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Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud, by Max Halberstadt, 1921

Sigismund Schlomo Freud

6 May 1856
Born Freiberg in Mähren,
Moravia, Austrian Empire
(now the Czech Republic)
23 September 1939
Died (aged 83)
London, England, UK
Residence Austria, UK
Nationality Austrian
Neurology
Philosophy
Psychiatry
Fields Psychology
Psychotherapy
Psychoanalysis
Literature
Institutions University of Vienna
Alma mater University of Vienna
Known for Psychoanalysis
 Breuer, Charcot, Darwin,
Dostoyevsky, Goethe,
Haeckel, Hartmann,
Influences Jackson, Kant, Mayer,
Nietzsche, Shakespeare,
Schopenhauer, Sophocles,
J.P. Jacobsen
John Bowlby
Viktor Frankl
Anna Freud
Arthur Janov
Ernest Jones
Influenced Carl Jung
Melanie Klein
Jacques Lacan
Fritz Perls
Otto Rank
Wilhelm Reich
Notable
Goethe Prize
awards
Signature

Part of a series of articles on

Psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud (German pronunciation: [ˈziːɡmʊnt ˈfʁɔʏt]), born Sigismund Schlomo Freud (6

May 1856 – 23 September 1939), was an Austrian neurologist who founded the psychoanalytic
school of psychiatry. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the
defense mechanism of repression, and for creating the clinical practice of psychoanalysis for
treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient, technically referred to as an
"analysand", and a psychoanalyst. Freud redefined sexual desire as the primary motivational
energy of human life, developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association,
created the theory of transference in the therapeutic relationship, and interpreted dreams as
sources of insight into unconscious desires. He was an early neurological researcher into cerebral
palsy, and a prolific essayist, drawing on psychoanalysis to contribute to the history,
interpretation and critique of culture.

While many of Freud's ideas have fallen out of favor or been modified by other analysts, and
modern advances in the field of psychology have shown flaws in some of his theories, his work
remains influential in clinical approaches, and in the humanities and social sciences. He is
considered one of the most prominent thinkers of the first half of the 20th century, in terms of
originality and intellectual influence.

Early life
Freud was born on 6 May 1856, to Jewish Galician[1] parents in the Moravian town of Příbor,
Austrian Empire, now the Czech Republic. Freud was born with a caul, which the family
accepted as a positive omen.[2]

His father, Jacob,[3] was 41, a wool merchant, and had two children by a previous marriage. His
mother, Amalié (née Nathansohn), the second wife of Jakob, was 21. He was the first of their
eight children and, in accordance with tradition, his parents favored him over his siblings from
the early stages of his childhood. Despite their poverty, they sacrificed everything to give him a
proper education. Due to the economic crisis of 1857, Freud's father lost his business, and the
family moved to Leipzig before settling in Vienna.

In 1865, Freud entered the Leopoldstädter Kommunal-Realgymnasium, a prominent high school.

He was an outstanding pupil and graduated the Matura in 1873 with honors.

After planning to study law, Freud joined the medical faculty at University of Vienna to study
under Darwinist Prof. Karl Claus.[4] At that time, the eel life cycle was unknown and Freud spent
four weeks at the Austrian zoological research station in Trieste, dissecting hundreds of eels in
an unsuccessful search for their male reproductive organs.

Freud began smoking at 24; he smoked cigarettes at first, but later switched exclusively to cigars.
Freud believed that smoking enhanced his capacity to work and ability to muster self-control,
and continued despite warnings from Wilhelm Fliess.[5]

Development of psychoanalysis
Group photo 1909 in front of Clark University. Front row: Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, Carl
Jung; back row: Abraham A. Brill, Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi.

Berggasse 19

Approach to Freud's consulting rooms at Berggasse

In October 1885, Freud went to Paris on a traveling fellowship to study with Europe's most
renowned neurologist and researcher of hypnosis, Jean-Martin Charcot. He was later to
remember the experience of this stay as catalytic in turning him toward the practice of medical
psychopathology and away from a less financially promising career in neurology research.[6]
Charcot specialised in the study of hysteria and susceptibility to hypnosis, which he frequently
demonstrated with patients on stage in front of an audience. Freud later turned away from
hypnosis as a potential cure for mental illness, instead favouring free association and dream
analysis.[7] Charcot himself questioned his own work on hysteria towards the end of his life.[8]
After opening his own medical practice, specializing in neurology, Freud married Martha
Bernays in 1886. Her father Berman was the son of Isaac Bernays, chief rabbi in Hamburg.

