PSYCHOANALYSIS

FREUD : PSYCHOANALYSIS

Sigmund Freud’s contributions to personality  theory have been both substantial and Controversial Freud’s theory, Psychoanalysis, is not only the most comprehensive of all personality theories, but is has generated the greatest amount of critical interest both positive and negative.

Freud’s understanding of human personality was based on his experiences with patients his analysis of his own dreams, and his vast readings in the various sciences and humanities. These experiences provided  the basic data for the evolution of his theories. To him, theory followed observation and his life Eva concept of personality underwent Constant revision during the just 50 years of his life. Evolutions though it was. Freud misted that Psychoanalysis could not be subjected to eclecticism and disciples who deviated from his basic ideas loon found themselves personality and professionally Ostracized by Freud.

BIOGRAPHY OF SIGMOND FREUD

          Sigmund Freud was born either on March 6 or May 6, 1856 in Freigberg. Mararia which is now part of the Freud was the first born child of Jacob and Amalie Nathaneon Freud although his father had two sons, Emanuel and philipp from a previous marriage. Jacob and amalie Freud had seven other children within 10 years but Sigmund remained the favorite of his young in dulgent mother which may have partially contributed to his life long self confidence. A Scholarly Serious minded youth. Freud did not have a close friendship with any of his younger siblings. He did however, enjoy a warm, indulgent relationship with his mother leading him in later, years to observe that the mother can relationship was the most perfect. The most free from ambivalence of all human relationships.

          Freud’s earliest playmates were his half-nephew. John and his half-niece, Pauline. John was about a year elder and Pauline a little younger him Sigmund. One of Freud’s earliest memories was of him and John taking a bouguer of flowers away from  Pauline and causing the young girl to run away in tears.

          When Freud was three, how the two Freud families left Freiberg. Emanuel’s family and philip moved to England. While the Jacob Freud family moved first to Leipzig and then the following year to Vienna. The Austrian capital remained Sigmund Freud’s home for nearly 8 years until 1938 when the Nazi invasion forced him to emigrate to London, where he lived until  his death on September 23, 1939.

          When Freud was about a year and a half old his mother gave birth to a second son. Julius an event that was to have a significant impact on Freud’s Psychic development. Sigmund was filled with hostility towards his younger brother and harbored an unconscious with for his death. When Jaliud deed at 6 months of age. Freud was left with feelings of guilt at having caused his brother’s death. Only during later years was Freud able to understand not only that the death wish for skin sibling was common in young children but also that his wish did not actually cause his brother’s death. This discovery during middle age pured Freud by his own analysis. Contributed to his later psychic development.

          Freud was drawn into medicine, not so much out of love for medical practice but act of an intense curiosity concerning human nature. He entered the university of Vienna medical school in 1873, but when he graduated in 1881, he had no intention of practicing medicine. He preferred instead to do research in psychology. To pursue his career, however, he was dependent on his father and friends for financial support. After his graduation he remained at the university’s psychological institute. Conducting research and doing some teaching.

          Freud might have continued is work indefinitely had it not been for two factors. First he believed that, as a Jew,l his opportunities for academic advancement could be limited. See and his father because less able to provide financial aid. Reluctantly, Freud turned from his laboratory to the practice of medicine. He worked for 3 years in the General Hospital of Vienna, becoming familiar with the practice of various branches of medicine, including Psychiatry and nervous diseases.

          In 1885, he received a travelling grant from the University of Vienna and decided to study in Puria with the famous French neurologist Jean Martin Charcol. He treating hysteria. A disorder typically characterized by paralysis or the improper functioning of certain parts of the body. Through hypnosis or the improper functioning of certain parts of the body. Through hypnosis. Freud became convinced of a psychogenic and sexual origin of hysterical symptoms.

          While still a medical student. Freud developed a close  professional association and a personal friendship with Josef Breuer, a well known Viennee physician 14 years older than Freud about eartharsis, the process of remaining hysterical symptoms through “talking them out” while wing Catharsis, Freud gradually and laboriously discovered the free associative technique. Which soon replaced hypnosis as his principal therapeutic technique.

          From as early as adolescence. Freud life rally dreamed of making monumental discovery and achieving  fame. On several occasions during 1880s and 1890s he believed he was on the Verge of such a discovery. His first opportunity to cain recognition came in 1884-1885 and involved his experiments with Cocuine Freud believed he had achieved an important breakthrough with his work Cocaine Freud believed he had achieved an important breakthrough with his work with Cacaine Freud believed he had achieved an important breakthrough with his work with Cacaine and was ied to proclaim the wonderful virtues of that drug. After taking Cocaine himself with no apparent harmful effects. Freud praised it as a near panacea as well as an effective anesthetic. He enthusiastically recommended it to his friends and sent small amounts to his finance Martha Bernays to make her strong and to give her cheeks to roly color. However, he was doomed to disappointment when his associate, Carl koller, received credit for discovering the drug’s anesthetic properties while Freud was away from Vienna visiting Martha at her home in Hamburg. Further trouble followed when he used Cocaine in treating a friend for morphine addiction and succeeded in causing his friend to become a Cocaine addict.

