Sigmund Freud

What is the origin of your theories and what evidence do you have to back them up?

Sigmund Freud developed many theories in an effort to answer the mystery of a person’s conscious and subconscious. The evidence for these theories came through years of analysis of patients and himself. In fact many of his ideas and beliefs came from his own psychoanalysis. His invention of “psychoanalysis” ha allowed us to better understand the Oedipus Complex, dreams, and symptoms of hysteria.

Certain patients of Freud would display signs and symptoms of hysteria and instead of excepting a doctor’s diagnostic he would delve into their mind in order to find a resolution. After analyzing numerous patients he came to the belief that certain events are never forgotten. A memory that would possible cause this problem would not fade away but rather just burrow itself into the persons conscious. The only way these events could ever be reached would be when the conscious would release its barrier and this could be done under hypnosis. Once the event and it feelings were relived the symptoms were gone. Freud came to the conclusion that the symptoms were a way of the conscious discharging the “affect” of the memory. In time Freud came to realize that a more productive method of recalling the memories was through “free association” or just talking about whatever is in your head. When this was performed on patients and the feedback was studied Freud was amazed that an abundance of it dealt with sexual childhood experiences.

This type of feedback became common in Freud’s free association sessions. What the patient talked about was not perfectly straight forward it was instead disguised. This disguising was common because it was a tool used buy the conscious in order to protect itself. Eventually these childhood experiences developed into the theory of the Oedipus complex. This complex meant that since a majority of a small child life is spent with just two parents, he forms an attraction to the opposite sex and a resentment towards the father. The Oedipus Complex in fact had strong support from Freud’s own experiences. As a boy he had seen his own mother naked and had become sexually aroused. And also when his father died it stirred up memories of when he had hated his father and even imagined his death. He remarked, “I have found a love of the mother and a jealously of the father in my own case too, and now believe it to be a general phenomenon of early childhood, even if it does not occur so early as in children who have been made hysterics.