Most Important Sigmund Freud ideas: Oedipus Complex

Sigmond Freud was an Australian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and psychoanalysis. When he completed his habilitation in 1885, he was given a docent in neuropathy and became an affiliated professor in 1902. Freud lived and worked in Vienna since he set up his clinical practice there in 1886. In 1938 he left Austria to escape the Nazis. He died in exile in the United Kingdom in 1939.

When founding psychoanalysis Freud developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association and discovered transference, establishing its role in the analytic process. Freud's redefinition of sexuality to include its infantile forms led to the formulation of the Oedipus complex as the central tenet of psychoanalytic theory. His analysis of dreams gave him models for the clinical analysis of symptom formation and underlying mechanisms of repression. Knowing this, Freud elaborated on his theory of unconsciousness and developed a model showing the difference between the id, ego, and superego. In his later years of working, Freud developed a wide-range interpretation and critique of religion and culture.

With a decline in diagnostic and clinical practice, psychoanalysis remains influential in psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, and across the humanities. This struck debated in regards to its therapeutic efficiency, scientific status, and whether it advances or is bad for the feminist cause.

Freud the first of either child, born to Jewish parents in a Moravian town called Freiberg. Both of his parents were from Galicia, a providence straddling the Ukraine and Poland. His father, Jacob Freud, was a wool merchant and had two sons from his first marriage. Jabob and Sigmond Freud's mother, Amalia Nathanson, who was twenty years older, and his third wife, were married by Rabbi Isacc Noah.

Freud entered the University of Vienna at age seventeen. He had originally planned to study law but ended up joining the medical wing where his studies included psychology. He also spends four weeks in zoology. He then moved to a psychology unit where he spent years studying human brains, and the brains of other vertebrates. In 1879, Freud’s research was interrupted by an obligation to undertake years of compulsory military service. The downtime allowed him to translate four essays written by John Stuart Mill. In March of 1881, he graduated with an MD.

In 1882, Freud began his medical career at the Vienna General Hospital. His research in cerebral anatomy led to the publication of an influential paper on the effects of cocaine. This discovery would form a platform for his first book on the Aphasias, a critical study published in 1891.

In 1886, Freud resigned from his hospital position and entered a private practice specializing in “nervous disorders”. That same year he married Martha Bernays, and they had six children. From 1891-1938, Freud and his wife lived in the same apartment along with his sister in law who’s fiance had just died. The close relationship between her and Freud formed caused suspicions of an affair between the two. Hotel logs found in the log of the Swiss hotel confirmed the affair.

Freud began smoking tobacco at the age of twenty-four, he had begun as a cigarette smoker then he became a cigar smoker. He believed that smoking enhanced his mental capacity at work and that he could exercise self-control in moderating it. Despite warnings from his colleagues, he remained a smoker and was later buccal cancer.

Sigmund Freud’s theories helped us a lot today, and if it weren’t for him we would not have made many of the discoveries we have made today without him.