What happens when a person no longer understands themselves as master in their own house and suddenly senses that unconscious wishes, repressed conflicts and old childhood images are steering their thinking? This non fiction book takes you into the world of Sigmund Freud and explains, in an accessible way, why his ideas around 1900 shook medicine and still shape our view of psyche, culture and society today.
The experienced author and editor Bert Alexander Petzold takes you on a fact rich cultural journey and explains, in an accessible, entertaining and clearly structured way, knowledge that provides immediate orientation. You learn how psychoanalysis emerged, how Freud experimented with hypnosis as a method of treatment, and why terms such as the Oedipus complex and dream interpretation became widely known far beyond therapy. The book shows not only theses, but the path towards them, marked by dispute, scepticism, self doubt and an unshakeable determination to take psychological phenomena seriously at last. In doing so, you gain language for interpretation and argument when it comes to self image, morality, shame, desire and the power of what is repressed.
Sigmund Freud, 1856 to 1939, worked as a Viennese doctor at a time when psychological symptoms were often dismissed as weakness. Freud put forward a provocative thesis that the unconscious and the suppressed within a person are the truly driving forces of psychology. Together with Josef Breuer, and shaped by clinical experience, he gradually developed a new method of talking from his early use of hypnosis, free association. From case observations, conversations and bold interpretations he formed a depth psychological framework that became a foundation of modern psychology. The book explains vividly why memories, dreams and apparently minor details could become the key.
You learn how Freud describes conflicts between desire and prohibition, how defence mechanisms work, and why psychological suffering becomes tangible not only in the mind, but throughout a person's whole sense of life. A particular focus lies on Freud's major writings that spread his thinking worldwide, 'Studies on Hysteria', 'The Interpretation of Dreams', 'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality', 'Totem and Taboo', 'The Ego and the Id', 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' and 'Civilization and Its Discontents'. In this way you see why Freud influenced not only therapy, but also literature, art, education and social criticism, and why his ideas still inspire and provoke contradiction in equal measure. This friction is precisely what makes the subject so compelling, because it shows how alive scholarship remains.
Freud's writings were initially judged dismissively and met with little resonance within the established scientific world, especially among doctors. With only a few supporters, he nevertheless spread his views consistently, often in the face of mockery and resistance. After the annexation of Austria in 1938, he had to flee the National Socialists into exile in London. This non fiction book makes clear how, over time, his work gained enormous influence across almost all intellectual and cultural spheres, and why it is still repeatedly debated, criticised and questioned. The book is ideally suited to preparation for examinations leading to the higher education entrance qualification and especially for study at university.
Secure this book and gain a clear, well grounded access to psychoanalysis and Freud's thinking. If you want not only to have heard of the Oedipus complex, dream interpretation and the idea of the unconscious, but to place and explain them convincingly, you will find here knowledge that lasts.