After experimenting with hypnosis on his neurotic patients, Freud abandoned this form of
treatment as it proved ineffective for many, he favored treatment where the patient talked
through his or her problems. This came to be known as the "talking cure" and the ultimate goal
of this talking was to locate and release powerful emotional energy that had initially been
rejected or imprisoned in the unconscious mind. Freud called this denial of emotions
"repression", and he believed that it was an impediment to the normal functioning of the psyche,
even capable of causing physical retardation which he described as "psychosomatic". The term
"talking cure" was initially coined by a patient, Anna O., who was treated by Freud's colleague
Josef Breuer. The "talking cure" is widely seen as the basis of psychoanalysis.[9]

Carl Jung initiated the rumor that a romantic relationship may have developed between Freud
and his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, who had moved into Freud's apartment at 19 Berggasse in
1896.[10] Psychologist Hans Eysenck has suggested that the affair occurred, resulting in an
aborted pregnancy for Miss Bernays.[11] The publication in 2006 of a Swiss hotel log, dated 13
August 1898, has been regarded by some Freudian scholars (including Peter Gay) as showing
that there was a factual basis to these rumors.[12]

In his 40s, Freud "had numerous psychosomatic disorders as well as exaggerated fears of dying
and other phobias" (Corey 2001, p. 67). In that time, Freud was exploring his own dreams,
memories, and the dynamics of his personality development. During this self-analysis, he came
to realize a hostility he felt towards his father, Jacob Freud, who had died in 1896.[13] He also
recalled "his childhood sexual feelings for his mother, Amalia Freud, who was attractive, warm,
and protective" (Corey 2001, p. 67). Freud considered this time of emotional difficulty to be the
most creative time in his life.

After the publication of Freud's books in 1900 and 1905, interest in his theories began to grow,
and a circle of supporters developed in the following period. However, Freud often clashed with
those supporters who critiqued his theories, the most famous being Carl Jung, who had originally
supported Freud's ideas. Part of the disagreement between the two was in Jung's interest and
commitment to religion, which Freud saw as unscientific.[14]

Struggle with cancer

In February 1923, Freud detected a leukoplakia, a benign growth associated with heavy smoking,
on his mouth. Freud initially kept this secret, but in April 1923 informed Ernest Jones, telling
him that the growth had been removed. Freud consulted the dermatologist Maximilian Steiner,
who advised him to quit smoking but lied about the growth's seriousness, minimizing its
importance. Freud later saw Felix Deutsch, who saw that the growth was cancerous; he identified
it to Freud using the euphemism "a bad leukoplakia" instead of the technical diagnosis
epithelioma. Deutsch advised Freud to stop smoking and have the growth excised. Freud was
treated by Marcus Hajek, a rhinologist whose competence he had previously questioned; Hajek
performed an unnecessary cosmetic surgery in the his clinic's outpatient department. Freud bled
during and after the operation, and may narrowly have escaped death. Freud subsequently saw
Deutsch again; Deutsch saw that further surgery would be required, but refrained from telling
Freud that he had cancer because he was worried that Freud might wish to commit suicide.[15]

Escape from Austria and final years

In 1932, Freud received the Goethe Prize in appreciation of his contribution to psychology and to
German literary culture. One year later (on 30 January 1933), the Nazis took control of Germany,
and Freud's books were prominent among those burned and destroyed by the Nazis. Freud
quipped:

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now
“ they are content with burning my books.[16] ”
Freud's four sisters perished in Nazi Concentration Camps.

In March 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss. This led to violent outbursts of
anti-Semitism in Vienna, and Freud and his family received visits from the Gestapo. Freud
decided to go into exile "to die in freedom". In this goal, he was fortuitously assisted by Anton
Sauerwald, a Nazi official given control over all Freud's assets in Austria. Sauerwald, however,
was not an ordinary Nazi; while "he had made bombs for the Nazi movement, he had also
studied medicine, chemistry and law."[17]

