Sigmund Freud: His Life And His Work

Sigmund Freud was born on May 6th 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia, which is now in Czech Republic. He is the eldest of eight children born to Jacob and Amalie Freud. Because of the anti-semetic riots who were ragging in Freiberg , Freud’s father, who was a wool merchant, lost his business and the whole family had to move to Leipzig (1859) and shortly after to Vienna where Freud spend most of his life. When he lived in Vienna, Freud had, once more, to come accross anti-semetism : jewish people had been persecuted in Europe for hundreds of years and they would often be attacked on the streets or called names.

Freud was a very intelligent and hard working student, but when he left school, he was not sure of what he wanted to do. At first, he decided to become a lawyer. Then, he decided to study medicine and to become a doctor, for this reason, he enrolled in the medical school of the University of Vienna (1873) and he often came top of the class. To the eyes of Freud, working hard and wanting to find out about things were the two most important qualities in life. In his 3rd year at the University, he started a reasearch work on the central nervous system in a phisiological laboratory under the direction of Ernst Wilhelm von Brucke. During this period of reasearch, Freud neglected his courses and as a result, he remained in medical school 3 years longer than it was normally required to qualify a physician. He received his medical degree in 1881 .

He spend three years working at the General Hospital of Vienna - working successively to psychatry, dermatology and to nervous diseases -. In the year 1885, he is given a government grant enabling him to spent 19 weeks in Paris to work with French neurologist Jean Charcot - director of the mental hospital, The Salpetriere - who tried to understand and treat nervous disorders, and most especially hysteria. Charcot used hypnosis to prove that the real problem of his patients was a mental one. From this demonstration, Freud realised the power that the mind had on the body, and he came back from Paris, determined to make a name for himself in this new field of study. When he came back from Paris, Freud immediately married his sister’s friend Martha Bernays. At first, the other doctors laughed at him and noboby baught his books. He was therefore very poor and in addition, he had a growing family to support. His only friend, Wi...

... middle of paper ...

...pose of having a child with him. At this stage, the mother becomes the object of rivalry and jealousy. For the girls, the castration complex comes first ( in opposition to the boys case ) and then they desire to kill the mother and marry the father and have a baby.

If for the boys the castration complex ends the Oedipus complex, and creates the unconscious and the superego, what happens with the girls ? Freud says that the oedipal cathexis in girls may be repressed or abandonned. The result is that women never really create a very strong superego. He is also not quite sure of how women’s unconscious is formed, since they do not have the castration anxiety as the motive to repress their incestuous wishes, some sort of repression might happen but Freud is not entirely clear on how it happens.

Freud succeeded in finding clear solutions for many human problems with the help of psychoanalysis : he demonstrated the existence of the unconscious and created a totally new approach to the understanding of a person’s personality. Although he was never accorded full recognition during his lifetime, today, Freud is acknowledged as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century.