Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Pocket Essentials
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Freud was one of the giants of 20th century thought. His ideas have been hugely influential not only in psychology but in all the social sciences and the arts. Even those who have never read a word of his writings are familiar with his concepts of the id, the ego, the Oedipus complex and the workings of the unconscious mind. This looks at Freud's life from his birth in the small Moravian town of Freiburg in 1856 to his death in Hampstead in 1939. Each of Freud's major works is summarised and his central ideas explored. Controversies over his methods and practices are examined. Did he, as some recent critics have alleged, turn his back on evidence of genuine child abuse in 1890s Vienna and prefer instead to ascribe it to fantasy and wish fulfilment? What were the reasons behind his terrible quarrel with Carl Gustav Jung? Does his 'talking cure' of psychoanalysis actually work? The essential information about Freud's enormously productive life and career is all here.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 142
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
FREUD AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
Freud was one of the giants of 20th century thought. His ideas have been hugely influential not only in psychology but in all the social sciences and the arts. Even those who have never read a word of his writings are familiar with his concepts of the id, the ego, the Oedipus complex and the workings of the unconscious mind.This looks at Freud's life from his birth in the small Moravian town of Freiburg in 1856 to his death in Hampstead in 1939. Each of Freud's major works is summarised and his central ideas explored. Controversies over his methods and practices are examined. Did he, as some recent critics have alleged, turn his back on evidence of genuine child abuse in 1890s Vienna and prefer instead to ascribe it to fantasy and wish fulfilment? What were the reasons behind his terrible quarrel with Carl Gustav Jung? Does his 'talking cure' of psychoanalysis actually work? The essential information about Freud's enormously productive life and career is all here.
NICK RENNISON
Nick Rennison is a writer, editor and bookseller with a particular interest in the Victorian era and in crime fiction. He has written several Pocket Essential guides published by Oldcastle Books including Short History of the Polar Exploration, Roget, Freud and Robin Hood. He is also the author of The Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide to Crime Fiction, 100 Must-Read Crime Novels and Sherlock Holmes: An Unauthorised Biography. His debut crime novel, Carver’s Quest, set in nineteenth century London, was published by Atlantic Books. He is a regular reviewer for both The Sunday Times and BBC History Magazine.
The Pocket Essential
FREUD and PSYCHOANALYSIS
NICK RENNISON
CONTENTS
Chapter One: Freud’s Life .............................................
Early Life; Cocaine and Charcot; Marriage and Hysteria; The Emergence of Psychoanalysis;The Wednesday Group and Early Converts
America and the Break with Jung; War and Tragedy; Illness and World Fame; The Last Years
Chapter Two: Freud’s Ideas.........................................
The Conscious and the Unconscious Mind; Sexual Development; The Structure of the Mind; Culture and Society
Chapter Three: Freud’s Major Works .........................
Studies on Hysteria; The Interpretation of Dreams; The Psychopathology of Everyday Life; Three Essays on Sexuality;
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious; Totem and Taboo; Mourning and Melancholia; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis;
Beyond the Pleasure Principle; The Future of an Illusion; Civilisation and Its Discontents; Moses and Monotheism
Chapter Four: Freud’s Case Histories........................
Anna O.;‘Dora’; Little Hans; The Rat Man; Schreber; The Wolf Man
Chapter Five: Freud’s Family, Friends And Fellow Early Analysts .......................................
Karl Abraham; Alfred Adler; Minna Bernays; Josef Breuer; Sandor Ferenczi; Wilhelm Fliess; Anna Freud; Martha Freud; Otto Gross
Ernest Jones; Carl Gustav Jung; Otto Rank; Wilhelm Reich; Wilhelm Stekel
Chapter Six: Freud’s Legacy .......................................
Chapter Seven: A Short Glossary Of Freudian Ideas And Concepts.....................................
Further Resources .......................................................
Chapter One: Freud’s Life
Early Life
Sigmund Freud was born on the 6thMay 1856 in the small country town of Freiberg, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now the Moravian town of Pribor in the Czech Republic. He was the eldest son of Jacob Freud, a relatively unsuccessful and unprosperous Jewish merchant, and Jacob’s second wife, Amalia who had married the previous year. Amalia was twenty years younger than her husband and Jacob had two adult sons from a previous marriage who were much the same age as their stepmother. Freud’s earliest playmates included the children of one of these sons, Emanuel. That uncle, nephew and niece were roughly contemporaries, as were Freud’s mother and his two older half-brothers, must have caused generational (and, possibly, sexual) confusion in the young Freud’s mind and biographers have felt free to speculate on the influence this may have had on his future interest in childhood sexuality and its effects on adult life. In an age, however, when many women died young in childbirth and many widowers married second wives much younger than themselves, the Freud household’s complex interrelationships would not have been significantly uncommon.
