Freud's Life Research Articles

Sigmund Freud: Pioneer in Energy Healing

Energy healing is a popular contemporary term for forms of healing that facilitate a natural healing process through harmonizing, rebalancing, and releasing energy flow disturbed or blocked by disease and illness. Biographical evidence indicates that Freud used physical, suggestive, and radiant forms of energy healing, and that his personal life, metapsychology, and psychoanalysis were founded on dynamic, energetic experiences and conceptualizations. Analysis of Freud's life and work leads to the conclusion that in experience, theory, and practice, Freud typified the traditional role of therapist and was a pioneer in modern forms of energy healing.

Freud at 150

Chapter 1 Acknowledgements Chapter 2 Preface Chapter 3 Introduction Part 4 Sigmund Freud: Conquistador of the Unconscious Chapter 5 Sigmund Freud: Conquistador of the Unconscious Chapter 6 Is Psychoanalysis an Art, a Science, A Religion, or a Fraud? Part 7 Freud: 2006 Chapter 8 The Historical Context Chapter 9 An Overview of Freud's Life Chapter 10 The Development of Psychoanalysis Chapter 11 Colleagues and Patients Chapter 12 Unveiling the 21st Century Chapter 13 Freud in Art and Literature Chapter 14 Freud and the 21st Century Part 15 Freud's Place in Our Minds: A Day of Reflection on Sigmund Freud's Significance in the 21st Century Chapter 16 Freud's Legacy and New Challenges in Clinical Treatment Chapter 17 The Application of Psychoanalysis in Non-Clinical Domains Chapter 18 Freud's Model of the Mind and Its Significance for Modern Life Chapter 19 Psychoanalysis and Society: Can Psychoanalysis Help to Understand Modern Conflicts? Chapter 20 Freud's Significance in the 21st Century Part 21 About the Contributors

Soaring on the Wings of the Wind: Freud, Jews and Judaism

This paper looks at Freud's Jewish identity in the context of the Jewish experience in Eastern and Central Europe after 1800, using his family history and significant figures in his life as illustration. Sigmund Freud's life as a Jew is deeply paradoxical, if not enigmatic. He mixed almost exclusively with Jews while living all his life in an anti-Semitic environment. Yet he eschewed Jewish ritual, referred to himself as a godless Jew and sought to make his movement acceptable to gentiles. At the end of his life, dismayed by the rising forces of nationalism, he accepted that he was in his heart a Jew "in spite of all efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial". The 18th century Haskalla (Jewish Enlightenment) was a form of rebellion against conformity and a means of escape from shtetl life. In this intense, entirely inward means of intellectual escape and revolt against authority, strongly tinged with sexual morality, we see the same tensions that were to manifest in the publication by a middle-aged Viennese neurologist of a truly revolutionary book to herald the new 20th century: The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud's life and work needs to be understood in the context of fin-de-siecle Vienna. Mitteleuropa, the cultural renaissance of Central Europe, resulted from the emancipation and urbanization of the burgeoning Jewish middle class, who adopted to the cosmopolitan environment more successfully than any other group. In this there is an extreme paradox: the Jewish success in Vienna was a tragedy of success. Freud, despite a deliberate attempt to play down his Jewish origins to deflect anti-Semitic attacks, is the most representative Jew of his time and his thinking and work represents the finest manifestation of the Litvak mentality.

HYSTERIA, HEREDITY AND ANTI-SEMITISM: FREUD'S QUIET REBELLION

In this paper, the author examines two episodes in Freud's early professional life which, she suggests, played a crucial role in the development of psychoanalysis. As a result of these episodes, Freud's warm relationship with Jean-Martin Charcot cooled markedly and his more intimate relationship with Josef Breuer broke down altogether. While Freud never referred to the circumstances surrounding these rifts, the author proposes that both cases had, at their core, issues surrounding scientific theories of the time about innate Jewish tendencies to neuropathic disease and hysteria, theories which played an important role in the development of racial anti-Semitism. She proposes that these theories contributed in important respects to Freud's historic leap from the prevailing theory of heredity as the primary cause of hysteria to one of a sexual aetiology.

