Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis: Who was it?

Sigmund Freud, known as the father of psychoanalysis, maintains that it is the unconscious psychic processes that influence thought and behavior and generate neurosis. A historical figure of whom we explain in more detail who he was and the importance of his contributions in the field of psychology.Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis: who he was and contributions to psychologySigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, was a thinker who left a significant legacy in the modern imagination: just think of all the concepts derived from his theories that are now part of common language, such as the unconscious, the Oedipus complex, the Freudian slip, also called a failed act. It is also at the center of a heated historical debate: on the one hand, there are those who underline the great impact that its theories have and those, on the other hand, insist on the ineffectiveness or unprovable functioning of its methods. The truth is that the concepts he developed, although partly outdated, have forever changed the course of studies of the mind and, more generally, of the humanities. Freud: from the birth to the development of psychoanalysis Freud was born in the mid-nineteenth century , more precisely in 1856, in Freiberg, in the Austrian Empire, a country that is now part of the Czech Republic and that bears the name of Příbor. Freud was part of an extended Jewish family: he was the third son of his father Jakob, but the eldest son of his mother Amalia. Freud will always feel very attached to the Jewish identity, even if he rejects any kind of religious experience.His latest work, written in forced exile due to the fervent anti-Semitic climate in Vienna, is The Man Moses and the Monotheistic Religion, in which Freud sets out in search of the origins of Jewish identity at the very dawn of the Holocaust. the economic crisis, his family is forced to move first to Leipzig and then to settle in Vienna, where Freud is enrolled in Medicine. At the university you have the opportunity to follow, among others, the courses of Franz Brentano, a philosopher of psychology known above all for having introduced the concept of intentionality. In recent years Freud has lived with his family in the Jewish quarter of Leopoldstadt: it is here that the anti-Semitism already widespread in the city lives for the first time. Initially his studies focused on physiology and anatomy. However, after graduating, he is forced to leave the position of investigator, due to financial difficulties in his family, which now includes five other children. Thus he began to practice medicine, becoming a psychiatric assistant. In 1885 he obtained a scholarship that took him to the Salpêtrière University Hospital in Paris, where the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot worked, who in those years worked on what would become the famous studies on hypnosis and hysteria. Upon his return to Vienna, Freud opened a private practice in psychopathology, thus introducing the method of hypnosis in the Austrian capital. In his practice he continues to research the topic of hysteria. Famous from this period is the case of Anna O., studied in collaboration with Josef Breuer. In the same year, 1886, Freud marries his girlfriend Martha, with whom he will have his first daughter the following year.During this period he met Wilhelm Fliess, an otolaryngologist who assumed the existence of a connection between the nose and the sexual organs. Thus began a friendly and intellectual exchange of letters, which will be a fundamental critical contribution to the writing of The Interpretation of Dreams. During these years Freud decided to abandon hypnosis, but to continue with sessions in which to carry out “free association” and the analysis of the dreams of the patients. the result of a conflict between the drives (it) and the demands imposed by society (superego) that are imposed as a control system. For Freud, subjectivity is in fact divided into the ego and the unconscious. The unconscious, in turn, is made up of the id and the superego, which represent the forces that struggle to guide the ego’s behavior. For Freud, therefore, conscious subjectivity is not autonomous, but is the result of what moves on an unconscious level: a theory that he himself considers revolutionary and comparable to the Copernican revolution or the theory of the evolution of species In the event that the ego does not develop a balance between the demands of the id and those of the superego, a neurosis develops; If these requests cause a complete dissolution of the ego, we are in the field of psychosis, that is, of madness. Psychoanalysis, however, being capable of acting only through the mediation of the ego, is considered by Freud only functional for the treatment of neuroses.The main way of exploring the unconscious is The Interpretation of Dreams, whose presentation in written form remains Freud’s best-known work today. This treatise (partly also deeply autobiographical, since the author is often inspired by the analysis of his own dreams) was published in November 1899 but dated 1900 by choice of the editor.The spread of psychoanalysis and the advent of Nazism Fame Freud’s theory spread and in 1902 the “Wednesday meetings” began, appointments with doctors interested in his theories and which were organized periodically in Freud’s house. The Vienna Psychoanalytic Society originates from this nucleus. It is in this period also begins the exchange of letters with Carl Gustav Jung, another fundamental figure for the historical course of psychological studies, which lasts for seven years. Their correspondence actually ended in 1913, due to a strong theoretical contrast. The last years of Freud’s life were deeply influenced by a cancer of the mouth, which probably developed as a result of smoking. The pathology forces him to undergo several operations and use a prosthesis that causes discomfort and pain. The last years of his life take a new negative turn due to the strengthening of the Nazi ideology: in 1933 his books are burned in Berlin, as a result of the accusation against psychoanalysis of being a “Jewish science”. The situation worsened in 1938 due to to the annexation of Austria to Germany. Freud is initially reluctant to move, but is convinced after his youngest daughter Anna, now also an exponent of psychoanalysis, is arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo.Thanks to the intervention of friends, Freud managed to emigrate to London with some relatives: however, he died the following year after a recurrence of the tumor, which was inoperable and especially painful and which led him to ask for a lethal dose of morphine. Freud’s, on the other hand, who all remained in Austria, were among the many concentration camp victims in the following years.