The Career and Discoveries of Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud is considered to be one of Psychology's most influential figures of all time. He is also considered to be one of the most controversial people of the twentieth century with his views on personality, sexuality, childhood, and therapy. He is best known for his views on sexuality and how they are directly related to ones pyschological processes.

Sigmund Freud was born May 6, 1856 in Freidberg, Morvavia (now the Czech Republic). His father was a merchant and his mother; which was his father's second wife. He had two half siblings that were about twenty years older than he was. He attended the University of Vienna and graduated in 1881 with a degree in medicine (www.nndb.com). While in medicine he befreinded Josef Breuer during his training. Josef Breuer was both a physician and a physiologist (www.nndb.com) and they often comparred thoughts on cases together. One in particular that had a lasting effect on Freud was about a patient named Anna O and she suffered from hysteria (now called conversion disorder) where she had temproary paralysis and anesthesia and nervous cough (www.psychology.about.com). Breuer discovered that if he could hypnotize her then she would be able to speak of things that she could not in her conscious state. Afterward her symptoms where relieved and this became known as the "talking cure" (www.pbs.org). Later he went to Paris to study under Jean Martin-Charcot a well known neurologist in Europe at the time (www.pbs.org). She was doing studies on hysteria and hypnosis and this influenced him to go into pyschopathology.

Sigmund Freud is the orginator of psycoanalysis which was Freud's way of thinking that people could be cured by making conscious their unconscious thoughts (www.simplypsychol...

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...y towards others. Ego which is developed from the id, is used to satisfy the id is a way that is safe and socially acceptable. The ego operated in both the conscious and unconscious mind. Finally the superego is developed during early childhood and is responsible for making sure that moral standards are followed. The superego can make a person feel a certain level of guilt if rules are not follwed (www.simplypschology.org).

Sigmund Freud is considered to be one of pyscholgy's greatest thinkers of this time. You can see this through this paper. He orginated the theory of pyschoanalysis and came up with structural models of the mind and how it works. This alone is important to a Psychologist because it helps him to better help his patient. In my opinion pyschoanalyisis was a great thing that happened to pyschologist because it was the begining of something huge.