A year after Sigmund’s arrival in the world, Amalia Freud gave birth to another boy, who was named Julius, but he died when only a few months old. In 1858 a sister Anna was born and she was followed at almost yearly intervals by four more girls. Alexander, Freud’s youngest sibling, was born in 1866. Sigmund, the talented oldest sibling, was to grow up surrounded by adoring and admiring females, convinced of his special genius. Most important of these was, of course, his mother who lavished her attention on her firstborn and was his earliest teacher. In later life, Freud wrote, ‘A man who has been the indisputable favourite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success.’ It is clear that when he wrote this he was thinking of his own position as his mother’s golden boy.
The Freud family, in the late 1850s, was not thriving in Freiberg. In 1859 Freud’s parents considered moving and travelled briefly to Leipzig to assess the potential of that city. Jacob’s sons from his first marriage uprooted themselves and their families and moved to England. In 1860 Jacob made the less dramatic decision to move to Vienna, the imperial capital. It was to remain Freud’s home until the Nazis drove him into exile in London in 1938.
In 1865 Freud, hitherto taught at home and at a private school, was enrolled at the Leopoldstadter Realgymnasium. In the eight years he attended the school he proved himself a star pupil, showing a gift for both languages and sciences, and regularly emerging top of his class. The promise of greatness that his parents, particularly his mother, had always detected in him was given full encouragement. Although the family remained relatively impoverished, and lived in restricted circumstances, Sigmund always had his own room for study and nothing was allowed to stand in the way of his academic progress. On one well-known occasion, which reflects less well on the budding genius than the early biographers who recorded it seem to have thought, Freud complained about the piano-playing of one of his sisters, which was disturbing his concentration. The piano was removed.
In 1873 Freud completed his triumphal school progress by graduating with distinction and was ready to enter the University of Vienna. He had long toyed with the idea of studying law but lectures he had attended on Goethe and on Darwin had changed his thinking and it was the medical faculty that Freud joined. His medical studies engaged him until 1881, several years longer than was usual, and it is clear from both his letters at the time and the work that he undertook that his aim was to be a research scientist rather than a practising doctor. He studied under the eminent German physiologist Ernst Brücke, later working as an assistant in the Physiological Institute Brücke, and in 1876 he won a research scholarship to the laboratory of Marine Zoology. While at Trieste he produced the first of the many publications that were to bear his name over the following sixty years – a paper on the sexual organs of eels.
Freud’s hopes of a career in pure science were dashed by a combination of personal circumstances and larger social issues. His father’s often shaky finances had been dealt a severe blow by a downturn in the Austrian economy and Freud was only too well aware of the need to earn his own money. As a Jew, advancement in the discreetly anti-Semitic world of academe would be difficult. In addition, in 1881 (the year he qualified as a doctor of medicine) Freud had fallen in love with Martha Bernays. If he were to marry her, he needed to find some career ladder less uncertain than that offered by research. Private practice seemed the best option but to enter private practice he needed to undertake another prolonged period of training at the Vienna General Hospital. At first he worked as an assistant to Herman Nothnagel, the Professor of Internal Medicine but, in 1883, Freud had his first encounter with medical psychiatry when he worked for five months at the psychiatric clinic run by Theodor Meynert. His time at Meynert’s clinic persuaded him that his future lay with diseases of the mind and the nervous system.
Cocaine and Charcot
It was at this time that he began his friendship with Josef Breuer. Breuer, fourteen years older than Freud, was already a respected Viennese physician and physiologist. Like most of Freud’s close friendships, that with Breuer was to end in estrangement and disillusion, but the older man was to stake his claim as the grandfather of psychoanalysis when he told Freud of the ‘talking cure’ he had used, with varying degrees of success, on the patient later known as ‘Anna O.’ (See Chapter Four) At the time the case may have seemed to Freud no more than an interesting curiosity but he was to return to it in later years and attempt to persuade an increasingly uncomfortable Breuer of its wider significance.
It was also during these years that Freud undertook his experiments with the medicinal use of cocaine. In later life he was keen to disassociate himself from these researches as far as possible but, at the time, he was clearly convinced that he had stumbled on a wonder drug and that cocaine was to be his road to fame and fortune. He took it himself. He prescribed it to his fiancée Martha Bernays. When his father had to undergo an eye operation, Freud not only insisted that cocaine be used as a local anaesthetic but assisted in the operation himself. Luckily another Viennese doctor, Carl Koller, laid prior claim to the discovery of the medicinal uses of cocaine. Freud could congratulate himself on a narrow escape from professional ignominy. By the late 1880s the addictive nature of the drug was becoming clear. Indeed, to Freud’s continuing self-reproach, one of his friends, Ernst Fleischl-Marxow, who had first taken cocaine at Freud’s recommendation, had become a confirmed addict and later committed suicide. (Freud may have been unnecessarily self-punishing about his role in his friend’s fate. Fleischl-Marxow was already a despairing morphine addict when he first took cocaine and it is clear from contemporary accounts that he was not a man destined to make old bones.)
