Freud Meets World Essay -- essays research papers

Sigmund Freud, physiologist, medical doctor, psychologist, and father of psychoanalysis, is recognized as one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Freud articulated the concepts of the unconscious, of infantile sexuality, and of repression. He proposed a tripartite account of the structure of the mind, as part of a radically new therapeutic reference for the understanding of human psychological development, and the treatment of abnormal mental conditions. Freud is also known as the â€Å"Father of Psychoanalysis.† Psychoanalysis refers to the method of investigating unconscious mental processes, and is also a form of psychotherapy. Not regarding the multiple manifestations of psychoanalysis as it exists today, it can, in almost all respects, be traced directly back to Freud’s original work (Brome 12). Sigmund Freud was born on May 6, 1856, at Freiberg in Moravia, which is now a part of Czechoslovakia. He was born into a family full of enough complexity and confusion to give him significant material for his ruminations on the individual mind and its connections with others. His mother, Amalia, an assertive, good-looking woman, was twenty years younger than her husband Jacob. Freud’s father was Jewish, and was said to be a wool merchant. His siblings were two half-brothers, who were already grown-up, which provided a constant reminder of the oddity of his position. His own confusions, hatreds, loves, and desires from this period appear to have had significant impact on his later work on development. The decline of the textile market, and an increase of anti-Semitism in the city, forced his family to relocate to Vienna, the capitol of Austria when he was four. While in Vienna, Freud developed a liking for the medical field, especially the nervous system, and the works of the mind. He graduated from the medical school of the University of Vienna in 1881. Freud later decided to specialize in neurology, the study Kevin Mechtley 2 and treatment of disorders of the nervous system (Brill V). He left the University, secretly engaged, and found a job at the Vienna Hospital in hopes of earning enough money to get married. While at the hospital, he concentrated on the study of cerebral anatomy and also conducted research on the possible clinical uses of cocaine. In September 1886 he married Martha Bernays after a... ...He is at once the principal writer and the principal thinker of our century. If one seeks the strongest authors in the West in our time, most readers would agree upon the crucial figures; Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Yeats, Mann, Lawrence, Eliot, Rilke, Faulkner, Valery, Stevens, Montale, Beckett certainly would be among them. The essential thinkers might constitute a shorter and more controversial canon, whether of scientists or philosophers, and I will not venture to list them here. Freud is unique in that he would dominate the second group and successfully challenge even Proust, Joyce, and Kafka in the first. Nor can one match him with any of the religious figures or scholars of the century. His only rivals indeed are Plato, Montaigne, Shakespeare, or even the anonymous primal narrator of Genesis, Exodus and Numbers, called the â€Å"J† writer of Yahwist in biblical scholarship. Sigmund Freud is generally recognized as one of the most influential and authoritative thinkers of the twentieth century. Even today, a century after Freud lived, all of his theories are debated and discussed, and some are still practiced in the psychotherapy field.