Sigmund Freud Ideas: Oedipus Complex

Sigismund Schlomo Freud was born May 6, 1856, in the small Moravian village of Freiberg. He was the son of Jacob Freud, a Jewish wool merchant, and his wife Amalia. Freud got special treatment as a child. He was the only member of his family who had his own room. When Freud started complaining that his sister playing the piano had disturbed him, the piano was gotten rid of. Freud earned top marks at his Jewish grade school while studying languages on his own. By the time he was twelve, he was reading original Shakespeare and fluent in six languages. Freud had also developed a hobby as a boy, he kept a record of his dreams. The interest in dreams was there from the beginning.

Sigmund Freud was positive that he would make a name for himself when he was a child. He told a playmate, “save these letters; you’ll never know how important they will be.” In 1975 Freud began medical school at the University of Vienna. He wanted to become a research scientist but Jews were not very welcome in that prestigious field. Reluctantly, to be able to make a living, he decided to become a doctor. In 1885 Freud was an intern at the general hospital of Vienna. He specialized in mental diseases, a field that included hysteria and other disorders. The smartest doctors of the time assumed that hysteria and related illnesses were caused by nerve damage or a lesion in the brain. Freud went to Paris in 1885 to study with one of the world’s experts on nervous disorders, Jean-Martin Charcot. Charcot was performing experiments, putting hysterical patients under hypnosis. Those experiments turned Freud’s ideas inside out and caused him to go on a lifelong exploration of the human mind. Freud learned from Charcot that diseases can be caused by ideas. Charcot proved that you can put ideas into someone’s head in a hypnotic state and cause a physical symptom. The key idea was that it could be their beliefs that change their symptoms. More specifically, a hidden part of the mind, what Freud eventually turned into the unconscious, which was a big concept of the 20th century.

On April 5, 1886, just weeks after returning from Paris, Freud opened his own medical practice. He rented a one-room office on the edge of fashionable Vienna. Freud began his medical practice as a hypnotist, the famous Freudian couch comes from hypnosis since it was easier to put hypnotize lying down. Inspired by Charcot, Freud hoped to get into his patients’ unconscious and end their hysteria through hypnotic suggestion. It didn’t work that well, but it wasn’t less effective than the other therapies of the time, some of them Freud also utilized. He tried a lot of therapeutic remedies, spa cures, electrotherapy, hydrotherapy, and the use of magnets. None of it worked, and Freud was very interested in why. Dr. Joseph Breuer told Freud about a patient known in psychoanalytic history as Anna O. And an unusual treatment, the talking cure. Anna was very severe hysteric. She has contractures, paralysis, impairment of vision and speech and Breuer starts to see her daily. As she describes her symptoms, when she tells him about the origin of the symptom, the symptom tends to disappear. The talking treatment becomes the basis of all psychotherapy. Still using hypnosis, Freud adopted this new treatment, talking with his patients about their symptoms, trying to discover when and how they began. He found that patients traced their hysteria back to traumatic childhood experiences involving sex. For some time, Freud believed that all hysteria originated from childhood sexual abuse. Eventually, he thought that it either came from real abuse or a hidden childhood fantasy of sex. Sex was coming up everywhere, Freud’s female patients were developing romantic feelings for him. At the end of one of his sessions, a woman threw her arms around Freud and kissed him. This made Freud very curious. He eventually realized that his patients were transferring feelings for their parents onto him. The concept of transference became an important tool in psychotherapy. While Freud's work life was filled with issues of sex, his actual sex life was threatening to make him neurotic. He married Martha at the age of 30 in 1886. They had six children in the next eight years. Freud didn’t want any more offspring but he disliked birth control, especially the withdrawal method. His many male patients convinced him it was the main cause of neurotic anxiety in men. He said in the 1890s, “the only way in which a man can not be neurotic is to have free and unfettered sexual intercourse with his mate, which meant no condoms, no withdrawal method, no masturbation.” If you did any of these things, you were going to end up neurotic. After the birth of Anna in 1895, Freud gave up sex for many years.

Work was Freud’s passion, he was caught up in the scientific investigation of a lifetime. He discovered revolutionary ideas about dreams, the unconscious, and sexuality. By the 1890s Freud was successful enough with his talking treatment to open new offices in a fashionable district of Vienna. Freud lived and worked here for 47 years. On October 23rd, 1896, Sigmund Freud's father Jacob died. With having many confusing feelings, Freud decided to analyze himself. Freud's self-analysis is a huge moment in the history of psychiatry. Freud had recently discovered what he called “the royal road to the unconscious.” Dreams; and he had created an interesting new method for exploring that road. Every night after his patients, Freud laid on the couch and cleared his mind to dream. One dream produced a vivid image. Freud dissecting himself, from the hips down. Freud had many neuroses to dissect. Among other things, he had a travel phobia. He always wanted to visit Rome. Once he went within 50 miles of the city, then turned around and went home. He also tended to faint in front of talented male friends, and he had a severe addiction to cigars. At first for about a year, the process of self-analysis made his symptoms worse because he was really looking into what he called 'the dung heap' which meant, all of the disgraceful, or anxiety-producing feelings were pushed into the unconscious. Fantasies of incest, fantasies of murder, unacceptable forms of bribery, repressed hatreds. As a child, he could wish for the death of a brother, feel lust for his mother. To face the fact that a child had sexual feelings for a parent. It was unacceptable and insane in his time. Freud looked at these memories like a scientist looking at research. Without moral judgment, they made a large leap. What if all children experienced passionate feelings of love and hate toward their parents. What if those feelings were built into the process of human development. The Oedipus complex is the name Freud eventually gave this theory. The name is taken from the play by Sophocles, Oedipus Rex. In which Oedipus, king of Thebes unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother.