Freud, Sigmund

I

Introduction

Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939), Austrian physician and founder of psychoanalysis. Through his skill as a scientist, physician, and writer, he created an entirely new approach to the understanding of human personality by bringing together ideas prevalent at the time, along with his own observation and study, into a major theory of psychology. Most importantly, he applied these ideas to medical practice in the treatment of mental disorders. These newly created psychotherapy treatments and procedures, many of which in modified form are applied today, were based on his understanding of unconscious thought processes and their relationship to neurotic symptoms. Regarded with scepticism at the time, Freud’s ideas have waxed and waned in acceptance ever since. Nevertheless, he remains regarded as one of the greatest creative minds of the 20th century.

II

Early Life

Freud was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Freiberg, Moravia (now Pribor in the Czech Republic) on May 6, 1856. When he was three years old, the family was forced to flee riots that characterized the strong anti-Semitic feeling that prevailed within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After a brief period in Leipzig the family settled in Vienna, where Freud remained for most of his life. At school the young Freud was at first drawn towards study of the law, but on reading the work of Charles Darwin he became intrigued by the rapidly developing sciences of the day. Especially inspired by the scientific investigations of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, he decided to become a medical student based on his having heard Goethe’s essay on nature read aloud shortly before he left school.

III

Career

Freud’s medical education began in Vienna in 1873 when he was 17. At 20, he was drawn to further study of the central nervous system under the tutelage of the German neurologist Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke. This delayed his graduation in medicine until 1881, by which time he was 25 and had also completed a year of compulsory military service. He remained at the university as a demonstrator in the physiology laboratory continuing his wide-ranging studies, which included researches into the drug cocaine, and the condition of cerebral palsy. He explored the neurophysiology of aphasia and agnosia, terms he applied to the neurological disorders of communication and recognition. Largely at von Brücke’s insistence, Freud relinquished his research interests temporarily to gain clinical experience in psychiatry, dermatology, and nervous diseases, as resident physician to the General Hospital of Vienna. After three years he was to return to the university, where he was appointed lecturer in neuropathology.

IV

Hypnosis and the Influence of Charcot

In 1885 Freud obtained a grant to visit the French neurologist Jean Charcot at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. Here he was to observe Charcot’s use of hypnotic suggestion to treat sufferers of nervous disorders. Fascinated by the apparent success of these treatments, Freud met and studied with several of the leading figures in the field, including Pierre Janet and Hippolyte Bernheim, whom he met in Nancy in 1889.

Charcot’s group had been tackling the problem of hysteria, a term derived from the Greek word hystera meaning “uterus“ (womb). Hysteria traditionally was seen as a condition of women and was characterized by unexplained faints, paralyses, loss of sensation, tics, and tremors. In time, Charcot came to see that men could also be so afflicted. Although the mechanism of hysteria was not understood, Charcot and his contemporaries showed that its symptoms could be cured by hypnosis.

During this period Freud returned to Vienna and in 1886 married Martha Bernays, to whom he had become engaged some four years earlier. The first of their six children was born the following year. Their family was complete with the birth of Anna in 1895, who herself would become an important psychoanalyst. In order to support his family, Freud set up in private neurological practice. In his own clinics he met many sufferers of nervous disorders where there was no apparent physical cause for the symptoms they were suffering. Cases of paralysed limbs, tics, tremors, losses of consciousness, impairment of memory, and numbness all seemed unexplained by the anatomy and physiology then studied in great depth by the medical graduates of the time. These unexplained cases were labelled as “neurotic”, meaning that they were similar to neurological conditions. In time they became known collectively as the “neuroses”.

Freud’s observation of Charcot’s use of hypnosis in the treatment of similar disorders led him to conclude that there could be powerful mental processes operating that remained hidden from conscious appreciation. He began to study and employ hypnosis in his own practice publishing his earliest psychological articles on the subject in 1892, including “A Case of Successful Treatment by Hypnotism: With Some Remarks on the Origin of Hysterical Symptoms Through ‘Counterwill’ “. He came to understand the formation of hysterical neurotic symptoms as the product of a conflict between opposing mental forces. Conscious forces representing “will” were balanced by unconscious opposing forces representing “counterwill”. He understood hypnosis to act on the side of will to subjugate the counterwill, thus obliterating the symptom. The idea of conflict proposed in this paper was to become a fundamental principle of psychoanalysis.