At the University of Vienna, Sauerwald had been a student of Professor Josef Herzig, who often
visited Freud to play cards. Sauerwald did not disclose to his Nazi superiors that Freud had many
secret bank accounts and disobeyed a Nazi directive to have Freud's books on psychoanalysis
destroyed.[17] Instead, Sauerwald and an accomplice smuggled them to the Austrian national
library, where they were hidden. Finally, dismayed by a Nazi order to transform Freud's home
into an institute for the study of Aryan superiority, Sauerwald signed Sigmund Freud's exit visa.
[17]
In June 1938, Freud left Vienna aboard the Orient Express train and settled in London. While
Freud told a local newspaper that "all my money and property in Vienna is gone", he did not
mention his secret bank accounts. When Anton Sauerwald went to trial on charges of absconding
with Freud’s secret wealth after the war, Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud's daughter, intervened to
protect Sauerwald. She disclosed to Harry Freud, a US army officer who had had Sauerwald
arrested, that:

"[The] truth is that we really owe our lives and our freedom to ,... [Sauerwald].
“ Without him we would never have got away."[17] ”
Sauerwald was then released from U.S. custody.

After arriving in Britain, Freud and his family settled in 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead,
London. There is a statue of him at the corner of Belsize Lane and Fitzjohn's Avenue, near Swiss
Cottage.
In September 1939, Freud, who was suffering from cancer and in severe pain, persuaded his
doctor and friend Max Schur to help him commit suicide. After reading Balzac's La Peau de
chagrin in a single sitting, he said, "Schur, you remember our 'contract' not to leave me in the
lurch when the time had come. Now it is nothing but torture and makes no sense."[18] When
Schur said that he had not forgotten, Freud said, "I thank you." and then "Talk it over with Anna,
and if she thinks it's right, then make an end of it."[18] Anna Freud wanted to postpone Freud's
death, but Schur convinced her it was pointless to keep him alive, and on September 21 and 22
administered doses of morphine that resulted in Freud's death on 23 September 1939.[18]

Three days after his death, Freud's body was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium in England
during a service attended by Austrian refugees, including the author Stefan Zweig. His ashes
were later placed in the crematorium's columbarium. They rest in an ancient Greek urn that
Freud received as a present from Marie Bonaparte, and which he had kept in his study in Vienna
for many years. After Martha Freud's death in 1951, her ashes were also placed in the urn.

Freud's ideas
Freud has been influential in two related but distinct ways: he simultaneously developed a theory
of the human mind's organization and internal operations and a theory that human behavior both
conditions and results from how the mind is organized. This led him to favor certain clinical
techniques for trying to help cure mental illness. He theorized that personality is developed by a
person's childhood experiences. In his philosophical writings he advocated an atheistic world
view; he was eulogized as "'the atheist's touchstone' for the 20th century."[19]

Early work

Sigmund Freud memorial in Hampstead, North London. Sigmund and Anna Freud lived at 20
Maresfield Gardens, near this statue. Their house is now a museum dedicated to Freud's life and
work.[20] The building behind the statue is the Tavistock Clinic, a major psychological health care
institution.
Freud began his study of medicine at the University of Vienna. He took nine years to complete
his studies, due to his interest in neurophysiological research, specifically investigation of the
sexual anatomy of eels and the physiology of the fish nervous system. He entered private
practice in neurology for financial reasons, receiving his M.D. degree in 1881 at the age of 25.[21]
He was also an early researcher in the field of cerebral palsy, which was then known as "cerebral
paralysis." He published several medical papers on the topic, and showed that the disease existed
long before other researchers of the period 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 birth being a cause. Instead, he suggested that complications in birth were only a
symptom.

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 repressed thoughts and feelings
into consciousness in order to free the patient from suffering repetitive distorted emotions.

Classically, the bringing of unconscious thoughts and feelings to consciousness is brought about
by encouraging a patient to talk in free association and to talk about dreams. Another important
element of psychoanalysis is lesser 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 discover and resolve repressed conflicts, especially childhood
conflicts involving parents.[22]

