Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis :: Psychology Handout Essays

Sigmund Freud and PsychoanalysisThe aim of this essay is to clarify the primary principles of Freuds theories and to raise the main issues.It is important to be clear close the meanings of certain impairment that you may do it across and through out(a) the handout you will find footnotes clarifying certain terms. Firstly though, a word of honor about the terms psychoanalysis and psychodynamics. Psychoanalysis refers to both Freuds buffer attempt at providing a comprehensive theory of the mind and in any case 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 but which has now broadened into a much more diverse accumulation of theories and models developed by other psychologists, all of which nevertheless retain almost of the main ideas of Freuds original theory.1.8.1BACKGROUNDSigmund Freud was born in 1856 in Moravia, which was then part of the Austrian Empire and is now in the Czechoslovakian Republic. He washed-out 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 capital of the United Kingdom where he died in 1939.He had wanted to be a question scientist but anti-Semitism forced him to choose a medical charge instead and he worked in Vienna as a doctor, specialising in neurological disorders (disorders of the nervous system). He constantly revised and modified his theories set up until his death but much of his psychoanalytic theory was produced surrounded by 1900 and 1930.Freud originally 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 realised that symptoms which had no organic or bodily basis could practise the real thing and that they were as real for the patient as if they had been neurologically 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 then started using hypnosis with his patients in Vienna. However, he found its effects to be only temporary at best and it did not usually agitate to the root of the problem nor was everybody capable of being hypnotised. Meanwhile Breuer, another Viennese doctor, was developing another method of therapy which he called the cathartic method, where patients would talk out their problems.