Sigmund Freud

He created a psychotherapeutic method based on the patient's free associations, the creation of a transference relationship with him and the interpretation of his utterances, dreams, transference emotions and resistance during therapy. Around this therapeutic technique, he developed an extensive theoretical system describing man from the psychological, philosophical and anthropological points of view. The system has several branches, the most important of which is the instinctual theory (libido, developmental stages of libido, narcissism, death drive), the so-called first topic (wishes, dream interpretation, Oedipus complex, unconscious, preconsciousness, consciousness) and the so-called second topic (ego, superego and id). He also paid great attention to culture and religion. He was the 3rd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

His ancestors lived in Cologne from the 15th century, from where they fled the pogrom in an easterly direction. In the 19th century, they moved from Lithuania to Galicia and then settled in Austria-Hungary. Freud is the German translation of the Hebrew Simcha, which means "joy". He received the name Shlomo (or Solomon) after his grandfather, who died shortly before he was born. Shlomo Simcha means "a wise man who enjoys learning." According to another theory, it is named after the Burgundian king St. Sigismund, the Czech national patron saint (not to be confused with the Czech king Sigismund of Luxembourg). The motivation for choosing this name was supposed to be an effort to conform to the Czech (and at the same time Catholic) surroundings. He was the eldest of eight children from the third marriage of Ya'ak Freud, a Jewish cloth merchant, to Amalia Nathan. He was born into a community of assimilated Jews on the first floor of house No. 117 in Zámecká Street in Příbor in Moravia, where the family lived until Sigmund was three years old. She had to move out due to the economic crisis, which led to the bankruptcy of her father's shop. In 1859 – after a short stay in Leipzig – the family settled in Vienna. As a child, Freud did not go to school, he received his primary education at home. At the age of ten (a year earlier than usual), he entered the Leopoldstädter Kommunal-Realgymnasium, later known as the Sperl Gymnasium. He was one of the best pupils there, became the head of the department and graduated with honors. He originally wanted to study law, but after reading On Nature, which is attributed to Goethe, he suddenly decided to study medicine. He began studying it in 1873 at the University of Vienna and passed his final exams in eight years, i.e. with a certain delay – among other things, due to two study stays at the experimental zoological station in Trieste (where his love for Italy was born). In 1873, he was also very excited by the news that Heinrich Schliemann had discovered the ancient Greek city of Troy, which he had dug out from under the sediments of time only because he trusted Homer's poetic description. From then on, he was fascinated by archaeology, and the metaphor of the excavation strongly influenced his later conception of the unconscious and the way he arrived at its contents. He graduated in 1881 as a doctor of all medicine. The university environment in Vienna influenced him in several ways. He encountered strong anti-Semitism there, which, in his own words, strengthened his oppositionism. It also discouraged him from sympathizing with the German nationalist movement, and he always felt himself to be either an Austrian or a Jew (in the national, not religious, sense). He was interested in Theodor Meynert's lectures on psychiatry (at that time he did not yet doubt his fully neurological approach to the psyche), but similarly to T.G. Masaryk, also by the lectures of the philosopher Franz Brentano. Occasionally, his interest veered from medical to cultural ones, translating, for example, four essays by John Stuart Mill (among other things on women's emancipation). He was also absorbed by reading the book Thinking of the Greeks by the Brno-born Theodor Gomperz and the study The History of Greek Civilization by Jacob Burckhardt, thanks to which he later connected many of his discoveries with Greek mythology (Oedipus, Electra, Eros, Thanatos). He was very interested in the work of Charles Darwin and studied it intensively. Although he later moved away from biology, he always respected Darwin, and according to Élisabeth Roudinescu, Darwinism was always the basic hidden model of all Freud's work. Frank Sulloway expressed himself analogously, according to him, Freud created a "cryptobiological" system, although he is considered the founder of a purely psychological view of the psyche.

