Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis :: Psychology Handout Essays

Sigmund Freud and PsychoanalysisThe aim of this essay is to clarify the basic principles of Freuds theories and to raise the main issues.It is important to be clear roughly the meanings of original margins that you may come crossways and throughout the handout you exit find footnotes clarifying certain terms. Firstly though, a word about the terms psychoanalysis and psychodynamics. Psychoanalysis refers to both Freuds original prove at providing a comprehensive theory of the mind and also to the associated treatment. The term encompasses both Freudian theory and therapy. You will also come across the term psychodynamics. This term is used to denote the approach which began with psychoanalysis merely which has now broadened into a much more diverse collection of theories and models create by other psychologists, all of which nevertheless retain some of the main ideas of Freuds original theory.1.8.1BACKGROUNDSigmund Freud was born in 1856 in Moravia, which was because part of the Austrian Empire and is now in the Czech Republic. He spent most of his life in Vienna, from where he fled, in 1937, when the Nazis invaded. neither Freud (being Jewish) or his theories were very popular with the Nazis and he escaped to London where he died in 1939.He had wanted to be a research scientist solely anti-Semitism forced him to choose a medical career alternatively and he worked in Vienna as a doctor, specialising in neurological disorders (disorders of the nervous system). He constantly revised and modified his theories right up until his death but much of his psychoanalytic theory was produced between 1900 and 1930.Freud earlier attempted to explain the workings of the mind in terms of physiology and neurology ...(but)... quite early on in his treatment of patients with neurological disorders, Freud gain that symptoms which had no organic or bodily basis could imitate the corporeal thing and that they were as real for the patient as if they had been neurologica lly caused. So he began to search for psychological explanations of these symptoms and ways of treating them.In 1885 he spent a year in Paris learning hypnosis from the neurologist Charcot he indeed started using hypnosis with his patients in Vienna. However, he found its effects to be only(prenominal) temporary at best and it did not usually get to the germ of the problem nor was everybody capable of being hypnotised. Meanwhile Breuer, another Viennese doctor, was ontogenesis another method of therapy which he called the cathartic method, where patients would talk out their problems.