Would you like to know Who was Sigmund Freud? A well-known name in the 21st century, "Freud explains" has become a popular expression for situations that reason itself does not understand, so for everything that people cannot understand due to its complexity, they say: "Only Freud explains".

Let's learn a little about his life, work and death.

Who was Freud?

On May 6, 1856 in the town of Freiberg, then belonging to Austria (and today the Czech Republic, Moravian region), Sigmund Freud is born At the age of 4, he went to live in Vienna, where for 7 years he was first in his class at the Gymnasium.

Although Freud and his family were economically limited, his father never interfered in his professional choice. Freud had never thought about medicine, but showed an early interest in human affairs.

You are also interested in Darwin's theories of evolution It was while listening to Professor Carl Bruhl, who was reading Goethe on Nature, that Freud decided to study medicine.

Sigmund Freud's formative years

In 1873, Freud entered the university According to Zimerman (1999), "he stood out as a brilliant student and trainee" (p.21).

He also experienced dissatisfaction, because he was Jewish, he was expected to feel inferior, which Freud wisely refused:

"I was never able to understand why I should feel ashamed of my ancestry or, as people were beginning to say, of my 'race.' I endured, without great regret, my non-acceptance into the community, for it seemed to me that despite this exclusion, a dynamic fellow worker could not fail to find some nook in the midst of humanity" (p.16,17).

Within the most varied areas of medicine, Freud was exclusively interested in psychiatry He received his medical degree in 1881, which he considered late.

Because of his difficult financial situation, he was advised by his teacher to left his theoretical career and joined the General Hospital as a clinical assistant under psychiatry professor Meynert, whose work on personality interested him.

Freud and his experience with Charcot

For a few years, Freud worked as a trainee and published a series of clinical observations on organic diseases of the nervous system.

However, I knew nothing about the neuroses He even presented a neurotic with frequent headaches as having chronic meningitis.

It was a trajectory that Freud traveled, from becoming a student at the Salpêtrière, the meetings with Charcot and his enormous contribution to psychoanalysis, in the year 1886, Freud moves to Vienna and marries Martha Bernays.

Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer's acquaintance

The meeting with Breuer After some work with Charcot, Freud goes on alone.

Knows Dr. Josef Breuer He became friends with the renowned physician and started sharing his scientific studies with him.

Then he separated from Breuer, abandoned hypnosis He dedicated himself to understanding how patients forget events in their lives, and understood that in some way what was forgotten was conflicting or shameful to him.

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To make him conscious, "it was necessary to overcome something that was fighting against something in the patient, it was necessary to make efforts of the patient's own art in order to compel him to remember" (p. 35).

He then realized that there could be resistance on the part of the patient, thus creating the theory of repression .

The psychoanalytic method of free association

Emergence of Free Association To overcome this resistance, instead of stimulating the patient to talk about something specific, he asked the patient to speak whatever came to mind, practicing the process of free association.

In the words of Zimerman (1999), Freud was not a good hypnotist, so he decided to test the " free association of ideas "He would ask the patient to lie down on the couch and press his forehead with his fingers; he believed that in this way the patient would remember the trauma that had occurred, a trauma that had been forgotten due to repression.

Thanks to your patient Elisabeth Von R. Freud then realized "that the barriers against remembering and associating stemmed from deeper, unconscious forces that functioned as true involuntary resistances s" (p.22).

Sigmund Freud segregated

After Breuer's departure, Freud was left alone, shunned, and criticized for his psychoanalytic studies.

In 1906, this segregation came to an end, he began to meet with a sophisticated group of theorists, among them Abraham, Ferenczi, Rank, Steckel, Sachs, Carl Jung, Adler.

The meetings were held on Wednesdays" and were called the "Wednesday Psychological Society". Later, from these meetings the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society was formed (Zimerman, 1999).

Conscious, Preconscious and Unconscious

Freud divided the mind into three places called: Conscious, Preconscious and Unconscious .

This was the first Topographic Model of the psychic apparatus (Zimerman, 1999).

• The conscious is everything that we are living in the moment, we can access at any time.
• In the preconscious, the contents are accessible and can be brought to consciousness easily.
• Finally, the unconscious, the obsolete part of the psychic apparatus, is where the censored and repressed contents are.

Id, Ego and Superego: Sigmund Freud's second phase

Freud deepened his studies and formulated the second topic, the Id, Ego and Superego .

• The ego, governed by the reality principle, tries to maintain a balance between id and superego.
• The Id, governed by the pleasure principle, is the source and reservoir of all psychic energy.
• And the Superego, the moral part, acts as a judge.

Anna Freud, his daughter

Anna Freud, Freud's daughter and disciple, continued her father's studies, but her technique was considered more pedagogical than psychoanalytical.

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Psychoanalysis grew and bore much fruit, and divergence also, three typical periods emerged:

• orthodox psychoanalysis,
• classical and
• and has also gone through a period of crisis (Zimerman, 1999).

Curiosities about Sigmund Freud's life

The myths that talk about Freud, Rotfus apud Roudinesco (2014), brings a curious topic about Freud, or rather, the legends that are part of the characters that are fascinating and unforgettable, Freud could not be left out, let's see some of these legends:

• " He was not a cocainomian If he used cocaine in an immoderate way around 1886, he stopped when he became a father.
• Rebekka Jacob, his father's second wife, did not commit suicide.
• Lacan invents that he would have declared to Jung on the boat approaching New York: 'They don't know that we are bringing them the plague!'
• Contrary to the rumor propagated by Jung and which has given rise to dozens of essays, articles and novels, Freud was not the lover of his sister-in-law Minna He didn't get her pregnant or have her aborted at the age of... fifty-eight.
• He was not greedy He kept his accounts in a rigorous manner, because he had to support an extended family, helping his children, as well as Lou Andreas-Salomé and even the psychoanalytic movement, to which he fully allocated the sum he received for his biography of Wilson.
• Death drive and Freud's interest in it, as well as the book Beyond the pleasure principle He had been working on the topic for a long time.
• He was not an admirer of Mussolini ".

Freud's last years and death

Finally Freud had to go to England because of Nazism, and that is where he spent the last days of his life.

Freud died in London on September 23, 1939 from a cancer that he had been fighting for years, and undoubtedly opened many paths for the progress of the human sciences.

He concludes:

"Casting a retrospective glance, therefore, at the mosaic that is the labors of my life, I can say that I have begun many times and thrown away many suggestions. Something will emerge from them in the future, though I myself cannot say whether it will be much or little. I can, however, express the hope that I have opened an important path of progress in our knowledge" (p. 72).

BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES

FREUD, S. Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Rio de Janeiro: Imago, 1996. Vol. XX.

ROTFUS, Michel. at last, Freud!... Freud in his time and ours. translated by Bernardo Maranhão. Reverso [online]. 2015, vol.37, n.70 [cited 2020-03-30], pp. 89-102 . Available at: . ISSN 0102-7395. accessed on: 30 March 2020.

ZIMERMAN, David, E. Fundamentos Psicanalíticos: teoria, técnica e clínica: uma abordagem didática - Porto Alegre: Artmed, 2007.

This article about Who was Sigmund Freud was written by Elaine Matos ([email protected]), clinical psychologist and student of psychoanalysis. Specialist in Psychological Assessment and Child Psychology.