Freud's Life Research Articles

Matters of the Mind: A Look Into the Life of Sigmund Freud.

This biography of Sigmund Freud examines the life and contributions of the individual recognized as the progenitor of psychoanalysis, analyzing his significant influence on the fields of psychology, culture, and the comprehension of the human psyche. Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in Freiburg, Moravia. His early education and burgeoning interest in the field of medicine established a critical foundation for the development of his innovative theories. Following his academic pursuits with distinguished individuals such as Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris, Freud formulated his theories regarding the unconscious mind, mechanisms of repression, and the importance of dreams. Freud's theoretical framework presented constructs such as the id, ego, and superego, fundamentally transforming our understanding of human behavior and motivation. The implementation of innovative methodologies, including free association and transference, has significantly contributed to the evolution of contemporary psychotherapy, facilitating the exploration of inner conflicts and unconscious desires among individuals. In the face of criticism and controversy, Freud's theories exerted a significant influence on psychology, as well as on art, literature, and popular culture, thereby shaping the intellectual landscape of the 20th century. The article further investigates Freud's personal life, encompassing his familial relationships. This also elucidates the diverse benchmarks of human psychiatry that were established during the era of Sigmund Freud. This review characterizes Freud as a multifaceted individual, a trailblazer whose contributions to the understanding of the human psyche persist in relevance, inciting discussions and encouraging further investigation across diverse disciplines. The narrative provides a comprehensive examination of Freud's life, contributions, and lasting impact, emphasizing his significance as a pivotal intellectual whose ideas continue to shape modern discourse surrounding identity, sexuality, and mental health.

Was Anna Freud a “friend of Dorothy”? A queer phenomenological historiography of Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham's personal and professional relationship

AbstractThe nature of Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham's 5‐decade‐long personal and professional relationship has always been subject to speculation. This paper considers the historiography of this important and enigmatic relationship from 1920s Vienna to today. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology, which theorises sexual orientation and whiteness in spatial terms, I illustrate how the relationship was seen as deviating from the ‘straight lines’ of mid‐20th century heteronormative society. I extend this queer phenomenological approach to think about cultural orientations to the relationship through an examination of its depiction in biographies published in the 1980s, the collections at the Freud Museums in London and Vienna, and a fictionalised account of Anna Freud's life published in 2014. Extending Ahmed's queer phenomenological vocabulary, I identify examples of ‘straightening up’, ‘straightening devices’ and ‘straightening up by queering’. The possibility of finding ‘queer angles’ in Anna Freud's early clinical writings, in contrast to the normative tendencies of her later writing on ego psychology, is explored as a counterbalance to discussions about non‐normative sexuality and gender in psychotherapy which typically position these as something new. The relevance for clinical practice today is considered through the lens of an ethical imperative to find space for queer angles in the history of psychoanalysis.

A portrait of the neurophysiologist as a young man: Claus, Darwin, and Sigmund Freud's search for the testes of the eel (1875-1877).

In 1878, Sigmund Freud produced his first scientific publication while a medical student in Vienna, a physiological and histological analysis of Szymon Syrski's claim to have discovered the long-sought testes of the European eel. Though he would eventually come to be known as the father of psychoanalysis, a closer look at Freud's earliest scientific publication demonstrates that he was initially positioned on the cutting edge of neo-mechanistic physiology, and academic Darwinism. Not only was the young Freud a methodologically capable physiologist, he was conceptually grounded by the anti-Lamarckian and anti-Haeckelian Darwinism of his first mentor, Carl Claus. Scholarship on Freud's life and ideas is copious and far-reaching, and yet the stature of his psychoanalytic legacy remains a significant barrier for reappraisals of his early foundations. By analyzing his first publication and the context in which it came to be, this article seeks to revisit the place of Darwin in Freud's earliest scientific work. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

