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Amman, Jordan
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Professional
Male
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Arabic, English
2-5 Years
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Jordan
Addiction, Adolescence Disorders, Anxiety Disorders & Obsessions, Child Disorders

Sigmund Freud (/frɔɪd/ FROYD;[2] Austrian German: [ˈziːgmʊnd ˈfrɔʏd]; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies seen as originating from conflicts in the psyche, through dialogue between patient and psychoanalyst,[3] and the distinctive theory of mind and human agency derived from it.[4]

Freud was born to Galician Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg, in the Austrian Empire. He qualified as a doctor of medicine in 1881 at the University of Vienna.[5][6] Upon completing his habilitation in 1885, he was appointed a docent in neuropathology and became an affiliated professor in 1902.[7] Freud lived and worked in Vienna, having set up his clinical practice there in 1886. Following the German annexation of Austria in March 1938, Freud left Austria to escape Nazi persecution. He died in exile in the United Kingdom in September 1939.

In founding psychoanalysis, Freud developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association, and he established the central role of transference in the analytic process. Freud’s redefinition of sexuality to include its infantile forms led him to formulate the Oedipus complex as the central tenet of psychoanalytical theory.[8] His analysis of dreams as wish fulfillments provided him with models for the clinical analysis of symptom formation and the underlying mechanisms of repression. On this basis, Freud elaborated his theory of the unconscious and went on to develop a model of psychic structure comprising id, ego, and super-ego.[9] Freud postulated the existence of libido, sexualised energy with which mental processes and structures are invested and that generates erotic attachments and a death drive, the source of compulsive repetition, hate, aggression, and neurotic guilt.[9] In his later work, Freud developed a wide-ranging interpretation and critique of religion and culture.

Though in overall decline as a diagnostic and clinical practice, psychoanalysis remains influential within psychologypsychiatrypsychotherapy, and across the humanities. It thus continues to generate extensive and highly contested debate concerning its therapeutic efficacy, its scientific status, and whether it advances or hinders the feminist cause.[10] Nonetheless, Freud’s work has suffused contemporary Western thought and popular culture. W. H. Auden‘s 1940 poetic tribute to Freud describes him as having created “a whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our different lives”.[11]

Biography

Early life and education

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Freud’s birthplace, a rented room in a locksmith’s house, FreibergAustrian Empire (PříborCzech Republic)
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Freud (aged 16) and his mother, Amalia, in 1872

Sigmund Freud was born to Ashkenazi Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg,[12][13] in the Austrian Empire (now Příbor, Czech Republic), the first of eight children.[14] Both of his parents were from Galicia. His father, Jakob Freud, a wool merchant, had two sons, Emanuel and Philipp, by his first marriage. Jakob’s family were Hasidic Jews and, although Jakob himself had moved away from the tradition, he came to be known for his Torah study. He and Freud’s mother, Amalia Nathansohn, who was 20 years younger and his third wife, were married by Rabbi Isaac Noah Mannheimer on 29 July 1855.[15] They were struggling financially and living in a rented room, in a locksmith’s house at Schlossergasse 117 when their son Sigmund was born.[16] He was born with a caul, which his mother saw as a positive omen for the boy’s future.[17]

In 1859, the Freud family left Freiberg. Freud’s half-brothers immigrated to Manchester, England, parting him from the “inseparable” playmate of his early childhood, Emanuel’s son, John.[18] Jakob Freud took his wife and two children (Freud’s sister, Anna, was born in 1858; a brother, Julius born in 1857, had died in infancy) firstly to Leipzig and then in 1860 to Vienna where four sisters and a brother were born: Rosa (b. 1860), Marie (b. 1861), Adolfine (b. 1862), Paula (b. 1864), Alexander (b. 1866). In 1865, the nine-year-old Freud entered the Leopoldstädter Kommunal-Realgymnasium, a prominent high school. He proved to be an outstanding pupil and graduated from the Matura in 1873 with honors. He loved literature and was proficient in German, French, Italian, Spanish, English, HebrewLatin and Greek.[19]