Whilst he was busy promulgating the virtues of cocaine, Freud’s life had taken a number of decisive new turns. In 1885 he became a Privat Docent (a kind of junior lecturer) at the University of Vienna, teaching a course on neuropathology. That same year he was given a small grant that enabled him to travel to Paris and study at the Saltpêtrière asylum there. Freud was lonely during his time in Paris and wrote a number of uncharacteristically self-pitying letters to Martha Bernays and others, detailing his difficulties in accustoming himself to Paris and his inability to persuade Parisians that he was speaking comprehensible French. (Later travellers may well sympathise.) However, from a professional perspective, his visit was invaluable. The director of the Saltpêtrière was Jean Martin Charcot who was then the best-known neurologist in the world. Charcot specialised in the study of hysteria. He had put forward a number of controversial theories about the nature of hysteria which was then assumed either to be a collection of strange phenomena brought on by disturbances in the female sexual organs or mere play-acting by attention-seeking women. Charcot denied that hysteria was exclusively female and, demonstrating that hysterical symptoms could be induced under hypnotism, claimed that it was a neurological rather than a physical problem. This was progress but Charcot refused to countenance the idea that hysteria might have its roots in psychological difficulties or that hypnotism could have any general benefit as a means of treatment.
Freud was enormously impressed by Charcot (he later named his eldest son after him) and what he had seen at the Saltpêtrière. When he returned to Vienna he translated Charcot’s Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System and, in October 1886, he delivered a lecture himself to the Vienna Medical Society on the subject of Male Hysteria. This proved a mistake. To the average Viennese doctor of the time the idea of male hysteria was almost as laughable as the idea of male pregnancy. The very word came from the Greek ‘hystera’, meaning ‘womb’. Freud was derided and retired to lick his wounds. Vienna was not yet ready for Charcot’s more advanced ideas, let alone the even more radical theories that Freud had half-glimpsed behind them.
Marriage and Hysteria
Despite the failure of his lecture, Freud had much to occupy him. On his return from Paris he had opened a private medical practice specialising in nervous disorders. In September of 1886, after a four-year engagement, he had finally felt able to marry Martha Bernays. He was launched on a new era in both his personal and professional life. The idea of using hypnotism as a form of therapy had not left him. In late 1887 he wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess, ‘I have thrown myself into hypnosis in the last few weeks and achieved all sorts of small but curious successes.’ His attention was also drawn to the work of another Frenchman, Hippolyte Bernheim, who seemed to have shown that, despite what Charcot might believe, the power of suggestion could be used as treatment. Freud also remembered Breuer’s case of Anna O. in which the patient had clearly benefited, at least briefly, from the use of hypnosis.
Wilhelm Fliess, the friend to whom he wrote of his experiments in hypnosis, was to become Freud’s closest intellectual confidant over the next ten years. Both men tended to see themselves as lonely pioneers, ostracised by their peers because of the adventurousness and progressiveness of their ideas. (A cruel historical judgement on Fliess’ ideas might be that they were not so much adventurous as half-baked but Freud, for many years, continued to give at least lip-service to the notion of Fliess’ genius.) Fliess, two years younger than Freud, was a Berlin nose-and-throat specialist who held eccentric beliefs about 23-day and 28-day ‘cycles’ of health and about supposed deep-rooted connections between the nose and the sexual organs. Today Fliess may seem like little more than a crank but he provided crucial intellectual support for Freud at a critical time in the latter’s life and Freud used his letters to Fliess as a means of sounding out new ideas.
Slowly Freud was moving towards the belief that hysteria and hysterical symptoms originated in childhood sexual trauma. He based this belief both on his practical experience of hysterical patients (throughout the late 1880s and early 1890s he saw many such patients and was refining his use of hypnosis and the ‘talking cure’ first adopted by Breuer) and on the theoretical system he was beginning to construct. Josef Breuer continued to be Freud’s increasingly reluctant co-worker. Breuer was uneasy about Freud’s insistence on the importance of sexuality in the origin of hysteria but was persuaded to collaborate on a book, Studies in Hysteria, which was published in 1895. By the time the book appeared Breuer had had enough and the friendship with Freud cooled noticeably.
With his growing family (he was to have six children, the youngest Anna being born in 1895) Freud had moved, in 1891, to Berggasse 19, which was to be his home and consulting rooms until he left Austria in 1938. It was in Berggasse that, increasingly aware of the limitations of hypnotism, he began to treat patients on the couch that has become such a permanent part of psychoanalytic folklore. By sitting out of sight of the patient, applying gentle pressure to the forehead and encouraging them to talk about what was passing through their minds, Freud found that he could bring the patients’ repressed memories back to the surface.