A tempest in a skull

“A Tempest in a Skull”. The expression comes from Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, but it says just as much about Freud's life as it does about ours. No one is probably more 'disturbed', or descends to the depths of chaos, than when he or she takes on the trappings of a 'tidy' being, or is caught up in a cosmetic life apparently made of order and beauty.
 Of course, “everything is fine” does not always hide “everything is bad”. But we must also recognize that there is often a 'tempest' in a skull, and that it is precisely at this moment that everything changes, and everything is modified within us. Based on this phenomenon, the leitmotiv "so much exception, so much modification" thus becomes the new imperative of phenomenology - not out of attachment to the tragic or the pathetic, but on the contrary to reach that part of us which is inexpressible and which is the strongest part of our existentiality. Garcia Lorca's Duende, as the “spirit of aching Spain”, will express in its own way this force “that burns the blood”, the only one capable of touching our own depths, magnified and exorcised by the rhythm of Andalusian singers.

Amnesias of a Freudian Kind, Part II

Amnesias of a Freudian Kind, Part II Diane O'Donoghue (bio) Part II This essay is the second of a two-part series that examines Freud's constructions of amnesia as they participated in "forgetting," both within the mechanisms of his psychoanalytic project and, far less investigated, as a way to fix the borders of his idea of an unconscious. As argued in Part One (O'Donoghue, 2021), the operations of forgetting that Freud would identify with repression were in fact constituted by a preceding removal from memory, one that was discursive rather than psychical. Significant events were banished from view—or, better, hidden in plain sight—by being enunciated as valueless, or as Freud said of his early years in Vienna, "nothing was worth remembering" (Freud, 1899, p. 312). What remained were selected fragments of one's past that were interpretable as markers of repression, and as such tied to specific a priori drives whose sexual or aggressive impulses necessitated their inaccessibility to consciousness. This allowed for a schema to be placed on the vagaries of an individual life and desires, and those that were irreducible to such characterizations, originating with Freud's own early life, were rendered forgettable. Freud's specific uses of the term "amnesie" have received surprisingly little attention, a fact that can be attributable to its lack of psychoanalytic gravitas—in contrast to repression—and as such it functioned as a descriptor that could be applied more fluidly. Several of its streams, including Freud's earliest published discussion of amnesia, as well as its later "infantile" version, were charted in the first portion of this study. We turn now to its presence within Studies on Hysteria (1895), where we find a striking example of expungement as Freud attempted to treat a patient by making her "reminiscences" permanently [End Page 601] inaccessible. After discussing this case, we will consider several genealogies that have been offered for Freud's attempt at such an extreme memory effacement. The essay concludes with a discussion of suppression, posited here as a form of amnesic erasure that, enacted by Freud as a conscious way to delimit the content of unconscious phenomena, was never, not surprisingly, privileged within the construction of psychical life that resulted from it. Hysteria, Amnesia, and Discontent In his treatment of "Emmy von N," likely occurring in brief periods during 1888 and 1889, Freud, in his "first attempt" (Breuer and Freud, 1895, p. 48) at hypnotic intervention—and his first recorded clinical case—was able to remove "melancholy things" from her memory by "not only wiping out her memories of them in their plastic form [but] by removing her whole recollection of them" (p. 61). The narrative of "Emmy," his pseudonym for Fanny von Sulzer-Wirth Moser (1848–1924) was documented in Studies on Hysteria (1895) as a series of journal entries detailing the episodes of sustained contact that Freud had with her. He added a subsequent self-reflection on the case in 1924, in a footnote to a later edition (1925) of Studies that Strachey added at the conclusion of the case, where Freud observed that "no analyst can read this case to-day without a smile of pity" (p. 105, n. 1). Such a comment intimates that Freud, by this point in the codification of his psychoanalytic project, was comfortable enough to proffer such a retrospective revelation of naïveté. Over a decade after this admission he penned a letter, in July of 1935, to Fanny Moser's daughter and namesake that appears to be his last word on the case.1 There he defended his inability to correctly identify the elder Moser's condition (rather baldly stated to her daughter as "unconscious hatred for her two children") because at that point he "didn't know anything," having not yet understood the workings of the "hidden psyche" (Tögel, 1999, p. 1165). In an earlier correspondence with this younger Fanny Moser, in 1918, he claimed that he had stopped his use of hypnosis (it was "meaningless and useless") because of this case, with [End Page 602] this abandonment resulting in "the incentive to create psychoanalytic therapy more in accordance with reason" (Andersson, 1979, p. 14). These...