While still a student, in 1876, he began to devote himself to research. He joined the laboratory of Ernst Wilhelm Ritter von Brücke and began to publish in the scientific press – his first contribution is devoted to the gonads of eels, and his work on the central nervous system of the river lamprey was also successful. In his neurological research, he was not far from defining the neuron (although it was not defined until Waldeyer in 1891). Nevertheless, Freud was not willing to sacrifice himself completely for science, because love intervened in his fate – in 1882 he met Martha Bernays, with whom he fell in love. Her family made it clear to him that he would not be able to marry her until he was financially secure. However, the conditions in the research were poor, and Brücke admitted to Freud that he would have to wait too long for a better-paid position. He therefore abandoned his scientific career and became Meynert's assistant (secondary) at the Vienna General Hospital. Even in the hospital, he continued to be inclined to research for some time. For example, he perfected the method of staining neurological sections and published a paper about it, which earned him a reputation. He also wrote a monograph on the cocaine plant, but experiments with cocaine worsened his position in medical and scientific circles, especially after he tried to relieve his friend Ernst von Fleichl, a morphine addict, with cocaine. Fleischl became addicted to both morphine and cocaine (the possible effect of which Freud did not know, the substance had not yet been investigated), which led to criticism of Freud by his colleague. In 1885 he became a private lecturer, but his economic situation still did not improve much. He therefore took two steps that would become crucial for his future development: he accepted a position at a private clinic in Oberdöbling, where he first heard about hypnosis, and then went to Paris for a one-year scholarship to study with Professor Jean-Martin Charcot. Charcot used hypnosis in his lectures, demonstrating its effects on volunteers. Freud was fascinated. Hysteria, which Charcot also dealt with, also came to the center of his attention. During lectures with Charcot, Freud was alerted that hypnosis was also used by Hyppolyte Bernheim in Nancy. Freud also attended his lectures, although there was a great rivalry between Charcot and Bernheim. Nevertheless, Freud won them both over by translating their works into German: Charcot's lectures Leçons sur les maladies du système nerveux and Bernheim's De la suggestion et de ses applications thérapeutiques. With Charcot, he understood above all that there can be thought that is separate from consciousness. It was the basis for the later concept of the unconscious.

In 1886 he returned to Vienna. He married Martha Bernays and opened a private practice. He dealt with the treatment of neuroses and hysteria. At first, he used Wilhelm Heinrich Erb's electrotherapy, but soon realized that the effects were zero. Other ways to help hysterical patients were not known at the time. So he tried to apply the hypnosis he had learned in France. And it was in this way that he worked his way to his own method and his own theory of human personality – psychoanalysis.

A key role in the discovery of psychoanalysis was played by the case of "Anna O.", as she is called in Freud's writings. It is now known that this patient was named Bertha Pappenheim and that she later became a famous feminist. Freud first learned about this case in 1882 from his friend Josef Breuer. Even later, he found out about Berta, as she was related to his wife several times.

The case began in 1880, when Breuer was first called to the twenty-one-year-old girl. He diagnosed severe hysteria and began to treat the woman. She suffered from physical disorders (loss of vision, paralysis, loss of speech) that stemmed from the mental strain that stemmed from taking care of her sick father at night. Breuer treated with bed rest, but the symptoms returned after his father's death, suggesting that stress was not the only cause of the problems. Breuer tried hypnosis, but unlike Bernheim in Nancy, he did not try to influence the patient suggestively, on the contrary, he let her speak, asking her about the origin of her symptoms. And the patient was really relieved after waking up from hypnosis. Bertha herself called it "talking cure" or "chimney sweeping". However, the treatment also had an effect that Breuer did not expect: Bertha had obviously fallen in love with him, fixated on him, which his wife did not like. And so Breuer abruptly discontinued his treatment in 1882. Bertha immediately suggested birth pains to herself, and that evening she convulsed, screaming: "Now Dr. Breuer's child is born." He was summoned, hypnotized her for the last time, and sent her to a sanitarium, after which he himself went with his wife on a second honeymoon. Bertha was in a so-called transference in relation to Breuer, which later became the basis of psychoanalytic treatment, but he was frightened by it. Freud wrote about this in a letter to Stefan Zweig in 1932: "At this moment he held a key in his hand. (…) But he threw it away. With all his great gifts of the soul, he had nothing Faustian in him." Freud, who quickly discovered in practice that electrotherapy was useless, seized on the hope that arose from Breuer's case – the patient was relieved when she could talk uninhibitedly, under hypnosis, about what was bothering her. He also tried to put patients under hypnosis, but he did not have much aptitude for it. So he invented a new technique – when a patient couldn't remember something, Freud suggested that he would remember it after touching his forehead. This method was a surprising success. Freud made a key discovery in the first phase of his work: "Hysterics suffer from memories." However, he did not want to usurp the claim to the discovery, which he believed belonged to Breuer, and so Freud persuaded Breuer ten years (1895) after the case of Anna O. to write her medical history. He added four more medical records that he had accumulated, and then together they published Studies on Hysteria (not without mutual disagreements).

