Who Was Freud?

Sigmund Freud is widely famous for his psychoanalytic theories and practices. His methods for psychiatric analysis became quickly popular in the early 1900’s and continue to be referenced and studied today. Any childhood development textbook, for example, will contain a section or chapter devoted to Freud’s theories. Who was the man, though? Where was he from and how did he start his work? His actual life is probably just as interesting as the theories and practices that he developed.

Early Life
Freud was not born in Vienna, but he moved there at a very young age. He grew up in a relatively affluent family. His Jewish upbringing happened in a community in which other Jews also held prominent social and political positions. His household employed servants and was never without significant comforts. Freud attended school and earned a medical degree.

Academic Life
While Freud did actively pursue a medical degree, he was easily distracted during his studies. His distraction usually led him to independent studies of neurology. Freud was not, in fact, a psychiatrist. After completing his academic work, including his somewhat frequent independent studies, Freud completed a residency in neurology. He also gained much of his education from a visit to another psychiatrist’s practice in which he learned some treatment methods for hysteria. Apparently, what he learned was relatively unorthodox and even offensive to the other higher class psychiatrists and medical professionals in his community. He lost a good deal of reputation and popularity over the events.

Neurological Practice
Eventually, Freud was given the opportunity to work with young female Jewish patients suffering from hysteria. As a Jew himself, he had access to the Jewish community. The young female patients were not predisposed to negative thoughts about Freud’s reputation. As he talked with his patients, he became increasingly aware of sexual content in their description of their experiences. Not every patient had such content to speak of, but he could usually coax some piece of information out of them.

Stumbling onto Genius
While the need to express repressed sexual desires or fears may or may not have been present in his patients, Freud did all that he could to convince those patients to think of some sexual element from their pasts that could be linked to current hysteria. He occasionally used hypnosis, but the dominant method was forced, deep introspection. His reasons for eliciting the introspection may or may not have been unfounded, but the results were very beneficial to his practice. The upper middle class caught on to the gist of psychoanalysis and sought it out for the opportunity to be introspective and self-searching. Interestingly enough, many patients were healed of their hysterias and other mental discomforts.

Freud’s success seems to have come from a combination of interest and luck. He was able to follow his passion and luckily came upon a vein of psychiatry that was appealing to the masses. He is widely known as a genius psychiatrist who brought innovation to the field. In reality, he was a neurologist who created an outlet for a typical human need. Granted, fulfilling that human need was a solution for several people’s abnormal problems.

Shorter, Edward. A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997.

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