Freud: An Intellectual Biography by Joel Whitebook

Reviewed by: Freud: An Intellectual Biography by Joel Whitebook Richard Wheeler (bio) Freud: An Intellectual Biography. Joel Whitebook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 497 pages. Philosophically trained psychoanalyst Joel Whitebook weaves an ambitious group of themes into his extended biography of Freud's intellectual development. The overarching purpose is aptly named in the first section of the introductory chapter, which Whitebook calls "Reappropriating Freud." A significant dimension of this reappropriation is deeply personal, reflecting Whitebook's return to a serious, comprehensive study of Freud's life and texts, decades after completing his psychoanalytic training. What Whitebook calls "Accounting for the 'Missing Mother'" is his primary theme. With it, he joins a search conducted over the past several decades by many analysts, feminists, and other scholars—some hostile, some friendly—in the developing field of Freud Studies, to come up with an understanding of the mother's part in a conceptual field originally centered on inevitable conflict with the father. He calls his "second theme" the "break with tradition," which involves both Freud's break with a tradition-based notion of truth that embraced the scientific world view of Enlightenment thought, as well as the break with positivist rationality that became a key exponent of the "dark enlightenment." Woven into the exploration of these themes are Whitebook's effort to locate Freud within the larger development of intellectual culture, to explore Freud's relation to the problems that have long occupied major philosophical strains of (mostly) western thought, and to account for the shift in the "hermeneutical horizon" that led him to the vantage points pursued in this book. I will focus here on the central "missing mother" strand. A key question the book explores could be put something like this: how should we understand Freud (the man and his work) in relation to what is often called the pre-oedipal turn in psychoanalysis, which emphasizes the self's emergence as an individual from the merged state of the infant/mother and the importance of that experience for ongoing life? In his exploration of this theme, Whitebook is generous in acknowledging the intellectual debts he ran up in the wide [End Page 131] reading behind this book. Whitebook's point of view is shaped by analysts who pioneered and nurtured this pre-oedipal turn (e.g., Melanie Klein, D.W. Winnicott, Margaret Mahler, Otto Kernberg, Hans Kohut, to name a few), feminists and queer theorists from outside analytic practice (Madelon Sprengnether in particular), analysts who brought feminism into their thinking and practice (e.g., Juliet Mitchell, Jessica Benjamin, Nancy Chodorow), philosophers from Heraclitus to Adorno, Horkheimer, and Ricouer, and other analysts deeply grounded in philosophy, particularly Cornelius Castoriadis. Especially important in shaping the central idea of this book, however, is the distinction that Hans Loewald made between the "official" and the "unofficial" Freud: In what the philosophically trained [he studied with Heidigger] psychoanalyst Hans Loewald calls his "official" doctrine, Freud focused almost exclusively on the figure of the father and maintained that the Oedipus complex was the "nuclear complex" not only of neurosis but also of civilization. (Whitebook, 2017, p. 2) The mother, Whitebook writes, may seem "largely absent" in the official Freud, but "her absence is itself a presence […] The early mother is in fact at the center of what [Loewald] refers to as Freud's 'unofficial' position, and it will be our task to draw her out" (p. 2). That is possible, Whitebook writes, because although Freud "split off" from his own psychic life, and from the main emphasis of his thinking, the traces of the mother's contributions to his own development, those "disavowed and dissociated regions of the mind appear in his 'unofficial' position, and, following Loewald, it will be our job to ferret them out, analyze them, and assess the ramifications for psychoanalytic theory" (p. 10). In order to draw the mother out in this project, White-book must explore what the biographical record tells us about Freud's earliest relation to his mother and must identify in Freud's later life what is best explained by the heritage of pre-oedipal experience. He must also clarify a dynamic in which Freud's development of psychoanalytic...