The therapy they created together was called the cathartic method. From this developed, without Breuer's participation, psychoanalysis. To do this, however, Freud had to develop the method of free association – he gradually elevated the dialogue between the doctor and the patient to the patient's monologue, which also eliminated the danger of the doctor influencing memories. In Studies on Hysteria, he admits that he was inspired to do so by a patient he calls Emma ("She said very sullenly that I should not keep asking her where this and that comes from, but let her tell me what to tell me."). And to be even less distracting, he also created the perfect environment for treatment, which is now known mainly as Freud's sofa.

The new method confirmed Freud in several things: that there is also an unconscious part of the mind, that the key message about it in therapy is a night dream, and that sexuality plays a crucial role in neurotic disorder. It was the last discovery that meant a definitive break with Breuer.

However, the role of sexuality has long puzzled Freud, who at first thought that neurotics had been sexually seduced by adults in childhood (as his patients testified to this almost without exception). In the end, however, he rejected the so-called theory of trauma, coming to the conviction that the scenes of seduction in childhood were children's sexual fantasies and that a neurotic is a neurotic precisely because he relates to fantasy as reality. To this day, however, there are authors (especially Jeffrey Masson) who believe that the original position was correct and that Freud only succumbed to his efforts to protect the reputation of bourgeois society. The correctness of Freud's original theory of "seduction" was pointed out in the early 1980s by psychoanalyst Alice Miller, who dealt with the issue of sexual (and as such) child abuse and its consequences in adulthood. Its intention was for the traditionally socially maintained taboo of child abuse to come to the surface publicly, not only to acknowledge the suffering of the victims and ease the path to successful therapy, but also to prevent their further transgenerational transmission by suppressing and displacing traumatic experiences.

However, Freud did not discover psychoanalysis only by studying neurotics and applying his new therapeutic method. His analysis of himself, the so-called self-analysis, was crucial. As early as 1895, he began to analyze his dreams, the first of which he analyzed at the Bellevue Hotel near Vienna. It was a dream about the so-called "Irma's injection", which he later opened the book The Interpretation of Dreams. However, self-analysis culminated around 1897. It had two main themes: his relationship with Freud's father (who died at the time, after which Freud began to observe neurotic traits in himself), and his relationship with his friend Wilhelm Fliess from Berlin, whom Freud understood to be latently homosexual and that Freud himself experienced in him what his patients experience for him – "hysterical love", i.e. a state of so-called "transference". This is how Freud discovered the Oedipus complex. He first mentioned him in a historic letter to Fliess dated October 15, 1897 (a few days before the one-year anniversary of his father's death), where he wrote: Freud formulated his new findings between 1900 and 1905 in several founding writings: In The Interpretation of Dreams, he defined the unconscious and the Oedipus complex, in the Three Treatises on Sexual Theory he defined libido and its development (oral and anal stages), as well as child sexuality. He described the role of sexuality in neurosis mainly in the so-called Dory case. (A fraction of an analysis of a case of hysteria) He then developed the basic model from The Interpretation of Dreams in two popular works, Psychopathology of Everyday Life (the so-called "Freudian slip of the tongue") and The Joke and His Relationship to the Unconscious, in which he used his extensive collection of anecdotes, especially Jewish.

