Sigmund Freud

The Basics

Janet Sayers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367340124
• eBook ISBN: 9781000178722
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Sigmund Freud: The Basics is an easy-to-read introduction to the life and ideas of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis and a key figure in the history of psychology.

Janet Sayers provides an accessible overview of Freud's early life and work, beginning with his childhood. Her book includes the stories of his most famous patients: Dora, Little Hans, the Rat Man, Judge Schreber, and the Wolf Man. It also discusses Freud's key ideas such as psychosexual development, the Oedipus complex, and psychoanalytic treatment. Sayers then covers Freud's later work, with a description of his observations about depression, trauma and the death instinct, as well as his 1923 theory of the id, ego, and superego. The book includes a glossary of key terms and concludes with examples of how psychoanalysis has been applied to the study of art, literature, film, anthropology, religion, sociology, gender politics, and racism.

Sigmund Freud: The Basics offers an essential introduction for students from all backgrounds seeking to understand Freud's ideas and for general readers with an interest in psychology. For those already familiar with Freudian ideas, it offers a helpful guide to their interdisciplinary applications and context not least today.

Part I

Pre-psychoanalytic Freud

This part focuses on the early years of Freud’s life before he founded psychoanalysis in 1900. It begins with his birth in Moravia on 6 May 1856; the family’s move, when he was nearly four, to Vienna; the start of his university studies in 1873; his research in physiology, anatomy, and into medical uses of cocaine before going in October 1885 to study hysteria with Martin Charcot in Paris; his return to Vienna, where in April 1886 he begins work as a doctor specializing in nervous disorders; and where that September he marries Martha Bernays, with whom he has six children. His first book, On Aphasia, is published in 1891, followed by the publication in 1895 of his and Breuer’s book Studies on Hysteria. In it Freud announces his discovery of the repressed unconscious erotic cause of hysteria. He follows this with his ‘seduction theory’ that hysteria is due to repressed memory of being sexually abused as a very young child – a theory which he almost immediately rejects in favour of arguing that, whether or not they are sexually abused, all young children experience Oedipal jealousy of their father for love of their mother, a theory to which he adds evidence regarding the wishful fantasy basis of memories of early childhood.

1

Childhood and youth

Sigmund Freud’s parents, Jacob and Amalia, were Jewish. They came from Galicia, a Polish part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and were living in a single rented room above a blacksmith’s business in Freiburg, Moravia (now in the Czech Republic), when Sigmund was born on 6 May 1856.

Jacob was then forty-one, worked in the family wool merchant business, and already had two sons, Emmanuel and Philipp, by his first marriage. Amalia, by contrast, was only twenty-one when, as Jacob’s third wife, she gave birth to Sigmund. He was the favourite of her eight children. They included his brother, Julius, who died aged seven months, and Sigmund’s sister, Anna, born in December 1858.

Sigmund’s other siblings came later after ‘a catastrophe’ in the family business in which Jacob ‘lost his fortune’ when, due perhaps to growing anti-Semitism in Catholic Freiburg during the 1859 Austro–Italian war, the family moved in August 1859 to Leipzig (Freud, 1899, p. 312). From Leipzig they moved again. In March 1860 they went to Vienna. Here they settled in a poor Jewish quarter, Leopoldstadt. And it was in Vienna that Amalia gave birth to Sigmund’s other siblings, namely his sisters Rosa, Mitzi, Dolfi, and Pauli, and his youngest sibling, Alexander, born in April 1866.

By then Sigmund had suffered the indignity, aged seven or eight years old, of peeing in his parents’ bedroom to which his father had responded by predicting, ‘The boy will come to nothing’ (Freud, 1900, p. 216). Freud also recalled being appalled, a couple of years later, by the following incident of which he said,

[My father] told me a story to show me how much better things were now than they had been in his days. ‘When I was a young man’, he said, ‘I went for a walk one Saturday in the streets of your birthplace [Freiburg]; I was well dressed, and had a new fur cap on my head. A Christian came up to me and with a single blow knocked off my cap into the mud and shouted: “Jew! Get off the pavement!”’ ‘And what did you do?’ I asked. ‘I went into the roadway and picked up my cap’, was his quiet reply. This struck me as unheroic conduct on the part of the big, strong man who was holding the little boy by the hand. I contrasted this situation with another which fitted my feelings better: the scene in which Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar Barca, made his boy swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever since that time Hannibal has had a place in my phantasies. (Freud, 1900, p. 197)

Freud (as I will now call him) had good reason to hope that, despite being Jewish, he might do well in life just as Hannibal had many centuries before. Prior to Freud’s birth, the revolutions of 1848 in Europe had been followed by the Austro–Hungarian empire, of which Vienna was the capital, granting full civil and political rights to Jews. Freud could therefore realistically hope to make a career for himself in Vienna as a doctor or lawyer.