          His second opportunity for achieving some measure of fame came in 1856 after he returned from pairs. Where he had learned about male hysteria from Charcot. He assumed that this knowledge would gain him respected and recognition from imperial society of physicians of Vienna whom he mistakenly believed would be impressed by the young Dr. Freud’s knowledge of male hysteria. Early physicians had believed that hysteria was strictly a female disorder because the very would had the same origins as uterus and was the result of a “wandering onward” with the uterus traveling throughout women’s bodies and causing various parts of the society, most physicians present were already familiar with the illness and knew that it could also be a male disorder. Because originality was expected and because Freud’s paper was a rehash of what was already known, the Viennese physicians did not respond well to the presentation. Also, Freud’s constant praise of charcot, a Frenchman, cooled the Viennese physicians to his talk. Unfortunately, in his autobiographical study Freud hold a very different story, claiming that his lecture was not well received because members of the learned society could not fathom the concept of male hysteria Freud’s account of this incident, now known to be in error, was nevertheless perpetuated for years, and as Sull away emerged, it is but one of many fictions created by friend and his followers to mythologize psychoanalysis and to make a lonely he of its founder. 

          Disappointed in his attempts to gain fame and afflicted with feelings of professional opposition due to his diffence of cocaine and his belief in sexual origins of neuroses, Freud felt the need to join with a more respected college. He turned to Breuer, with whom he had worked while Still a medical student and with whom he enjoyed a continuing personal and professional relationship. Breuer had discussed in detail with Freud the case of Anna O. a young women bruer had spent many hours treating for hysteria several years earlier. Because of his rebuff by the imperial society of physicians and his desire to establish a reputation for himself. Freud urged bruer to collaborate with him in publishing an account of Anna.O. and several other causes of hysteria.

          Finally, and with some reluctance, he agreed to publish with Freud studies on Hysteria. Finally, and with same in this book. Freud introduced the term “Psychical analysis” and during the following year, he began calling his approach “psycho-analysis”.

          At about the time studies on Hysteria was published, Freud and Bruer had a professional disagreement and became estranged personally. Freud and then turned to his friend Wilhelm Fliese, a Berlin Physician who lerved as a sounding board for Freud’s newly developing ideas. Freud’s letters to fliers. Constitute a first hand account of the beginning of psychoanalysis and travel the embryonic stage of Freudian theory. Freud and Fliess had became friends in 1887,but their relationship became more intimate following Freud’s break with Bruer.

          During the late 1890s, Freud suffered both professional isolation and personal cries. He had began to analyze his own dreams, and after the death of his father in 1896, he initiated the practice of analyzing himself daily. Although his self analysis was a lifetime labor, it was especially difficult for him during the late 1890s. during ths period, Freud regarded himself as his own best patient. In August of 1897, he wrote to Fliers, “the chief patient I am preoccupied with is myself. The analysis is more difficult than any other. It is, in fact what paralyzes my psychic strength.

          Freud’s official biographer Jones believed that Freud suffered from a severe psychoneurosis during the late 1890s, although Max Schur Freud’s personal physician during the final decade of his life. Contended that his illness was due to a cardiac lerion, aggregated by addition to in nicotine. Peter Gay suggested that during the time immediately after his father’s death. Freud “relived his oedipal conflicts with peculiar ferocity”. But Henri Ellenberger described this period in Freud’s life as a time of ‘creative illness”. A condition characterized by depression, neurosis. Psychosomatic  ailments, and an intense  preoccupation with same from of creative activity. In any of midlife, Freud was suffering from self doubts. Depression, and an obsession with his own death.

          Despite these difficulties. Freud completed his greatest work. The interpretation of Dreams, during this period. This book, finished in 1899, was an outgrowth of his self analysis, much of which he had revealed to his friend Wilhelm Fliese. The book contained many of Freud’s  own dreams. Some disguised behind fictitious names. Almost immediately after the publication his friendship with flies began to cool, even tually to rupture in 1903. This breakup paralleled Freud’s earlier estrangement from bruer. Which took place almost immediately after   they had published studies on Histeriya together. It was also aharbinger of his breaks with Alfred adler, Carl jung, and severa other close associate.

          Although. The interpretation of Dreams did not create an instant international Stir, it eventually gained for Freud the fame and recognition he had Sought in the 5 years period following  its publication.

          Also, Freud’s personal sexual life was and frequently troublesome, Although his name is  often associated with sex and even with promiscuous sex, his own sexual life was anything but roburt. Apparently, Freud practiced self restraint prior to marriage and was monogamous during marriage. Freud believed that both master brain and the various form of birth Control that excited in those days could lead to neurotic consequences, but at the  same time he worried in those days could lead to neurotic consequences but at the same time he worried in about Martha becoming pregnant, indeed Martha gave birth to their five children in only 6 years. Prompting Freud to write to flies in 1893 that Marth “does not have to expect a child for a year because we are not living in abstinence”. But after that year. Murtha again become pregnant and in 1895. She gave birth to anna, their youngest child, Two years later. Freud wrote to flies saying that “Sexual excitement…. Is no longer of we for someone like me”. At that point, Freud, then only 41, believed that his sexual life had come to a half. Although his sexual activity did not completely cease after Anna’s birth his sexual relations with Murtha were quite sporadic over the next fex years and soon become nonexistent (Ferris, 1997).