At first, his discoveries aroused only opposition and Freud lived in isolation. In 1902, however, he was appointed an extraordinary professor (außerordentlicher Professor) and gradually began to gain his first supporters among the Viennese doctors, with whom he established a tradition of regular Wednesday meetings in his apartment at Berggasse 19. The historically first meeting in 1902 was attended by Rudolf Reitler, Max Kahane, Wilhelm Stekel and Alfred Adler. Other participants during the year were musicologist Max Graf and publisher Hugo Heller. In 1903, Paul Federn and Alfred Meisl joined. In 1905, Eduard Hitschmann, Adolf Deutsch and Philipp Frey were added. In 1906, Isidor Sadger and Otto Rank signed up. Later, Wilhelm Reich, Sándor Ferenczi and Hans Sachs appeared. An important moment was the establishment of contact with the Zurich school of psychology (Max Eitingon, Eugen Bleuler, Karl Abraham, Carl Gustav Jung). This allowed a local school of thought to be transformed into an international movement.

In 1908, the first international psychoanalytic congress was held in Salzburg. It was here that Freud met Ernest Jones, who later spread psychoanalysis in Britain and also wrote the most detailed, three-volume biography of Freud to date. Abraham Arden Brill came from the United States, who played a similar role in the United States as Jones did in Britain. Thanks to his influence, Freud and Jung were invited to lecture at Clark University in the USA in 1909, which was led by Granville Stanley Hall.

Already at the end of the Salzburg Congress, however, the movement began to be convulsed by controversy. On the train journey back to Vienna, a group of malcontents demonstratively refused to let Freud sit in the compartment (Adler, Stekel, Sadger, Reitler, Federn, Wittels). She reproached him for neglecting his first comrades-in-arms from Vienna at the congress and preferring foreign delegates, especially Zurichians. The detonator was the fact that Freud did not invite anyone from the Viennese group to a meeting on the psychoanalytic yearbook, which took place in Bleuler's hotel room, and that Jung became the editor of the yearbook and Bleuler and Freud became editors-in-chief (i.e. 2:1 in favor of Zurich). Taken aback, Freud defended himself by arguing that meeting foreign guests was a social necessity, that Zurichians have support from the University of Zurich and, in addition, have their own clinic (Burghölzli), which will facilitate the penetration of psychoanalysis into the scientific world. Adler, who was the undeclared leader of the malcontents, eventually relented and the crisis was averted for a while.

However, at the second congress in Nuremberg in 1910, it flared up again. When the chairman of the congress, Ferenczi, proposed (at Freud's request) that Jung should become president for life of the newly formed International Psychoanalytic Society, the Viennese group around Adler and Stekel unleashed a storm of indignation, due to which Ferenczi had to interrupt the negotiations. The disgruntled immediately gathered in Stekel's room and began to negotiate a demonstrative departure from the congress. Freud came to his room and gave a dramatic speech in which he warned that if a Christian was not at the head of the psychoanalytic movement, psychoanalysis would be scorched by anti-Semitism. However, the Viennese forced a compromise that Jung would be elected for only two years. Freud agreed and made two tactical moves: he resigned from the leadership of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and proposed Adler as his chairman, and at the same time proposed the creation of a psychoanalytic monthly, Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, which would be headed by Stekel and Adler. This caused enthusiasm and the schism was averted once again. However, not for long. Although Freud was willing to make concessions to Adler in "political" wrangling, he was not willing to make concessions in theoretical questions. Shortly after the Nuremberg Congress, Adler gave a lecture in the premises of the Medical College (where he moved the meeting of the Vienna Society) in which he completely rejected Freud's sexual theory. Freud did not hesitate any longer and spoke out sharply against Adler. Most joined him. Surprised, Adler left the lecture room in protest and resigned as chairman of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Stekel and eight other of his supporters left with him. They first founded the Society for Free Psychoanalysis, but in the end Adler decided not to use the term psychoanalysis at all and founded his own school called individual psychology. However, a break with the Zurichians soon followed. Freud was first alarmed that Jung had fallen into a dispute with Bleuler, whom Freud always wished to have on his side, although their opinions differed. But then Jung began to distance himself ideologically. He published Metamorphoses and Symbols of the Libido, in which he rejected Freud's sexual theory. When he expressed in his letters the opinion that psychoanalysis should not fight religion with reason, but should itself become a new religion, Freud broke off contact with him. Jung then founded analytical psychology. However, the break with Jung and Adler prompted Freud to enrich his theory: Jung's concept of "introversion/extroversion of libido" and Adler's emphasis on egoistic drives led him to formulate the theory of narcissism (definition in the article On the Introduction of Narcissism, Development of the Theory in the texts Instincts and Their Fates and Sadness and Melancholy). Jung's theory of the archetype also prompted Freud to write Totem and Taboo, in which he developed an original speculation about the "murder of the primordial father".