Freud entered the University of Vienna at age 17. He had planned to study law, but joined the medical faculty at the university, where his studies included philosophy under Franz Brentano, physiology under Ernst Brücke, and zoology under Darwinist professor Carl Claus.[20] In 1876, Freud spent four weeks at Claus’s zoological research station in Trieste, dissecting hundreds of eels in an inconclusive search for their male reproductive organs.[21] In 1877, Freud moved to Ernst Brücke’s physiology laboratory, where he spent six years comparing the brains of humans with those of other vertebrates such as frogs, lampreys, as well as invertebrates, for example, crayfish. His research work on the biology of nervous tissue proved seminal for the subsequent discovery of the neuron in the 1890s.[22] Freud’s research work was interrupted in 1879 by the obligation to undertake a year’s compulsory military service. The lengthy downtimes enabled him to complete a commission to translate four essays from John Stuart Mill‘s collected works.[23] He graduated with an MD in March 1881.[24]

Early career and marriage

In 1882, Freud began his medical career at Vienna General Hospital. His research work in cerebral anatomy led to the publication in 1884 of an influential paper on the palliative effects of cocaine, and his work on aphasia would form the basis of his first book On Aphasia: A Critical Study, published in 1891.[25] Over three years, Freud worked in various departments of the hospital. His time spent in Theodor Meynert‘s psychiatric clinic and as a locum in a local asylum led to an increased interest in clinical work. His substantial body of published research led to his appointment as a university lecturer or docent in neuropathology in 1885, a non-salaried post but one which entitled him to give lectures at the University of Vienna.[26]

In 1886, Freud resigned his hospital post and entered private practice, specializing in “nervous disorders”. The same year, he married Martha Bernays, the granddaughter of Isaac Bernays, a chief rabbi in Hamburg. Freud was, as an atheist, dismayed at the requirement in Austria for a Jewish religious ceremony and briefly considered, before dismissing, the prospect of joining the Protestant ‘Confession’ to avoid one.[27] A civil ceremony for Bernays and Freud took place on 13 September, and a religious ceremony took place the following day, with Freud having been hastily tutored in the Hebrew prayers.[28] The Freuds had six children: Mathilde (b. 1887), Jean-Martin (b. 1889), Oliver (b. 1891), Ernst (b. 1892), Sophie (b. 1893), and Anna (b. 1895). From 1891 until they left Vienna in 1938, Freud and his family lived in an apartment at Berggasse 19, near Innere Stadt.

On 8 December 1897, Freud was initiated into the German Jewish cultural association B’nai B’rith, to which he remained linked for all his life. Freud gave a speech on the interpretation of dreams, which had an enthusiastic reception. It anticipated the book of the same name, which was published for the first time two years later.[29][30][31]

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Freud’s home at Berggasse 19, Vienna

In 1896, Minna Bernays, Martha Freud’s sister, became a permanent member of the Freud household after the death of her fiancé. “[A] paper published in 1969 by John M. Billinsky contained the transcript of a conversation he had with [Carl] Jung in 1957, in which Jung confided that … Minna herself had told him about her affair with Freud”.[32][33] The discovery of a Swiss hotel guest book entry for 13 August 1898, signed by Freud whilst travelling with his sister-in-law, has been presented as evidence of the affair.[34]

Freud began smoking tobacco at age 24; initially a cigarette smoker, he became a cigar smoker.[35] He believed smoking enhanced his capacity to work and that he could exercise self-control in moderating it. Despite health warnings from colleague Wilhelm Fliess, he remained a smoker, eventually developing buccal cancer.[36] Freud suggested to Fliess in 1897 that addictions, including that to tobacco, were substitutes for masturbation, “the one great habit.”[37]

Freud had greatly admired his philosophy tutor, Franz Brentano, who was known for his theories of perception and introspection. Brentano discussed the possible existence of the unconscious mind in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874). Although Brentano denied its existence, his discussion of the unconscious probably helped introduce Freud to the concept.[38] Freud owned and made use of Charles Darwin‘s major evolutionary writings and was also influenced by Eduard von Hartmann‘s The Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869). Other texts of importance to Freud were by Fechner and Herbart,[39] with the latter’s Psychology as Science perhaps of underrated significance in this respect.[40] Freud also drew on the work of Theodor Lipps, who was one of the main contemporary theorists of the concepts of the unconscious and empathy.[41]

