Freud and his contributions to Psychology
Sigmund Freud physiologist, medical doctor, psychologist and the father of psychoanalysis is generally recognised as one of the most influential and authoritative thinkers of the twentieth century.
Sigmund Freud was born in Freiberg, Moravia in 1856. When he was four years old he and his family moved to Vienna where he lived until the last year of his life. He was the 1st child of his mother but not of the father. Therefore his mother spoiled him and the relationship to his father was a bit hostile. From 1873-1881 he attended medical school at the university of Vienna. He specialised in the treatment of nervous disorders. Afterwards he studied the “taking cure” under the Viennese physician Joseph Breur. He also studied hypnosis under the French psychiatrist Jean-Martin Charcot. In 1881 he received his medical degree shortly after which he got engaged to Martha Bernays. They married in 1886. His marriage was extremely happy and gave him six children, the youngest, Anna, became a distinguished pyschoanalysist, too. For over 40 years Freud explored the unconscious mind by free association (this is a technique used in psychology, devised by Sigmund Freud. In it, patients are asked to continually relate anything which comes into their minds, regardless of how superficially unimportant or potentially embarrassing the memory threatens to be. This technique assumes that all memories are arranged in a single associative network, and that sooner or later the patient will stumble across the crucial memory). In 1923 he was diagnosed with cancer from which he died of, on the 23 of September 1939 in London.
One of Freud’s most important contributions was the psychodynamic approach also known as the Freudian theory of personality. According to that there are three levels of awareness (see Topographic model): the conscious, the preconscious and the unconscious. Freud’s theory of the mind has been linked to an iceberg (also known as topographic model), where the vast majority is buried underneath the water’s surface. Only 10% are visible. This is the conscious which we can observe if we turn out attention inwards. The other 90% are beneath the waters surface. The first 10-15% of that represent the preconscious, these are things we are not thinking about but could bring into consciousness easily if we wished. The other 75-80% represent the unconscious which is the biggest and most important part of our mind. According to Freud our repressed memories and instincts lie in the unconscious. It can not be accessed easily because it is buried deep down in our mind. The only way to surface it is to ‘dig’. However, we can get clues from our unconscious i.e. slips of the tongue, accidents or lapses of memory. The iceberg model also includes the three structures of the mind, the id, ego and the superego. The first structure, the id, lies deep in our unconscious at the bottom of the iceberg. It is the part of our mind we are born with. The id is the primitive ‘irrational’ part of our mind and works on the pleasure principle i.e. “I want it and I want it now!” The second structure is the ego. It lies in all three levels of the mind. The Ego is the ‘rational’ part and works on the reality principle i.e. “you can’t always get what you want”. In addition the ego has to negotiate between the id and the superego, to keep balance. The superego is the third and last structure of the mind. It lies in the preconscious. It is the moral part of our mind, the conscience. The superego is the embodiment of parental and social values. In his theory of the psychological development Freud overlooked that experiences after the first five years of life also affect the personality.
