'It is a new and somewhat embarrassing experience for me to appear as lecturer before students of the New World. I assume that I owe this honor to the association of my name with the theme of psychoanalysis, and consequently it is of psychoanalysis that I shall aim to speak.'

The post's title are the words of Sigmund Freud at the beginning of his first lecture. Being an English student, I made an unfortunate mistake of picking a Literature and Psychoanalysis module for my second year and in the recent weeks of research for my Freud essay, I am filled with Freud knowledge that people are tiring of listening to me. I kid about it being a mistake, I do enjoy learning about Freud, someone I only really knew by name beforehand...sort of. And so to kick start what will be a blog filled with knowledge about a completely range of topics, I'll start with an accessible introduction to Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis! 




Original name: 

• Sigismund Freud (bit of a mouthful...no wonder it was changed. No offence to anyone out there called Sigismund...in fact, I'd like to meet someone called Sigismund. I change my mind, its awesome and my future son will thank me for such a name)
• Born on 6 May 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia (now Pribor in the Czech Republic). His father was a merchant. The family moved to Leipzig and then settled in Vienna, where Freud was educated. Freud's family were Jewish but he was himself non-practicing.
• In 1873, Freud began to study medicine at the University of Vienna. After graduating, he worked at the Vienna General Hospital. He collaborated with Josef Breuer in treating hysteria by the recall of traumatic experiences under hypnosis. 
• In 1885, Freud went to Paris as a student of the neurologist Jean Charcot. On his return to Vienna the following year, Freud set up in private practice, specializing in nervous and brain disorders. The same year he married Martha Bernays, with whom he had six children.
• Freud developed the theory that humans have an unconscious in which sexual and aggressive impulses (the id) are in constant conflict for supremacy with the defenses against them (the ego). In 1897, he began an intensive analysis of himself. In 1900, his major work 'The Interpretation of Dreams' was published in which Freud analysed dreams in terms of unconscious desires and experiences. The dreams analyzed were his own and this was discovered in his letters to Fliess 
• In 1902, Freud was appointed Professor of Neuropathology at the University of Vienna, a post he held until 1938. Although the medical establishment disagreed with many of his theories, a group of pupils and followers began to gather around Freud. In 1910, the International Psychoanalytic Association was founded with Carl Jung, a close associate of Freud's, as the president. Jung later broke with Freud over the theory of infantile sexuality and developed his own theories.
• After World War One, Freud spent less time in clinical observation and concentrated on the application of his theories to history, art, literature and anthropology. For example, his studies included the works of Leonardo DaVinci, and a dream he wrote in a footnote, playwright Goethe's dream, and Shakespeare, especially Hamlet in his development of the Oedipal Complex. In 1923, he published 'The Ego and the Id', which suggested a new structural model of the mind, divided into the 'id, the 'ego' and the 'superego'.
• In 1933, the Nazis publicly burnt a number of Freud's books. In 1938, shortly after the Nazis annexed Austria, Freud left Vienna for London with his wife and daughter Anna.
• Freud had been diagnosed with cancer of the jaw in 1923, and underwent more than 30 operations. He died of cancer on 23 September 1939.

Brief overview of some of his widely known theories 

• Trauma: the treatment of hysteria was the beginning for Freud's work on psychoanalysis. Freud trained as a neurophysiologist and worked on the physical structure of the brain and the central nervous system. In 1885 he traveled to Paris and studied with the great French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. Charcot’s main object of study at the time Freud worked with him was physical trauma and its often delayed after-effects, which he conceived of as a form of hysteria caused by the psychological shock of the trauma (railway and workplace accidents were the prototypical instances) as opposed to hysteria conceived of as an hereditary and constitutional condition. Freud developed the idea of a primal scene in which something traumatic, yes, perhaps sexual, occurred in one's childhood, and the memory is repressed. After puberty, another traumatic moment occurs which triggers the the hysterical symptoms in response to the raising of repressed memories. So, in conclusion, the event that caused the hysteria occurs long before the hysteria in childhood and the dividing line is puberty. The problem happens after puberty where you have become sexualised and realise that what occurred in childhood was sexual. In childhood, you do not realise sexuality. It is the distance of time between the traumatic scenes that cause the development of hysteria and not due to heredity as Charcot proposed.