The origin of Freud's early work with psychoanalysis can be linked to Josef Breuer. Freud
credited Breuer with opening the way to the discovery of the psychoanalytical method by his
treatment of the case of Anna O. In November 1880 Breuer was called in to treat a highly
intelligent 21-year-old woman (Bertha Pappenheim) for a persistent cough which he diagnosed
as hysterical. He found that while nursing her dying father she had developed a number of
transitory symptoms, including visual disorders and paralysis and contractures of limbs, which
he also diagnosed as hysterical. Breuer began to see his patient almost every day as the
symptoms increased and became more persistent, and observed that she entered states of
absence. He found that when, with his encouragement, she told fantasy stories in her evening
states of absence her condition improved, and most of her symptoms had disappeared by April
1881. However, following the death of her father in that month her condition deteriorated again.
Breuer recorded that some of the symptoms eventually remitted spontaneously, and that full
recovery was achieved by inducing her to recall events that had precipitated the occurrence of a
specific symptom.[23][24] In the years immediately following Breuer's treatment, Anna O. spent
three short periods in sanatoria with the diagnosis "hysteria" with "somatic symptoms,"[25] and
some authors have challenged Breuer's published account of a cure.[26][27][28] (A contrary view has
been published by Richard Skues.)[29]

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" and his newly developed analytic
technique of interpretation and reconstruction. According to Freud's later accounts of this period,
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 believe that they were
fantasies. He explained these at first as having the function of "fending off" memories of
infantile masturbation, but in later years he wrote that they represented Oedipal fantasies.[30]

Another version of events focuses on Freud's proposing that unconscious memories of infantile
sexual abuse were at the root of the psychoneuroses in letters to Wilhelm Fliess in October 1895,
before he reported that he had actually discovered such abuse among his patients.[31] In the first
half of 1896 Freud published three papers stating that he had uncovered, in all of his current
patients, deeply repressed memories of sexual abuse in early childhood.[32] In these papers Freud
recorded that his patients were not consciously aware of these memories, and must therefore be
present as unconscious memories if they were to result in hysterical symptoms or obsessional
neurosis. The patients were subjected to considerable pressure to "reproduce" infantile sexual
abuse "scenes" that Freud was convinced had been repressed into the unconscious.[33] Patients
were generally unconvinced that their experiences of Freud's clinical procedure indicated actual
sexual abuse. He reported that even after a supposed "reproduction" of sexual scenes the patients
assured him emphatically of their disbelief.[34]

As well as his pressure technique, Freud's clinical procedures involved analytic inference and the
symbolic interpretation of symptoms to trace back to memories of infantile sexual abuse.[35] His
claim of one hundred percent confirmation of his theory only served to reinforce previously
expressed reservations from his colleagues about the validity of findings obtained through his
suggestive techniques.[36]

Cocaine

As a medical researcher, 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 friend and confidant Wilhelm Fliess, who recommended cocaine for the treatment
of "nasal reflex neurosis". Fliess operated on the noses of Freud and a number of Freud's patients'
whom he believed to be suffering the disorder, including Emma Eckstein, whose surgery proved
disastrous.[37]

Freud felt that cocaine would work as a panacea 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 acquired while treating a disease of the nervous system.[38] Freud
also recommended cocaine to many of his close family and friends. He narrowly missed out on
obtaining scientific priority for discovering its anesthetic properties of which he was aware but
had not written extensively. Karl Koller, a colleague of Freud's in Vienna, received that
distinction in 1884 after reporting to a medical society the ways cocaine could be used in 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
ambition. 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, dubbed by later biographers as "The Cocaine Incident".[citation needed] He managed
to move on although some speculate that he continued to use cocaine after this event. Some
critics have suggested that most of Freud's psychoanalytical theory was a byproduct of his
cocaine use.[39]

The Unconscious

Perhaps the most significant contribution Freud made to Western thought were his arguments
concerning the importance of the unconscious mind in understanding conscious thought and
behavior. However, as psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer 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 Principles of Psychology his monumental treatise on
psychology, examined the way Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, Janet, Binet and others had used
the term 'unconscious' and 'subconscious'".[40] Boris Sidis, a Russian Jew who emigrated to the
United States of America in 1887, and studied under William James, wrote The Psychology of
Suggestion: A Research into the Subconscious Nature of Man and Society in 1898, followed by
ten or more works over the next twenty five years on similar topics to the works of Freud.
Historian of psychology Mark Altschule concluded, "It is difficult—or perhaps impossible—to
find a nineteenth-century psychologist or psychiatrist who did not recognize unconscious
cerebration as not only real but of the highest importance."[41] Freud's advance was not to uncover
the unconscious but to devise a method for systematically studying it.

Freud called dreams the "royal road to the unconscious". This meant that dreams illustrate the
"logic" of the unconscious mind. Freud developed his first topology of the psyche in The
Interpretation of Dreams (1899) in which he proposed 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; its contents could be accessed with a little effort.

