Who Is Freud
Sigmund Freud is considered the father of psychoanalysis. He developed the main theories and the specific psychoanalytic method for treating neuroses. At the same time, he first applied psychoanalytic
science to the analysis of cultural products. A Jew living in Vienna, Freud
published his main work, The Interpretation of Dreams, in 1899, dated 1900.
This is the first scientific work dedicated to the dreams, constantly
enriched in successive editions [see also the essay dedicated to this book - click here]. In this impressive work, Freud analyzes his own dreams, presenting the stages of dream work and tries to explain the structure of the psychic apparatus.To Freud and psychoanalysis, dreams are the royal road to knowledge of the unconscious. [See also the section dedicated to psychoanalytic methods - click here ].
The unconscious, repressed/repression, resistances, the Oedipus complex, infantile sexuality are other important theories developed by Freud and elaborated with the same methodical approach, soon becoming
landmarks of culture and education in the profane world. "My life - wrote Freud - has no importance outside psychoanalysis". In other words, his scientific activity
in the field of psychoanalysis constitutes the most important event of his life. Of course, we should not forget the psychoanalytic practice, gradually developed by Freud following new
experiences with his patients and himself. His collaboration with names like Breuer, Carl Jung, Adler, Jones, Ferenczi, Marie Bonaparte and many others are notorious.
Part of his psychoanalytic work, biography and main meetings are addressed on this site (see the sections in the left menu). Freud's Quotes On Secessionist Movements inside PsychoanalysisSuppose, for instance, that an analyst attaches little value to the influence of the patient's personal past and looks for the
causation of neuroses exclusively in present-day motives and in expectations of the future. In that case he will also neglect the analysis of childhood; he will have to adopt an
entirely different technique and will have to make up for the omission of the events from the analysis of childhood by increasing his didactic influence and by directly indicating
certain particular aims in life. We for our part will then say: 'This may be a school of wisdom; but it is no longer analysis.' Or someone else may arrive at the view that the
experience of anxiety at birth sows the seed of all later neurotic disturbances. It may thereupon seem to him legitimate to restrict analysis to the consequences of this
single impression and to promise therapeutic success from a treatment lasting from three to four months. As you will observe, I have chosen two examples which start from
diametrically opposite premisses. It is an almost universal characteristic of these 'secessionist movements' that each of them takes hold of one fragment out of the wealth of
themes in psycho-analysis and makes itself independent on the basis of this seizure - selecting the instinct for mastery, for instance, or ethical conflict, or the mother, or genitality, and so on. (Freud:
New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1933) The Sense of Inferiority In fact 'inferiority complex' is a technical term that is
scarcely used in psycho-analysis. For us it does not bear the meaning of anything simple, let alone elementary. To trace it back to the self-perception of possible organic defects, as
the school of what are known as 'Individual Psychologists' likes to do, seems to us a short-sighted error. The sense of inferiority has strong erotic roots. A child feels inferior if he
notices that he is not loved, and so does an adult. The only bodily organ which is really regarded as inferior is the atrophied penis, a girl's clitoris. But the major part of the
sense of inferiority derives from the ego's relation to its super-ego; like the sense of guilt it is an expression of the tension between them. Altogether, it is hard to separate the
sense of inferiority and the sense of guilt. It would perhaps be right to regard the former as the erotic complement to the moral sense of inferiority. (Freud: New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,
1933) On Religion Religion is an attempt to master the sensory world in which we are situated by means of the wishful world which we
have developed within us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. (Freud: New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1933) On the value of Human Civilization
For a wide variety of reasons, it is very far from my intention to express an opinion upon the value of human civilization. I have endeavoured to guard myself against the
enthusiastic prejudice which holds that our civilization is the most precious thing that we possess or could acquire and that its path will necessarily lead to heights of unimagined
perfection. I can at least listen without indignation to the critic who is of the opinion that when one surveys the aims of cultural endeavour and the means it employs, one is
bound to come to the conclusion that the whole effort is not worth the trouble, and that the outcome of it can only be a state of affairs which the individual will be unable to tolerate. (Freud:
Civilization and its Discontents, 1930) Spirits and Demons Spirits and demons, as I have shown in the last essay, are
only projections of man's own emotional impulses. He turns his emotional cathexes into persons, he peoples the world with them and meets his internal mental processes again
outside himself - in just the same way as that intelligent paranoic, Schreber, found a reflection of the attachments and detachments of his libido in the vicissitudes of his
confabulated 'rays of God'. (Freud: Totem and Taboo, 1912-1913) On Demonology and Neurosis The neuroses of childhood have taught us that a number of
things can easily be seen in them with the naked eye which at a later age are only to be discovered after a thorough investigation. We may expect that the same will turn out to
be true of neurotic illnesses in earlier centuries, provided that we are prepared to recognize them under names other than those of our present-day neuroses. We need not be
surprised to find that, whereas the neuroses of our unpsychological modern days take on a hypochondriacal aspect and appear disguised as organic illnesses, the
neuroses of those early times emerge in demonological trappings. Several authors, foremost among them Charcot, have, as we know, identified the manifestations of hysteria
in the portrayals of possession and ecstasy that have been preserved for us in the productions of art. If more attention had been paid to the histories of such cases at the time, it
would not have been difficult to retrace in them the subject-matter of a neurosis. The demonological theory of those dark times has won in
the end against all the somatic views of the period of 'exact' science. The states of possession correspond to our neuroses, for the explanation of which we once more have
recourse to psychical powers. In our eyes, the demons are bad and reprehensible wishes, derivatives of instinctual impulses that have been repudiated and repressed. We
merely eliminate the projection of these mental entities into the external world which the middle ages carried out; instead, we regard them as having arisen in the patient's
internal life, where they have their abode. (Freud: A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis, 1923) False Standards of Mesurement
It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement - that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire
them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life. And yet, in making any general judgement of this sort, we are in danger of forgetting how variegated the
human world and its mental life are. There are a few men from whom their contemporaries do not withhold admiration, although their greatness rests on attributes and
achievements which are completely foreign to the aims and ideals of the multitude. One might easily be inclined to suppose that it is after all only a minority which appreciates
these great men, while the large majority cares nothing for them. But things are probably not as simple as that, thanks to the discrepancies between people's thoughts and their
actions, and to the diversity of their wishful impulses. (Freud: Civilization and its Discontents, 1930) Read also: Quotes classified by topics Read also:
Biography
Self-analysis
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