• The unconscious/conscious system: 1900 with the Publication of Dreams is when Freud says that we are all divided in a conscious and an unconscious. Most of what you are made up of is your unconscious. You have no or little access to it. It is constructed by traumatic scenes of their childhood. The conscious is small slither of what you’re thinking in your mental faculties and is about what you are currently attending to. Therefore, as I am writing all of this down, my conscious is made up of what I'm thinking and writing. The pre-conscious is when one can easily access memories and bring them to mind, which is what I'm doing when I remember what was said in a class or a lecture about Freud. And the unconscious is made up of repressed memories; things we can't remember. 

•  The Interpretation of Dreams: Freud argues that all dreams come from wish fulfillment. They can be dreams of convenience such as being thirsty, and so drinking in a dream, which is common in children's dreams, and so are easy to interpret. The ego is relaxed in the dream, and consequently, can allow for feelings and wishes that were repressed when the dreamer was awake, to come out into the dream. Unsatisfied days's events in the pre-conscious can lurk in the dream and while dreaming, the conscious wish is realized with a parallel to an unconscious wish. Freud argues that even anxiety or traumatic dreams are wish fulfillment dreams as it is the fulfilling the wish of the ego with ideas of fear and punishment. The dreams use something called the days residues which are points of transference used by consciousness. The dream cannot be spelled out that simply to be understood as such things called displacement, condensation which distort the dream and it ends up seeming nonsensical.Freud uses the decoding method to analyse dreams. He breaks the dream up, treats it as a set of signs,signifying sequence/chain, analyzing separate components, on each separate signifying element, ‘as if each fragment of rock requires a separate assessment’
• Infantile sexuality: this theory definitely turned a few heads! Broadly speaking, yes, this is to do with the child being in love with their mother. Used in the Little Hans case, Freud argues that this idea of sexuality is divorced from its close connection with genitals to concentrate rather on the purpose of achieving pleasure. It is only secondary to serve as the means to reproductive function which is something that the mother provides for the child in their years of infancy. 

•      The Ego, the Id, and the Superego: the ego, to start with, is a socially constructed driving force of repression and, formed through a modification of the body, it takes the impact of things coming from the outside world and consequently represents reason and common sense. The id is, in comparison, the source of passions that need to be controlled by the ego. The superego is formed by the identification with the adult, in particular, the parent site of the drive, labelled the id and is the embodiment of norms and injunctions, being internalized by identification with the parent/adult figure
• The Oedipus complex: you know, it really can be summed up quite easily as the child (male) is in love with his mother, and wishes to kill his father, and marry his mother. Freud uses the tale of Oedipus and Hamlet as part of his findings of where we can see the Oedipal complex. However, Oedipus the character does not know he has married his mother and killed his father, so there is no desire for it shown in the narrative. Hamlet, on the other hand, one can see has a certain kind of obsession with his mother's sex life but the desire to kill his uncle is out of revenge, not to take his place as the mother's husband - in fact, making this even more problematic is that his uncle is not even his father!

I hope this is an easy and accessible way of getting acquainted with Freud if you haven't done so already! He is an interesting character, I'll say that, from what I can recall, he is quite the narcissist, fancies himself as a Hamlet and tries to really punch up his work as works of science - despite the incredibly small sample sizes he uses, not to mention simply using himself as a patient - but that doesn't stop him from making sweeping generalizations! However, I do not wish to belittle Freud as some of his work is incredibly fascinating and I urge you to read on some of it (or a Wikipedia summary entry on it). Oh, and fun fact, he was in love with eldest daughter, Anna! And smoked a hell of a lot of cigars! Hope you enjoyed reading it!