One key factor in the operation of the unconscious is "repression". Freud believed that many
people "repress" painful memories deep into their unconscious mind. 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 repression varies among individual patients. Freud also argued
that the act of repression did not take place within a person's consciousness. Thus, people are
unaware of the fact that they have buried memories or traumatic experiences.

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 processes and
contents that are defensively removed from consciousness as a result of conflicting attitudes. 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. 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. He
noted finding 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 in fact been sexually
abused by their fathers. He explicitly discussed several patients whom he knew to have been
abused.[42]

Freud also believed that the libido developed in individuals by changing its object, a process
codified 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 evacuating 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 term 'Electra complex' is
sometimes used to refer to such a fixation on the father, although Freud did not advocate its use.)
The repressive or dormant latency stage of psychosexual development preceded the sexually
mature genital stage of psychosexual development.

Freud's views have sometimes been called phallocentric. This is because, for Freud, the
unconscious desires the phallus (penis). Males are afraid of losing their masculinity, symbolized
by the phallus, to another male. Females always desire to have a phallus—an unfulfillable desire.
Thus boys resent their fathers (fear of castration) and girls desire theirs.
Id, ego, and super-ego

Main article: Id, ego, and super-ego

In his later work, Freud proposed that the human psyche could be divided into three parts: Id,
ego, and super-ego. Freud discussed this model in the 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
and fully elaborated upon it in The Ego and the Id (1923), in which he developed it as an
alternative to his previous topographic schema (i.e., conscious, unconscious, and preconscious).
The id is the impulsive, child-like portion of the psyche that operates on the "pleasure principle"
and only takes into account what it wants and disregards all consequences.

The term ego entered the English language in the late 18th century; Benjamin Franklin (1706–
1790) described the game of chess as a way to "...keep the mind fit and the ego in check". Freud
acknowledged that his use of the term Id (das Es, "the It") derives from the writings of Georg
Groddeck. The term Id appears in the earliest writing of Boris Sidis, in which it is attributed to
William James, as early as 1898.

The super-ego is the moral component of the psyche, which takes into account no special
circumstances in which the morally right thing may not be right for a given situation. The
rational ego attempts to exact a balance between the impractical hedonism of the id and the
equally impractical moralism of the super-ego; it is the part of the psyche that is usually reflected
most directly in a person's actions. When overburdened or threatened by its tasks, it may employ
defense mechanisms including denial, repression, and displacement. The theory of ego defense
mechanisms has received empirical validation,[43] and the nature of repression, in particular,
became one of the more fiercely debated areas of psychology in the 1990s.[44]

Life and death drives

Freud believed that humans were driven by two conflicting central desires: the life drive
(libido/Eros) (survival, propagation, hunger, thirst, and sex) and the death drive (Thanatos).[45]
Freud's description of Cathexis, whose energy is known as libido, included all creative, life-
producing drives. The death drive (or death instinct), whose energy is known as anticathexis,
represented an urge inherent in all living things to return to a state of calm: in other words, an
inorganic or dead state.

Freud recognized the death drive only in his later years and developed his theory of it in Beyond
the Pleasure Principle. Freud approached the paradox between the life drives and the death
drives by defining pleasure and unpleasure. According to Freud, unpleasure refers to stimulus
that the body receives. (For example, excessive friction on the skin's surface produces a burning
sensation; or, the bombardment of visual stimuli amidst rush hour traffic produces anxiety.)

Conversely, pleasure is a result of a decrease in stimuli (for example, a calm environment the
body enters after having been subjected to a hectic environment). If pleasure increases as stimuli
decreases, then the ultimate experience of pleasure for Freud would be zero stimulus, or death.
[citation needed]
Given this proposition, Freud acknowledged the tendency for the unconscious to repeat
unpleasurable experiences in order to desensitize, or deaden, the body. This compulsion to repeat
unpleasurable experiences explains why traumatic nightmares occur in dreams, as nightmares
seem to contradict Freud's earlier conception of dreams purely as a site of pleasure, fantasy, and
desire. On the one hand, the life drives promote survival by avoiding extreme unpleasure and any
threat to life. On the other hand, the death drive functions simultaneously toward extreme
pleasure, which leads to death. Freud addressed the conceptual dualities of pleasure and
unpleasure, as well as sex/life and death, in his discussions on masochism and sadomasochism.
The tension between life drive and death drive represented a revolution in his manner of
thinking.