HISTORICIZING FREUD: AUTOPSY OR REINCARNATION?

The publication between 2014 and 2017 of four substantial historical biographies of Sigmund Freud raises a number of questions that should be of interest to intellectual and cultural historians. Both Freud's reputation as a pioneering empirical investigator and brilliant theorist of human subjectivity, and his influential role in framing public discussion of the unconscious dynamics and conscious expressions of the “psyche” or the “soul” have been declining for a number of decades. Apparently we have finally reached that point in time at which W. H. Auden's famous comment (in his 1939 elegy) that Freud was “a whole climate of opinion under whom we conduct our different lives” no longer resonates.1 Unlike the last major historical Freud biography, Peter Gay's Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988), which still worked assiduously to sustain the contemporary presence and thus cross-cultural and cross-temporal validity of Freud's discoveries as empirically grounded, universal rational truths, recent works by Frederick Crews, Joel Whitebook, Élisabeth Roudinesco, and Peter-André Alt attempt to historicize Freud's work in a more critical and fundamental fashion. The perspectives governing all of these studies are self-consciously “historical.” They build their interpretations of Freud's work and their judgements regarding its claims on investigations of the temporally situated, personal, sociocultural and theoretical contexts which conditioned and therefore limited or “relativized” its meaning and its truth. For three of the biographers (all except Crews) this also implies that Freud's work was not so much a completed articulation of an investigative method (either positivist or hermeneutical) that unveiled a singular interpretation or “discovery” of a general truth as the representation of an open-ended process of investigating and thinking through the problem of the origin, development and nature of the human “soul.” From this perspective the attempt to grasp Freud's work as a fully articulated truth or completed interpretation that can now be seen as historically limited or framed by specific cultural contexts is to read Freud's life and work within assumptions about closed cultural systems or temporally bounded climates of opinion, assumptions that have themselves become a part of the historical past.

From Biography to Theory: the role of Anna Freud in the emergence of the “adolescent process”

Some aspects of Anna Freud's life reveal the existence of specifically adolescent conflicts, which can be tied to some of her theoretical and clinical discoveries in the field of adolescent psychoanalysis.

Beyond the Pleasure Principle

In reasoned progression he outlined core psychoanalytic concepts, such as repression, free association and libido. Of the various English translations of Freud's major works to appear in his lifetime, only one was authorized by Freud himself: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud under the general editorship of James Strachey. Freud approved the overall editorial plan, specific renderings of key words and phrases, and the addition of valuable notes, from bibliographical and explanatory. Many of the translations were done by Strachey himself; the rest were prepared under his supervision. The result was to place the Standard Edition in a position of unquestioned supremacy over all other existing versions.Newly designed in a uniform format, each new paperback in the Standard Edition opens with a biographical essay on Freud's life and work -along with a note on the individual volume-by Peter Gay, Sterling Professor of History at Yale.

Anna Freud and the Holocaust: Mourning and survival guilt

This article explores the period of Anna Freud's life after she was informed of the deaths of her aunts in Nazi concentration camps during World War . Understanding of this period may be enhanced by consideration of the role of the Holocaust in her complicated mourning process. A series of her dreams is re‐examined from the point of view of survivor guilt and the complicated mourning of her father in the context of the Holocaust. It is argued that unconscious reproaches against her father led to an identification with him that included his ‘decision’ to leave his sisters in Vienna. Survivor guilt in relation to her aunts’ murders is seen as one of the complicating factors in the mourning process. In addition the article discusses the possible role of this period, particularly her work with child concentration camp survivors, in her post‐war writing. The noted duality in her work between innovation and conservatism is explored in terms of an outcome of the mourning process of this period. It is argued that her views on mourning, trauma, attachment, and the widening scope of indications for psychoanalysis were influenced by the outcome of her mourning process. Finally, an irony is noted in the fact that her attitude about altruism never changed despite the role of the altruism of others in her rescue from the Nazis.