The First World War was a great impetus for the development and recognition of psychoanalysis, among other things due to the significant successes of psychoanalysts in the treatment of war neuroses. The experience of war also inspired Freud to define the so-called death instinct (in his 1920 treatise Beyond the Pleasure Principle), which gave his instinctual theory a third epicenter (after libido and narcissism).

The year 1923 was in many ways crucial in Freud's life. On the one hand, he published one of his most important writings, I and It, where he developed the so-called structural model of the psyche (ego, superego and id), which later became by far his most influential concept. However, he also developed cancer of the upper jaw that year and found himself on the threshold of death. Since then, he has resolved to deal only with the topics he enjoys the most, which were cultural and psychological theories. These really filled the last phase of his work (The Future of an Illusion, Dissatisfaction in Culture, The Man Moses and the Monotheistic Religion). In the 1930s, despite the fact that the criticism to which psychoanalysis was subjected never wavered, Freud also won his first awards: in 1930 he received the Goethe Prize in Frankfurt, although not for his psychological discoveries, but for his style. The prize was accepted by his daughter Anna and she also read a speech of thanks, because Freud could hardly speak after an extensive amputation of his upper jaw (despite this, he continued to treat patients until his death). For the same reason, Anna read the acceptance speech in Příbor on October 25, 1931 at the unveiling of a memorial plaque on Freud's birthplace. In it, Freud wrote of his birthplace: Although institutional honors were few, Freud earned respect among many of the intellectual and artistic giants of his time. In 1936, on the occasion of Freud's 80th birthday, they wrote a greeting in which they stated: "The question that Sigmund Freud asked mankind will never be lost. His contribution to knowledge cannot be permanently denied (...) If any act of our race is preserved, we are sure that it will be its penetration into the depths of the human mind." The letter was signed by 200 artists, including H. G. Wells, Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Romain Rolland and Virginia Woolf. Albert Einstein added a personal letter: "I am happy that our generation can pay its respects to you as one of its greatest teachers," he wrote.

However, Freud was not allowed to live out his life festooned with honours and surrounded by respect. A political threat appeared: Nazism – in May 1933, the Nazis burned Freud's books at their rally in Berlin. Freud commented: "What progress we are making! In the Middle Ages they would have burned me, today they are content to burn my books." The Nazis considered his psychology perverse.

Freud believed that Nazism could not take hold in Austria and that Hitler would not dare to occupy Austria. For a long time, he therefore resisted emigration, which was chosen by a number of other analysts (they fled mainly to the United Kingdom and the United States, which thus became the new centers of the psychoanalytic movement). After the Anschluss, he realized that it was necessary to escape, but the Nazis did not want to allow him to do so. The analyst and Greek princess Marie Bonaparte, the diplomatic steps of the USA and the intercession of the Italian fascist leader Mussolini, who respected Freud – Freud was able to leave Vienna with his daughter Anna (also an important analyst) helped. However, all four of Freud's sisters perished in the Holocaust. Freud went to London, where he died on September 23, 1939. For many years, he refused painkillers so that he could think and create clearly. However, when the pain became unbearable, Freud asked his attending physician, Max Schur, for a lethal dose of morphine. Schur then wrote a biography of Freud, in which he accurately described his health problems and last moments. According to Schur, Freud asked for euthanasia after he had finished reading Balzac's novella The Skin of Shagrene, which deals with the power of desire, which was also a major theme of Freud. Contrary to Jewish custom, Freud was cremated in London's Golders Green Crematorium, and his urn was stored in the crematorium. Ernest Jones and Stefan Zweig spoke at the funeral ceremony.