Though Freud was reluctant to associate his psychoanalytic insights with prior philosophical theories, attention has been drawn to similarities between his work and that of both Schopenhauer[42] and Nietzsche. In 1908, Freud said that he occasionally read Nietzsche and was strongly fascinated by his writings, but did not study him, because he found Nietzsche’s “intuitive insights” resembled his own work at the time too much, and also because he was overwhelmed by the “wealth of ideas” he encountered when he read Nietzsche. Freud sometimes would deny the influence of Nietzsche’s ideas. One historian quotes Peter L. Rudnytsky, who says that based on Freud’s correspondence with his adolescent friend Eduard Silberstein, Freud read Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and probably the first two of the Untimely Meditations when he was seventeen.[43][44] Freud bought Nietzsche’s collected works in 1900, telling Wilhelm Fliess that he hoped to find in Nietzsche’s works “the words for much that remains mute in me.” Later, however, he said he had not yet opened them.[45] Freud came to treat Nietzsche’s writings, according to Peter Gay, “as texts to be resisted far more than to be studied.”[46] His interest in philosophy declined after he decided on a career in neurology.[47]

Freud read William Shakespeare in English; his understanding of human psychology may have been influenced by Shakespeare’s plays.[48]

Freud’s Jewish origins and his allegiance to his secular Jewish identity were significant in the formation of his intellectual and moral outlook, especially concerning his intellectual non-conformism, as he pointed out in his Autobiographical Study.[49] They would also have a substantial effect on the content of psychoanalytic ideas, particularly in respect of their common concerns with depth interpretation and “the bounding of desire by law”.[50]

Relationship with Fliess

During the formative period of his work, Freud valued and came to rely on the intellectual and emotional support of his friend Wilhelm Fliess, a Berlin-based ear, nose, and throat specialist whom he had first met in 1887. Both men saw themselves as isolated from the prevailing clinical and theoretical mainstream because of their ambitions to develop radical new theories of sexuality. Fliess developed highly eccentric theories of human biorhythms and a nasogenital connection which are today considered pseudoscientific.[51] He shared Freud’s views on the importance of certain aspects of sexuality – masturbationcoitus interruptus, and the use of condoms – in the etiology of what was then called the “actual neuroses,” primarily neurasthenia and certain physically manifested anxiety symptoms.[52] They maintained an extensive correspondence from which Freud drew on Fliess’s speculations on infantile sexuality and bisexuality to elaborate and revise his own ideas. His first attempt at a systematic theory of the mind, his Project for a Scientific Psychology, was developed as a metapsychology with Fliess as interlocutor.[53] However, Freud’s efforts to build a bridge between neurology and psychology were eventually abandoned after they had reached an impasse, as his letters to Fliess reveal,[54] though some ideas of the Project were to be taken up again in the concluding chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams.[55]

Freud had Fliess repeatedly operate on his nose and sinuses to treat “nasal reflex neurosis”,[56] and subsequently referred his patient Emma Eckstein to him. According to Freud, her history of symptoms included severe leg pains with consequent restricted mobility, as well as stomach and menstrual pains. These pains were, according to Fliess’s theories, caused by habitual masturbation, which, as the tissue of the nose and genitalia were linked, was curable by removal of part of the middle turbinate.[57][58] Fliess’s surgery proved disastrous, resulting in profuse, recurrent nasal bleeding; he had left a half-metre of gauze in Eckstein’s nasal cavity, whose subsequent removal left her permanently disfigured. At first, though aware of Fliess’s culpability and regarding the remedial surgery in horror, Freud could bring himself only to intimate delicately in his correspondence with Fliess the nature of his disastrous role, and in subsequent letters maintained a tactful silence on the matter or else returned to the face-saving topic of Eckstein’s hysteria. Freud ultimately, in light of Eckstein’s history of adolescent self-cutting and irregular nasal (and menstrual) bleeding, concluded that Fliess was “completely without blame”, as Eckstein’s post-operative haemorrhages were hysterical “wish-bleedings” linked to “an old wish to be loved in her illness” and triggered as a means of “rearousing [Freud’s] affection”. Eckstein nonetheless continued her analysis with Freud. She was restored to full mobility and went on to practice psychoanalysis herself.[59][60][57]

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