          Moreover, when Freud, Ferenczi and Jung went to a private camp in western Marrachusetts, they were greeted by a barrage of imperial Germany, despite the fact that none of them were. German and each had reasons to dislike Germany. Also at Camp. Freud, along with the others. Sat on the ground while the host grilled steaks over Charcal. A custom Freud deemed to be both savage and uncouth (Roazen, 1993).

LEVELS OF MENTAL LIFE

          Feud’s greatest contribution to personality theory is his exploration of the unconscious and his insistence that people are motivated primarily by instinctual forces of which they have little or no awareness. To Freud mental life is divided into two levels, the unconscious and the Consious. The unconscious, in turn, has two df levels, the unconscious proper and the preconscious. In Freudian psychology the three levels of mental life are used to designate both a process and a location. The existence as a specific location, of course, is merely hypotherical and has no real existence within the body, yet, Freud spoke of the unconscious as well as unconscious process.

UNCONSCIOUS

          The unconscious contains all those drives urges or instincts that are  beyond our awareness but that nevertheless motivate most of our words. Feelings, and actions. Although we have may be conscious of our over behaviors, we often are not aware of the mental processes that the behind them. For example, a man may know that he is attracted to a woman but may non fully understand all the reasons for the attraction come of which may even seem irrational.

          Because the unconscious is not available to the conscious mind, how can one know it really exists? Freud felt that its existence could be proved only indirectly. To him the unconscious is the explanation for the meaning behind dreams. Slips of the tongue, neurotic symptoms, and certain kinds of  forgetting, called repression dreams serve as a particularly rich source of unconscious material. For example Freud believed that childhood experiences can appear in adult dreams even though the dreamer has no conscious recollection of these experiences.

          Unconscious process often enter into consciousness but only after being disguised or distorted enough to clued censorship. Freud  used the analogy of the guardian or censor blocking the passage between the unconscious and preconscious and preventing undesirable anxiety producing memories from entering awareness. To enter the conscious level of the mind, these unconscious images first must be sufficiently disguised to slip part the primary censor and them they must clued a final censor that watches the passage way between the preconscious and the conscious. By the time these memories enter our conscious mind. We no longer recognize them for what they are; instead, we see them as relatively pleasant, month retaining experiences. In most cases, these images have strong sexual or aggressive mofifs, because childhood sexual and aggressive behaviours are frequently punished or suppressed, punishment and suppression often create feelings of anxiety and the anxiety, in turn stimulates repression, that is, the forcing of unwanted, anxiety-ridden experiences into the unconscious as a defense against the pain of that anxiety.

          Not all unconscious processes, however, spring from repression of childhood events. Freud believed that a portion of our unconscious originates from the experiences of our early ancestors that have been paused on to us though hundreds generations of repetition. He called these inherited  unconscious images our psychogenetic endowment.

          His unconscious mind, therefore mind, therefore motivates him to express fertility indirectly through an exaggerated show of love and opposite from the criginal feelings, but it is almost always overblown and ostentious.

PRECONSCIOUS

          The preconscious level of the mind contains all these elements that are not conscious but can be became to quite readily. The contents of the preconscious can from two source, the first of which is conscious perception what a person per eeriest is conscious for only a transitory period, it quickly passes in the preconscious when the focus of attention shifts to another idea. These ideas that altemate easily between being conscious and preconscious are largely free from anxiety and in reality are much more similar to the conscious images than to unconscious urges.

          The second sources of preconscious images is the unconscious. Freud believed that ideas can slip paut the vigilant censor and enter into the because if we recognized them as derivatives of the unconscious. We would experience increased levels of anxiety. Therefore our final censor represses  these anxiety loaded images back into the unconscious. Other  images from the unconscious do gain administration to consciousness, but only because their true nature is cleverly disguised through the dream process, a slip of the tongue, or an elaborate definitive measure.

CONSCIOUS:

          Consciousness, which pluyea relatively minor role in psycho analytic theory, can be defined as those mental life directly available to us.

          Ideas can reach consciousness from two df direction. The first is from the perceptual conscious system, which is turned toward the outer world and acts as a medium for the perception of external stimuli. In other words, what we perceive through our sense organs, it not too threatening, enters into consciousness.

          The effect in either case is the same the menacing, disorderly people are prevented from coming into view of an important guest who is seated at the far end of the perception room behind a screen. The meaning of the analogy is obvious. The people in the centrance hall represent unconscious images. The small reception room is the preconscious and its inhabitants represent  preconscious ideas, people in the reception room may or may not come into view of the important.

REFERENCES:

1.     Adler a study of organ inferiority and it psychological compensation, New York, Nervous and Mental disorders publishing.

2.     Bandura A Social Cognitive theory of personality in 2A Pervin and Op John Chand book of personality theory.