The Jewish population in Vienna was also increasing. During Freud’s years at secondary school, where he was top of his class for seven years in succession, the proportion of Jewish to other students increased from ‘44 to 73 percent of the total school population’ (Gay, 1988, p. 20). There was also considerable anti-Semitism, not least when in May 1873 a financial crisis occurred resulting in bankruptcies and business failures for which the Viennese Jews were ‘accused of destabilizing the markets’ (Roudinesco, 2016, p. 25).

The same year Freud registered, aged seventeen, as a student at Vienna University where he later recalled,

I found that I was expected to feel myself inferior and an alien because I was a Jew. I refused absolutely to do the first of these things. I have never been able to see why I should feel ashamed of my descent or, as people were beginning to say, of my ‘race’. I put up, without much regret, with my non-acceptance into the community; for it seemed to me that in spite of this exclusion an active fellow-worker could not fail to find some nook or cranny in the framework of humanity. These first impressions at the University, however, had one consequence which was afterwards to prove important; for at an early age I was made familiar with the fate of being in the Opposition and of being put under the ban of the ‘compact majority’. The foundations were thus laid for a certain degree of independence of judgement. (Freud, 1925c, p. 9)

Being his mother’s favourite child must have helped. He had a room to himself while his parents, together with their six other children, had to make do with three bedrooms between them in the larger apartment to which Jacob moved the family during Freud’s student days. Furthermore, so devoted seemingly were Freud’s parents to him that, when he complained of the noise made by his sister Anna’s piano playing, the piano was removed.

Freud was not keen on music. But he certainly benefited from other aspects of the artistic and cultural life of late nineteenth-century Vienna where there were many Jewish publishers, editors, gallery owners, theatre and music promoters, poets, novelists, conductors, virtuosos, painters, scientists, philosophers, and historians. In later life Freud’s friends included the novelists Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig, and he was consulted in his work as a psychoanalyst by the composer Gustav Mahler.

As a student, Freud’s travels took him in early 1875 to England where he visited his half-brothers, Emanuel and Philipp, in Manchester. Following his return to Vienna, and thanks to work there in the zoology laboratory of Carl Claus, Freud did research, beginning in March 1876, in an experimental laboratory of marine biology in Trieste into the sexual organs of eels.

On his return to Vienna he did research in a laboratory headed by the German doctor and physiologist Ernst Brücke. Here, as well as getting to know a fellow researcher, Josef Breuer, who would become a major influence on his subsequent clinical work, Freud’s research included evolutionary-based investigation of the nervous system of fish, this resulting in one of his first scientific publications.

Following a year’s compulsory military service in 1879 and 1880, and after completing his medical degree in 1881, Freud continued doing physiology research with Brücke. But this ended when, after falling in love with, and getting engaged in June 1882 to marry one of his sister’s friends, Martha Bernays, Freud was persuaded by Brücke to get the medical training needed to qualify as a doctor so as to earn the money needed to support a family.

To this end Freud got work in Vienna’s general hospital. Here, while completing his medical training and qualification, he did research with the psychiatrist, neuropathologist, and anatomist Theodor Meynert. In May 1884, Freud achieved the rank of junior doctor and soon after qualified as a university lecturer.

By then he had done research into medical uses of cocaine. This resulted in an article, ‘On Coca’, published in June 1884. But his hopes of doing well in research into cocaine were, it seems, crushed by another researcher, Carl Koller, being credited with discovering the value of cocaine as an anaesthetic in eye surgery. Freud’s research into cocaine was also brought to an end, apparently, due to what in retrospect turned out to be his ill-judged prescription of cocaine to ease problems of his friend Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow.

Freud had meanwhile learnt about his above-mentioned friend Josef Breuer’s treatment of a case of hysteria. This may have contributed to Freud going, in October 1885, to study in Paris with Martin Charcot. By then Charcot was famous not only for demonstrating that hysteria occurs in men as well as in women. He was also famous for overturning previous neurological accounts of this condition by using hypnosis to demonstrate its psychological cause.