Paradise lost and trauma mastered: new findings on little Sigmund

Although this paper manifestly deals with new historical data, its main objective is the psychoanalytic reconstruction of Sigmund Freud's early development, and a deeper understanding of the circumstances influencing the development of his psychoanalyzing mind. The present paper is a continuation of Burianek's book Facts and impressions: Psychoanalyst's guide to the birthplace of Sigmund Freud, currently available only in Czech. Methodological approaches intersecting in the book and in the present paper include environmental topography, ethnography, historical archival research, personal communications, indirect symbolic communications such as screen memories, interpretations and reconstructions by Freud himself, and later interpretations by other analysts. Finding the gaps and inconsistencies in the expectable course of historical events, the paper further clarifies the financial situation of the family of Jakob Freud, the situation surrounding the (nurse)maids, and the birth, life, and death of Julius Freud, Freud's younger brother. Summarizing Sigmund Freud's early life with regard to the problems of separation and ambivalence vis-à-vis the maternal object, and his fantasies of “paradise lost,” it is speculated that the long-term sublimation and transformation of his early neurosis became the model of Sigmund Freud's personal creativity and the basis for the psychoanalytic method.

A practitioner's notes on the free-associative method as existential praxis

Freud's pre-1914 texts demonstrate why he consistently asserted that his free-associative method was the sine qua non of his discipline. Prior to 1914, Freud's theorizing was intimately and inextricably connected to his lived experience with the discovery of this method. After 1914, he became more speculative in this thinking and writing; his models of the “mental apparatus” and its functioning drew increasingly on conceptual sources other than his experience with free association. The four fundamental coordinates of his discipline (the methodical disclosure that self-consciousness is repressive, the nonlinear “time of the mind,” the significance of our sensual embodiment or libidinality, and the formation of the repression barrier by the incest taboo) are all closely tied to free-associative experience. By contrast, post-1914 theoretical preoccupations (from object relations to the structural-functional model, and other formulations generated after Freud's life) are comparatively divorced from such experience. These conceptual edifices imply a conventional depiction of the theory–practice relationship, which is radically challenged by free-associative discourse. The notion of praxis is introduced as contesting the prevailing depiction of practice as an application of theory, and as serving to rescue psychoanalysis from the somewhat “sterile debates” over its scientific status and over the relevance of metapsychological speculation to clinical treatment. Against the normative ideology of theory and practice, the lived experience of free-associative discourse, with its potential for change and healing, can only be understood in terms of this notion of praxis, and this justifies Freud's claim to have initiated “a critical new direction in science.”

Freud's world: an encyclopedia of his life and times

Comprising well-known and obscure information, this compendium provides a historical context to the facts of Sigmund Freud's life, theories, and influence on society. * Hundreds of entries on the life and work of Sigmund Freud spanning over five decades * Photographic portraits of various key figures * A bibliography of sources for further reading on specific topics of interest

Lucian Freud portraits

'Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait, even if it's only a chair.' Portraits were central to the work of Lucian Freud. Working only from life, the artist claimed 'I could never put anything into a picture that wasn't actually there in front of me.' Lucian Freud Portraits surveys his portraits and figure paintings from across his long career. Drawing together the finest portraits from public and private collections around the world, the book explores Freud's stylistic development and technical virtuosity. A series of previously unpublished interviews conducted by Michael Auping between May 2009 and January 2011 reveal the artist's thoughts on the complex relationship between artist and sitter, the particular challenges of painting nudes and self-portraits, and his views on other painters he admired. Freud's psychological portraits are often imbued with a mood of alienation. A private man, the artist's close relationship with his sitters was played out behind the closed door of the studio. Frequently there is the sense of an emotionally charged drama unfolding, but his subjects remain elusive. Sitters represented in the book include family members, particularly his mother, Lucie, and artists such as Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon and David Hockney. In the early 1990s Freud produced a series of monumental paintings of the performance artist Leigh Bowery and Bowery's friend Sue Tilley, the 'benefits supervisor', examples of which are reproduced in this book. Authoritative survey of more than 130 works, accompanying the first major exhibition focussed on seven decades of Freud's portraits. Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London (9 February-27 May 2012) and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2 July-28 October 2012). Includes new, illuminating interviews with Freud by Michael Auping. Contribution by John Richardson (friend of Freud and biographer of Picasso). Features an illustrated chronology of Freud's life. Essay and interviews with Lucian Freud by Michael Auping With a contribution by John Richardson This book accompanies the National Portrait Gallery's major Spring 2012 exhibition on Lucian Freud Portraits and the subsequent tour to Fort Worth, Texas in July 2012

