Sigmund Freud :: Psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud1856 - 1939Sigmund Freud was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1856, it was in the Czech Republic. His father was a smooth time merchant, and Freuds mother was his second wife. Freud had two half-brothers some 20 days older than himself. His family moved to Vienna when he was four years old, and though he lots claimed he hated the city, he lived there until it was active by Germany in 1938. Freuds family background was Jewish, though his father was a atheist and Freud himself an avowed atheist.Freud was a good student, and very ambitious. Medicine and law were the professions and hence open to Jewish men, and in 1873 he entered the University of Vienna medical school. He was interested in science above all the idea of practicing treat was slightly repugnant to him. He hoped to go into neurophysiological research, but slight research was hard to manage in those days unless you were independently wealthy. Freud was engaged and needed to be able to support a family before he could marry, and so he determined to go into private form with a specialty in neurology.During his training he befriended Josef Breuer, another physician and physiologist. They often discussed medical cases together and one of Breuers would have a lasting exertion on Freud. Known as Anna O., this patient was a young cleaning woman suffering from what was then called hysteria. She had temporary paralysis, could not speak her native German but could speak French and English, couldnt drink water even when thirsty, and so on. Breuer disc everywhereed that if he hypnotized her, she would talk of things she did not remember in the conscious state, and afterwards her symptoms were relieved -- thus it was called the talking cure. Freud went to Paris for but study under Jean-Martin Charcot, a neurologist known all over Europe for his studies of hystericals and use of hypnosis. In 1886, Freud returned to Vienna, opened a private practice specializing in nervous and brain disorders, and married. He tried hypnotism with his hysteric and neurotic patients, but gradually discarded the practice. He found he could get patients to talk just by putting them in a relaxing position (the couch) and encouraging them to say whatever came into their heads (free association). He could then analyze what they had remembered or expressed and determine what traumatic events in their ultimo had caused their current suffering.