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Sigmund Freud's View on Human Psycholoy |
Austrian Sigmund Freud was born on May 6, 1866 in Freiburg, died September 23, 1989 in London. He was a physician, neurologist, author and the founder of the psychoanalysis. His most wellknown work is the Interpretation of Dreams (1900), where he presents that the dreams can be interpreted and understood.
Sigmund Freud married year 1886 with Martha Bernays and they had three sons and three daughters, among them Anna Freud.
S. Freud had a significant part in the contemporary view of the mind and the psychotherapy. He worked as a neurologist and began to interest in the human psyche professionally at 40 years of age.
S. Freud received a scholarship in the end of 1800:s that made an opportunity for him to travel to Paris to the mental hospital la Salpêtrière. There could the young S. Freud follow the demonstration of professor Jean-Martin Chareots of how hysteric women under the hypnosis were able to show the symptom of similar kind as epilepsy, fainting etc. In the end of the 1800:s hysteria was a very common diagnosis especially in women.
The main part of S. Freuds patients were hysterical persons and he tried to help them by varying methods. But the patients did not want to be subjected to hypnosis. Instead they preferred to have an outbrak by talking about their deepest feelings and thoughts. Now they started using terms as a repression and the unconscious to explain the psychological course of events behind the hysterical symptoms. He found that by talking, under hypnosis and by using free associations, one could get hold of the unpleasant events which had been repressed away from the conscious of the patients. He thought he found a connection between the traumatic (after incestuous) sexual experiences back in early childhood and the hysterical symptoms.
S. Freud noticed that he came closer to his patients by listening and really trying to understand what they had to tell. He gave up the hypnosis as a method of treatment and let the patients speak straight from the heart, lying on the sofa. He sat beside the sofa, behind the head of the patient, listening concentrated. The method is called free associations and the psychoanalytic treatment started taking a form. The free associations mean that the therapist creates the contents about what the patients express.
S. Freud drew up his conclusion that there was an unconscious part of human psyche that could take control over the body’s fysiological functions and also operate on a great part of human conscious processes. As a result of this discovery and after several years of the clinical work S.F. introduced the topographical pattern of human psyche:
* Within the conscious there are all information which are available for our memory. Things that we know and can remember.
* Within the preconscious there are things that at present are not conscious but is rather easy to get hold on, such as dentist times, the codes to the doors etc.
* Within the unconscious there are ideas, thoughts and events that are threatening to the individual. They are repressed. It could be unpleasant things that oneself has done as child or unpleasant things that has happened to one.
* The censor is between the unconscious system and the preconscious. It decides if the information stored in the unconscious shall become preconscious or not. During the sleep the censor gets weaker. In spite of the censor the unconsciousness still can take place in the conscious as miss-presentation, which are the result of a conflict between a conscious intention and a repressed wish or dream.
In his continuing theorizing S.F. started out from the significance of the immature and unconscious fantasies behind the later symptom development. Now came additional theory about the psychosexual development and its aspects. Here is among others lies what S.F. calls the oral stage, the anal stage and the genital stage.
1923 S.F. introduced his structural formula of human psyche where he underlines conflicts between our biological driving forces:
* The Id is the part of our psyche that is dominated by our congenital needs, instincts and reflexes. The Id is controlled by the principle of lust, that is, to satisfy our instincts and needs.
* The Ego has a compromising role between the Id’s desires and the Superego’s demand that develops during the second year of life when a child realizes that he/she must adjust to the outer reality. One says that the Ego works by the real life principle. The child realizes that mother cannot always be present and this is not dangerous.
* The Superego starts growing between 2-6 years. It represent the conscience and the child’s moral, the rules and the values that within the society that the parents transform to the child by upbringing. Often one hears little children try to educate and bring up other children in the same age. The demands that the Super ego put on itself can be as unrealistic as the Id’s desires and needs.
With help of defence mechanisms the psyche tries to control those conflicts that are between the Id, Ego and Superego. The individual wants to keep their self-respect and then unconsciously misrepresent the reality by using the defence mechanism. One represses, denies and jusifies own mistakes.
In the middle of 1920:s the surrealistic style of art grew up and they used theories from S. Freud in their attempt to reshape the human subconscious/superconscious lines of thoughts in art, literature and film.
S. Freud had many followers who developed his theories. Among others the most known are Anna Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, Alfred Adler, Erik H, Eriksson, Melanie Klein, Wilhelm Reich and David Stern.
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