After leaving Paris in February 1886, Freud studied children’s diseases in Berlin before returning to Vienna. Here, that April, he began work as a doctor specializing in the treatment of patients with hysteria and other nervous or psychological problems. Money from this work, together with financial help from his fiancée Martha Bernays’s family, enabled him to marry her that September.

Their first child, Mathilde, was born the following October. They went on to have five more children – Jean-Martin, Oliver, Ernst, Sophie, and Anna. By the time Anna was born, on 3 December 1895, Freud’s first book – an account of the psychology of aphasia affecting the ability to speak, read, and write – had been published. The same year, 1891, the Freud family moved to a large flat in Vienna, Bergasse 19. It remained Freud’s home for the next forty-seven years.

SUMMARY: Born in Freiburg on 6 May 1856, Freud was brought up with his six younger siblings in Vienna. Here, after becoming a university student in 1873, he did research in physiology and anatomy, qualified as a doctor, and studied hysteria in Paris with the then leading specialist in this condition, Martin Charcot. In April 1886 Freud began work as a doctor specializing in the treatment of nervous disorders including hysteria. That September he married his fiancée, Martha Bernays, with whom he went on to have six children.

2

Talking cure

Freud is often credited with inventing the talking cure treatment of psychological ills. In fact, however, the term ‘talking cure’ was first used by his friend Josef Breuer’s patient Anna O during her treatment by Breuer, which began in December 1880, and about which Breuer first told Freud in November 1882.

In a jointly written article the two men recounted their finding that the psychological trauma causing the symptoms of hysteria could be discovered by persuading the patient to recall, under hypnosis, the first occurrence of their symptoms. Examples included an involuntary ‘clacking’ noise made with her tongue emitted by one of Freud’s patients, Emmy von N. Under hypnosis it transpired that this symptom began when, despite wanting to keep particularly quiet so as not to waken her sick daughter, Emmy found herself making this noise against her will.

Breuer and Freud described other symptoms of hysteria as ‘symbolic’ of the psychological trauma causing them. Examples included vomiting as symbol of ‘moral disgust’. They found that, provided the patient recalled under hypnosis both emotionally and in words the psychological trauma causing their symptoms of hysteria, these symptoms ‘immediately and permanently disappeared’ (Breuer & Freud, 1893, pp. 5, 6).

Why, though, were patients not conscious, without hypnosis, of the psychological trauma causing each of their symptoms of hysteria? The answer, according to Breuer and Freud, was that the emotional experience evoked by the trauma involved was not sufficiently expressed or ‘abreacted’ at the time it occurred. There was therefore no cathartic release, as they called it, of this trauma’s emotional effect. Sometimes, they argued, this lack of release was due to the trauma occurring when the patient was in a day-dreaming ‘hypnoid’ state of mind such that it remained unconscious and cut off from conscious awareness (Breuer & Freud, 1893, pp. 8, 12).

Another explanation was that the nature of the trauma prevented the emotion it evoked being expressed at the time it occurred. An example was a man for whom the traumatic cause of his hysterical symptoms first occurred when he was unable to express the full strength of the fury evoked in him by the trauma of his work supervisor’s behaviour towards him. Insufficiently abreacted at the time, and cut off from consciousness, this trauma was instead expressed by this man in the form of outbursts of hysteria in which ‘he collapsed and fell into a frenzy of rage’ (Breuer & Freud, 1893, p. 14).

Through enabling patients to recall, under hypnosis, both verbally and emotionally the full force of the trauma causing their symptoms, this force was purged. Furthermore, claimed Breuer and Freud, this had the effect of restoring to ‘normal consciousness’ the previously unconscious trauma causing the patient’s ills (Breuer & Freud, 1893, p. 17).

Breuer illustrated this method of treatment in detail with the example of Anna O, whose manifest bodily symptoms of hysteria included

[P]araphasia, a convergent squint, severe disturbances of vision, paralyses (in the form of contractures), complete in the right upper and both lower extremities, pa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part I Pre-psychoanalytic Freud
• Part II Unconscious-conscious dynamics
• Part III Psychoanalytic case studies
• Part IV Consolidating psychoanalysis
• Part V War and its psychoanalytic aftermath
• Part VI Beyond clinical psychoanalysis
• Glossary
• References
• Index