Freud, Ferenczi, and the “disbelief” on the Acropolis

Ferenczi's 1929 claim that “no analysis can be regarded … as complete unless we have succeed in penetrating the traumatic material” resonated deeply in Freud, influencing his last works. According to the author, it reactivated in Freud the same traumatic memories that were at the heart of his self-analysis, letting them resurface in the 1936 essay “A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis,” in the striking simile of the Loch Ness monster. The image of “the sea-serpent we've never believed in” is then analyzed and used as a sounding lead for Freud's self-analysis. The transformation of the love-object into an attractive monster, which is found as a recurrent pattern in Freud's life and work, hints at the centrality of the combined figure of woman and serpent in mythology, in psychoanalysis, and in Freud's self-analysis. Finally, the background of the “memory disturbance” on the Acropolis is traced back to the woman patient who had dreams of gigantic snakes. It is suggested that the patient might be Emma Eckstein and that a still unexplored thread exists, which runs through the foundation of psychoanalysis, connecting the surgical operation of Emma, the Irma dream, and the Acropolis incident.

Freud's Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysisby GalloRubén, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Press, 2010, 408 pp., $32.95 (hardcover).

Freud's Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysisby GalloRubén, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Press, 2010, 408 pp., $32.95 (hardcover).

Nature, Nurture, or Both Influenced Freud Descendent?

Nature, Nurture, or Both Influenced Freud Descendent?

Mysteries of Nature

This article examines a group photograph of the Psychiatry and Neurology section of the 66th Meeting of the Society of German Natural Scientists and Doctors in Vienna, 24-30 September 1894 which Sigmund Freud attended. The society's origins in Naturphilosophie are indicated and a number of the participants are identified on the photo. They and the events at the conference are related to Sigmund Freud's work at the time and to his gradual abandonment of anatomy and of heredity and degeneration as significant aetiological factors in the neuroses. Philosophical problems, such as how phenomena should be described and how 'nature' is conceptualized, are also considered in the light of their implications for Freud's life and thought at that period.

Freud in Trieste: Journey to an Ambiguous City

This article provides an insightful exploration of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and the city of Trieste. Through an analysis of the correspondence between Freud and his friend Eduard Silberstein, Gandolfi follows those places visited by the future father of psychoanalysis and analyses their link to Freud's life. The journey to Trieste is considered as an experience that played a fundamental role in his future decisions as well as in the development of some of his psychoanalytic theories. The article eventually relates the ambiguous nature of the city - a peculiar space in with North and South, East and West converge - to Freud's own Triestine experience, that not only remits to his initial scientific researches, but also symbolizes a first significant contact with the world of sexuality.

Moses in Moravia

Approaching eighty, Freud, in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, described his engagement with the story of Moses as enduring "throughout the whole of my life." The origins of this relationship, usually traced to Freud's experiences with the narratives of his childhood Bible, may have included early encounters, in the company of his Czech caretaker, with sculptural images as well. The first three years of Freud's life were spent in Moravia, where a reverence for Moses was deeply woven into the Catholic identity of its population and the region's visual culture. A statue of this biblical figure in one of the churches in Freud's birthplace provides us with an opportunity to investigate the amalgam of meanings invested in Mosaic representation, and its extension in an important local saint, Methodius. Moses' Jewish identity was incorporated into discourses of local hagiology, perhaps complicating his significance for Freud from the start.