These ideas resemble aspects of the philosophies of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich
Nietzsche. Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy, expounded in The World as Will and
Representation, describes a renunciation of the will to live that corresponds on many levels with
Freud's Death Drive. Similarly, the life drive clearly parallels much of Nietzsche's concept of the
Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy. However, Freud denied having been acquainted with their
writings before he formulated the groundwork of his own ideas.[46]

Freud's legacy
Psychotherapy

Freud's theories and research methods have always been controversial. He and psychoanalysis
have been criticized in very extreme terms.[47] For an often-quoted example, Peter Medawar, a
Nobel Prize winning immunologist, said in 1975 that psychoanalysis is the "most stupendous
intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century".[47] However, Freud has had a tremendous
impact on psychotherapy. Many psychotherapists follow Freud's approach to an extent, even if
they reject his theories.

One influential post-Freudian psychotherapy has been the primal therapy of the American
psychologist Arthur Janov.[48][49][50]

Freud's contributions to psychotherapy have been extensively criticized and defended by many
scholars and historians.

Critics include H. J. Eysenck, who wrote that Freud 'set psychiatry back one hundred years',
consistently mis-diagnosed his patients, fraudulently misrepresented case histories and that "what
is true in Freud is not new and what is new in Freud is not true".[51]

Betty Friedan also criticised Freud and his Victorian slant on women in her 1963 book The
Feminine Mystique.[52] Freud's concept of penis envy—and his definition of female as a
negative[53]—was attacked by Kate Millett, whose 1970 book Sexual Politics explained confusion
and oversights in his work.[54] Naomi Weisstein wrote that Freud and his followers erroneously
thought that his "years of intensive clinical experience" added up to scientific rigor.[55]
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen wrote in a review of Han Israëls's book Der Fall Freud published in The
London Review of Books that, "The truth is that Freud knew from the very start that Fleischl,
Anna O. and his 18 patients were not cured, and yet he did not hesitate to build grand theories on
these non-existent foundations...he disguised fragments of his self-analysis as ‘objective’ cases,
that he concealed his sources, that he conveniently antedated some of his analyses, that he
sometimes attributed to his patients ‘free associations’ that he himself made up, that he inflated
his therapeutic successes, that he slandered his opponents."[56]

Jacques Lacan saw attempts to locate pathology in, and then to cure, the individual as more
characteristic of American ego psychology than of proper psychoanalysis. For Lacan,
psychoanalysis involved "self-discovery" and even social criticism, and it succeeded insofar as it
provided emancipatory self-awareness.[57]

David Stafford-Clark summed up criticism of Freud: "Psychoanalysis was and will always be
Freud's original creation. Its discovery, exploration, investigation, and constant revision formed
his life's work. It is manifest injustice, as well as wantonly insulting, to commend
psychoanalysis, still less to invoke it 'without too much of Freud'."[58] It's like supporting the
theory of evolution 'without too much of Darwin'. If psychoanalysis is to be treated seriously at
all, one must take into account, both seriously and with equal objectivity, the original theories of
Sigmund Freud.

Ethan Watters and Richard Ofshe wrote, "The story of Freud and the creation of psychodynamic
therapy, as told by its adherents, is a self-serving myth".[59]

Philosophy

Freud did not consider himself a philosopher, although he greatly admired Franz Brentano,
known for his theory of perception, as well as Theodor Lipps, who was one of the main
supporters of the ideas of the unconscious and empathy.[60] In his 1932 lecture on psychoanalysis
as "a philosophy of life" Freud commented on the distinction between science and philosophy:

Philosophy is not opposed to science, it behaves itself as if it were a science, and to a

certain extent it makes use of the same methods; but it parts company with science, in
that it clings to the illusion that it can produce a complete and coherent picture of the
universe, though in fact that picture must needs fall to pieces with every new advance in
our knowledge. Its methodological error lies in the fact that it over-estimates the
epistemological value of our logical operations, and to a certain extent admits the validity
of other sources of knowledge, such as intuition.[61]

