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Austrian Culture: Sigmund Freud & Psychoanalysis

Robert Easton

As the founder of psychoanalysis Freud was one of the most important psychologists in history. By popularising ideas such as penis envy, the Oedipus complex, dream symbolism, anal retentiveness and Freudian slips (technically known as parapraxes) he has done more to promote psychology in the public imagination than any other man.

He was born Sigismund Schlomo Freud in 1856 to a Jewish family in Freiberg, now part of the Czech Republic, but then part of the Austrian Empire. The family moved to Vienna shortly after his birth. He went to the university of Vienna, graduated as a medical doctor in 1881, and got engaged to Martha Bernays the following year.

Freud destroyed all of his papers twice in his life, so for a man who wrote so prolifically and lived so recently, we know relatively little about him.

He got a job at Vienna General Hospital, and also began experimenting with cocaine. He was impressed by its anaesthetic qualities, and prescribed it to his friend Ernst Von Fleischl-Marxow to help him get over his heroin and morphine addiction. Unfortunately Fleischl-Marxow developed an even stronger addiction to cocaine, and 'cocaine psychosis', and died a few years later.

In 1885-6 he began experimenting with hypnosis, but later abandoned the practice because he thought he could get patients to speak equally effectively through the process of free association. Free association basically involves the patient saying anything which comes into their mind - no matter how bizarre and irrelevant it seems. The idea is that eventually the patient simply stumbles across important memories.

Freud first used the term psychoanalysis around 1896, and started turning his attentions to analysing himself. At the time he had numerous psychosomatic disorders and phobias, which he began to explore, as well as his dreams, memories and personality.

At this time he came up with some of his most memorable theories. He began to realise that he felt hostility towards his father, and had sexual feelings for his mother as a child. This led him to develop the Oedipus complex.

Oedipus was a mythical character who killed his father and married his own mother. The Oedipus complex holds that the mother is the first object of a child's sexual desire, but the child realises that his father will castrate him if he 'makes a move', and so turns his attentions to other women. He later suggested that girls may have undergo a similar process, and his associate Carl Jung named this the Electra Complex.

The Electra Complex is linked to the stages of psychosexual development and the divisions of the psyche which Freud developed. Freud suggested that the psyche consists of the 'id' the 'super-ego' and the 'ego'.

The id exists almost entirely in the subconscious and represents a human's primitive desires- lust, rage and hunger.

The 'super-ego' straddles the conscious and the unconscious, and is more 'learned', it contains morals and taboos.

The 'ego' mediates between the id and the super ego. It chooses a course which sometimes satisfies the desires of the id, but is limited by the super-ego.

According to Freud, we are born 'polymorphously perverse', in other words anything can be a source of sexual pleasure. Children go through stages of development, where the id focuses on different areas of the body in a sexual way. The first three are oral, anal and phallic.

According to Freud, if something unusual happens during a child's development, it can have consequences in later life. For example if a child was weaned too late or too early (during the oral stage) then it may develop an 'oral fixation', which may lead to a constant hunger for mouth-stimulating activities like smoking during later life.

From about 18-36 months the child is said to be in the anal stage, where they derive pleasure from bowel movements. Some children discover the pleasure of power (the power of not crapping). The theory goes that children who enjoy withholding faeces will develop into careful, organised, miserly and obstinate people. These people are known as 'anally retentive' or 'tight arses'.

The third stage of a child's psychosexual development is the phallic stage. According to the Electra complex, it is during the phallic stage that a girl first realises she doesn't have a penis.

This leads to 'penis envy', the girl is jealous of her father's penis and wants to possess it so much that she dreams of getting pregnant by him. This leads to negative feelings towards the mother. Electra was a character of Greek myth who wanted her brother to avenge their father's death by killing their mother.

Freud was also interested in dreams, which he described as 'The royal road to the unconscious'. In 1906 Freud met Carl Jung, and they exchanged ideas and research for several years, and toured the US together giving lectures about psychoanalysis.

Freud didn't like the US, but Jung later returned there, and their relationship deteriorated. Freud has been accused of lacking any patience with people who disagreed with him, to the extent of ostracising them as much as possible from the psychoanalytical community.

In 1923 Freud was diagnosed with mouth cancer. He had smoked cigars for many years (up to a box a day) and continued to do so even after his jaw was removed.

In 1933 books by Freud and other psychoanalysts were publicly burned by Nazis in Germany. Shortly after the 1938 annexation of Austria by Germany, Freud fled the country, and spent the rest of his life in London.

By 1939 Freud had had over 30 operations to treat his cancer, and needed to use prostheses to eat and talk. Finally, after having fought the disease for 16 years, he asked his doctor for a lethal dose of morphine and was dead within hours.

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