Sigmund freud

Sigmund Freud
Mr. R. Carrillo
Academic Study
March 13, 2011

The Work of Sigmund Freud

Back in 1900, the psychoanalysis therapy was seen with a different point of view, about what people described in their frustrations of every day and that was strictly the rule untilsomeone came along and change the perspective of the psychology forever and even now a days his theories about the treatment of mental diseases are still in practice.

Sigmund Schlomo Freud was born in may 1956 in Freiberg, a small city that is now called Czech Republic that belongs to the Astro-Hungarian empire. Died in 1939 of buccal cancer in London, where he resided because of his Jewishdescendant and the persecution from the Nazis.

His first studies in medicine started analysing the effects of cocaine as a way to treat depression, drug that he prescribed for his patients and himself. He soon gave it up because of the highly addictive and secondary effects that where caused by it. Later on he became interested in the use of hypnosis as a way to treat nervous disorders as well ashysteria.Freud subsequently collaborated with Josef Breuer, who applied hypnosis not just to cause or suppress the symptoms of hysteria but to actually divine the root causes. However, Freud soon abandoned hypnosis in favor of conscious psychoanalysis, first for the technique of free association, then eventually for his well-known technique of observational, couch-based psychoanalysis.

Hispsychological early research years started in Vienna, however, his research wasn’t taken seriously especially among medics although he was a graduate of medical school and specialized in neurology. Some critics have suggested that much of Freud's early psychoanalytical theory was a by-product of his cocaine use.He developed a new method of treating the mental diseases and called it psychoanalysis, themethod parts from the unconscious into the psyche.

Freud studied two methods to get in the unconscious the first was by the interpretation of dreams:

“I shall demonstrate that there is a psychological therapy which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and that on the application of this technique every dream will reveal itself as a psychological structure, full of significance, and one whichmay be assigned to a specific place in the psychic activity of the waking state”(page 6, Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of dreams)

The next method Sigmund Freud proposed was the free association method:
The basic method in which psychological phenomena are investigated in psychoanalysis is free association. Free association consists on adjuring the patient to follow what Freud termed thefundamental rule of psychoanalysis: while focusing attention on the symptom, the dream or the parapraxis being analyzed, the patient has to suspend his or her critical attitude and report all of the ideas that then come to mind, (page 109, Malcolm Macmillan, Freud evaluated)
While he was studying these mental diseases Freud started wondering about different puzzles from some of his patients:

‘Freudis presented with a young girl who feels compelled to rinse out her wash basin over and over, dozens of times after she washes herself. Her habit becomes so intense that her whole life revolves around it. Why? A young boy becomes terrified of horses although he himself was never hurt by one. Why?
( chapter 5, psychodynamics theories: Freud’s conceptions)

It was this kind of questionsthat he could not answer himself by the classical therapy and hypnosis treatment, that is when he developed this new theory that sees the personality as an iceberg, that we only show a little part of it the rest lies below. Instead of listening what the people did say about their illness, he observed the involuntary or disguised behaviour and made assumptions he believed that those were the root...