Freud's model of the mind is often considered a challenge to the enlightenment model of rational
agency, which was a key element of much modern philosophy. Freud's theories have had a
tremendous effect on the Frankfurt school and critical theory. Following the "return to Freud" of
the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Freud had an incisive influence on some French
philosophers.[62]
Freud once openly admitted to avoiding the work of Nietzsche, "whose guesses and intuitions
often agree in the most astonishing way with the laborious findings of psychoanalysis".[63]
Nietzsche, however, vociferously rejected the conjecture of 'scientific' men, and despite also
'diagnosing' the death of a God, chose instead to embrace the animal desires (or 'Dionysian
energies') the humanist Freud sought to reject through positivism.[citation needed]

Science

Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper argued that Freud's psychoanalytic theories were
presented in untestable form.[64] Psychology departments in American universities today are
scientifically oriented, and Freudian theory has been marginalized, being regarded instead as a
"desiccated and dead" historical artifact, according to a recent APA study.[65] Recently, however,
researchers in the emerging field of neuro-psychoanalysis have argued for Freud's theories,
pointing out brain structures relating to Freudian concepts such as libido, drives, the
unconscious, and repression.[66][67] Founded by South African neuroscientist Mark Solms,[68]
neuro-psychoanalysis has received contributions from researchers including Oliver Sacks,[69]
Jaak Panksepp,[70] Douglas Watt, António Damásio,[71] Eric Kandel, and Joseph E. LeDoux.[72]
Still other clinical researchers have recently found empirical support for more specific
hypotheses of Freud such as that of the "repetition compulsion" in relation to psychological
trauma.[73]

Patients

Freud's couch used during psychoanalytic sessions

Freud used pseudonyms in his case histories. Many of the people identified only by pseudonyms
were traced to their true identities by Peter Swales. Some patients known by pseudonyms were
Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim, 1859–1936); Cäcilie M. (Anna von Lieben); Dora (Ida Bauer,
1882–1945); Frau Emmy von N. (Fanny Moser); Fräulein Elisabeth von R. (Ilona Weiss);[74]
Fräulein Katharina (Aurelia Kronich); Fräulein Lucy R.; Little Hans (Herbert Graf, 1903–1973);
Rat Man (Ernst Lanzer, 1878–1914); and Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff, 1887–1979). Other
famous patients included H.D. (1886–1961); Emma Eckstein (1865–1924); Gustav Mahler
(1860–1911), with whom Freud had only a single, extended consultation; and Princess Marie
Bonaparte. Critics of Freud argue that, among all his patients, Freud was "unable to document a
single unambiguously efficacious treatment".[75]
People on whom psychoanalytic observations were published, but who were not patients,
included Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911); Giordano Bruno, Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924),
on whom Freud co-authored an analysis with primary writer William Bullitt; Michelangelo,
whom Freud analyzed in his essay, "The Moses of Michelangelo"; Leonardo da Vinci, analyzed
in Freud's book, Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood; Moses, in Freud's book, Moses
and Monotheism; and Josef Popper-Lynkeus, in Freud's paper, "Josef Popper-Lynkeus and the
Theory of Dreams".

Followers

Alfred Adler

Freud spent most of his life in Vienna, where a brilliant group of followers formed around him.
They believed that his ideas could do more for the treatment of neurotic patients than any other
method. These people spread their ideas throughout Europe and America. Some of them
subsequently withdrew from the original psychoanalytic society and founded their own divergent
schools. The most famous of these are Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung.

Around 1910, Alfred Adler began to pay attention to some of the conscious personality factors
and gradually deviated from Freud's basic ideas, including the perceptions of the importance of
infant hunger for life and the driving force of unconscious cruelty. Adler eventually realized that
his views were different from Freud's, and started a system he called Individual psychology.

Carl Jung
In 1912 Jung published Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (published in English in 1916 as
Psychology of the Unconscious) and it became clear that his views were taking a direction quite
different from those of Freud. To distinguish his system from psychoanalysis, Jung called it
analytical psychology.

Another follower of Freud was Karen Horney, one of whose primary contributions was to
introduce a new method of psychoanalysis—introspection. Horney believed that in some cases,
the patient is able to continue the analysis without the supervision of the doctor, if he has already
mastered the technique. She claimed that some people can achieve a clear understanding of their
unconscious stress without the supervision of experienced analysts. Horney is now considered a
Neo-Freudian.

Bibliography
On 1 January 2010, in accordance with the Life+70 law of copyright, the works of Sigmund
Freud passed into the Public Domain.

