Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud was born in Austria in 1856. He studied medicine in Vienna and joined the staff of the Vienna General Hospital in 1882. Over the next few years he carried out research with Joseph Breuer into the treatment of hysteria by the recall of painful experience under hypnosis. He later published a book on the subject, Studies in Hysteria (1895).
During this period Freud developed the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. Freud believed that everyday actions are determined by motives which are far more numerous and complex than people realize. He claimed that the most basic and constant motives which influence our actions are unconscious and therefore are difficult to know or acknowledge.
In 1895 Freud published his controversial book, The Interpretation of Dreams. In the book Freud argued that dreams are disguised manifestations of repressed sexual desires. This was followed by The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1904) and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905).
These books influenced the work of other people working in this field including Alfred Adler, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney and Carl Jung. In 1908 Freud and his followers established the International Psychoanalytical Association. Other books by Freud included Totem and Tabu (1913), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1919), Ego and Id (1923) and a book on religion, The Future of an Illusion (1937).
Shocked by the slaughter of the First World War Freud became increasingly interested in political solutions to world problems and in 1926 joined the Pan-European Union. Other people who joined included Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ortega y Gasset and Konrad Adenauer. In 1933 Freud and Einstein wrote Why War?
On 13th March, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the leader of the Austrian Nazi Party invited the German Army to occupy Austria and proclaimed union with Germany. Freud, a strong opponent of Adolf Hitler, moved to London where he died of a cancer in 1939.
Primary Sources
(1) Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899)
To be sure, the ancient belief that the dream reveals the future is not entirely devoid of truth. By representing to us a wish as fulfilled the dream certainly leads us into the future; but this future, taken by the dreamer as present, has been formed into the likeness of that past by the indestructible wish.
(2) Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899)
As everyone knows, the ancients before Aristotle did not consider the dream a product of the dreaming mind, but a divine inspiration, and in ancient times the two antagonistic streams, which one finds throughout in the estimates of dream life, were already noticeable. They distinguished between true and valuable dreams, sent to the dreamer to warn him or to foretell the future, and vain, fraudulent, and empty dreams, the object of which was to misguide or lead him to destruction.
(3) Sigmund Freud, Dora : An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905)
The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is "What does a woman want?"
(4) Sigmund Freud, Dream Psychology (1920)
The unconscious is the larger circle which includes within itself the smaller circle of the conscious; everything conscious has its preliminary step in the unconscious, whereas the unconscious may stop with this step and still claim full value as a psychic activity. Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.
(5) Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work (1957)
One of the conditions for being granted an exit visa was that he sign a document that ran as follows, "I Prof. Freud, hereby confirm that after the Anschluss of Austria to the German Reich I have been treated by the German authorities and particularly the Gestapo with all the respect and consideration due to my scientific reputation, that I could live and work in full freedom, that I could continue to pursue my activities in every way I desired, that I found full support from all concerned in this respect, and that I have not the slightest reason for any complaint." When the Nazi Commissar brought it along Freud had of course no compunction in signing it, but he asked if he might be allowed to add a sentence, which was: "I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone".
(6) Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1927)
The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions, by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.
© John Simkin, March 2013
