
23 Sept. Death
17
.


17
Freud, Dr. Bernard Muldworf, ditions Messidor, Paris, 1987, pp. 295-298.