Major works by Freud

 The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated
from the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey. In collaboration with
Anna Freud. Assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, 24 volumes, Vintage, 1999
 Studies on Hysteria (with Josef Breuer) (Studien über Hysterie, 1895)
 The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, Publisher:
Belknap Press, 1986, ISBN 0-674-15421-5
 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)
 Delusion and Dream in Jensen's Gradiva (Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensens
Gradiva, 1907)
 Totem and Taboo (Totem und Tabu, 1913)
 On Narcissism (Zur Einführung des Narzißmus, 1914)
 Introduction to Psychoanalysis (Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse, 1917)
 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)

Correspondence
  The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, (editor and
translator Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson), 1985, ISBN 0-674-15420-7
 The Sigmund Freud Carl Gustav Jung Letters, Publisher: Princeton University Press; Abr
edition , 1994, ISBN 0-691-03643-8
 The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham, 1907-1925,
Publisher: Karnac Books, 2002, ISBN 1-85575-051-1
 The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, 1908-1939., Belknap
Press, Harvard University Press, 1995, ISBN 0-674-15424-X
 The Sigmund Freud Ludwig Binswanger Letters, Publisher: Open Gate Press, 2000,
ISBN 1-871871-45-X
 The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Volume 1, 1908-1914,
Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1994, ISBN 0-674-17418-6
 The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Volume 2, 1914-1919,
Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1996, ISBN 0-674-17419-4
 The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Volume 3, 1920-1933,
Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2000, ISBN 0-674-00297-0
 The Letters of Sigmund Freud to Eduard Silberstein, 1871-1881, Belknap Press, Harvard
University Press, ISBN 0-674-52828-X
 Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salome; letters, Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich;
1972, ISBN 0-15-133490-0
 The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Arnold Zweig, Publisher: New York University Press,
1987, ISBN 0-8147-2585-6
 Letters of Sigmund Freud - selected and edited by Ernst Ludwig Freud, Publisher: New
York: Basic Books, 1960, ISBN 0-486-27105-6

Biographies

 Helen Walker Puner, Freud: His Life and His Mind (1947)
 Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols. (1953–1958)
 Frank Sulloway, Freud: Biologist of the Mind (1979)
 Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction
Theory, Ballantine Books (November 2003), ISBN 0-345-45279-8
 Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988)
 Louis Breger, Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision, (New York: Wiley, 2000), ISBN
978-0-471-07858-6
 Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, (Victor Gollancz, 1960)

Further reading

 Cioffi, Frank. Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience. Peru, IL: Open Court, 1999.
 Derrida, Jacques & Roudinesco, Elisabeth. For What Tomorrow... Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press, 2004.
 Dufresne, Todd, ed. Against Freud: Critics Talk Back. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2007.
 Dufresne, Todd. Killing Freud: Twentieth-Century Culture and the Death of
Psychoanalysis. New York: Continuum, 2003.
 Ellenberger, Henri. Beyond the Unconscious: Essays of Henri F. Ellenberger in the
History of Psychiatry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
 Ellenberger, Henri. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of
Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books, 1970.
 Fromm, Erich. Greatness and Limitations of Freud's Thought. London: Cape, 1980.
 Hale, Nathan G., Jr. Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the
United States, 1876-1917. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.
 Hale, Nathan G., Jr. The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud
and the Americans, 1917-1985. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
 Hirschmüller, Albrecht. The Life and Work of Josef Breuer. New York University Press,
1989.
 Jung, Carl Gustav. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung Volume 4: Freud and
Psychoanalysis. Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1961.
 Lear, Jonathan. Freud. New York and London: Routledge, 2005.
 Macmillan, Malcolm. Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc. Cambridge, Mass.: The
MIT Press, 1997.
 Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.
 Roazen, Paul. Freud and His Followers. New York: Knopf, 1975.
 Roazen, Paul. Freud: Political and Social Thought. London: Hogarth Press, 1969.
 Roudinesco, Elisabeth. Why Psychoanalysis? New York: Columbia University Press,
2003.
 Roth, Michael, ed. Freud: Conflict and Culture. New York: Vintage, 1998.
 Webster, Richard. Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis. Oxford: The
Orwell Press, 2005.
 Wollheim, Richard. Freud. Fontana, 1971.
 Wollheim, Richard, and James Hopkins, eds. Philosophical Essays on Freud. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982.
 Zaretsky, Eli. Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis. New
York: Vintage, 2005.