The Dog, the Knight, and the Squire Sigmund Freud's Reading of Cervantes

The essay describes a stage in Freud's literary education initiated by an early reading of Don Quixote in German translation. Fired by the depth and inventiveness of Cervantes's story-telling and the insight into human character it revealed, Freud conceived a desire to learn something of the language in which it was originally written; and the discovery of an excerpt from Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares in a Spanish reader led him and a schoolfriend to fashion for themselves a home-made Spanish as a medium for the construction of a private world. Assumption of the persona of Cipión, the dog who conducts a conversation with a fellow-dog in Cervantes's 'Coloquio entre Cipión y Berganza', made possible various kinds of self-image and distancing. Repeated readings of Don Quixote sharpened Freud's appreciation of different kinds of humour, provided dramatic images for himself and his fiancée along with opportunities to indulge his didactic impulses, and helped him portray, through contrast and parallel, characters encountered in his life and his reading. They also strengthened his appreciation of graphic art when he set himself to assess the strengths and weaknesses of Gustave Doré's illustrations. Some of Freud's comments bring into focus his time-conditioned social preconceptions, especially about the nature and social rôles of women. Freud subjects neither Don Quixote nor the 'Coloquio' to the kinds of psychoanalytic analysis he applied to the writings of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and Wilhelm Jensen; but when his aesthetic delight in Cervantes's art led him into self-definition and character analysis, he took a decisive step towards enlisting literature in the psychoanalytic quest. A concluding summary of the rôle of Cervantes's writings in Freud's life and thought offers itself as a demonstration of the part literature may play in the lives of sensitive and intelligent people who have not made its aesthetic investigation their principal task.

The 14th World Congress of Psychiatry (Prague, September 20–25, 2008)

The 14th World Congress of Psychiatry (Prague, September 20–25, 2008)

Freud, Anna, and the Problem of Female Sexuality

Freud has been criticized for his failure to understand and write about femininity in ways that reflect the place of women in society. Indeed, although from the outset he worked with highly intelligent, articulate women analysands, his discussion of female sexuality was convoluted and did not take his clinical observations into account. His views of female sexual development focused on a picture of girls as defective boys. This article suggests that much of Freud's problem in understanding femininity was related to his relationship with his youngest child, daughter Anna (1895–1982), who was a part of psychoanalysis from her earliest childhood through her adult years, when she became his analysand and protégée, and later his guide and support. An admirer of Sophocles' drama Oedipus the King, Freud wrote of Anna as his Antigone. Reviewing Sophocles portrayal of Oedipus and Antigone, we show the parallel between this drama and that in Freud's own life through his own old age in exile from Vienna in London. … a natural predilection usually sees to it that a man tends to spoil his little daughters, while his wife takes her son's part. (S. Freud, 1900, p. 258) Unfortunately we can describe this state of things [the child's sexual theories] only as it affects the male child; the corresponding processes in the little girl are not known to us. (S. Freud, 1923, p. 142)

The Civilization of Discontent

The following essay engages Freud's German title Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, translated in the psychoanalytic canon as Civilization and Its Discontents (1930 [1929]). We know that the pithy title was preceded by another title, and recent research reveals an earlier title whose meaning is the complete reverse of the present title. I argue here that Freud's ultimate decision to use the term Unbehagen reflects more than the intention to emphasize the painful disgruntlement of humankind as it struggles restlessly under the bridle of the superego, as the theme of this book is usually understood. Rather, the title, and the crisis that ensued when it was being translated, was a response to the nearing to consciousness of a cluster of psychological dimensions that fomented conflict throughout Freud's life: the illusory quality of religious belief anxieties surrounding femininity, motherhood, and death, and uncanny qualities of the realm of the aesthetic. I reinterpret the choice of the term Das Unbehagen as representing the unique depressive "gain" that is the byproduct of the symbolizing function basic to the process of civilization. Mature aesthetic and religious structures and beliefs require and contain the modicum of discontent that is inevitably produced during symbolization.

A VERY FREUDIAN AFFAIR: ERICH FROMM, PETER SWALES AND THE FUTURE OF PSYCHOANALYTIC HISTORIOGRAPHY

Despite steadfast denials by Ernest Jones, Peter Gay and Paul Roazen (among others), a recent discovery by Franz Maciejewski renders it reasonably certain that Freud had an affair with his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays. While this discovery vindicates certain claims made by the controversial Freud scholar, Peter Swales, other claims of his vis-a-vis Freud's personality and ideas are open to doubt. Meanwhile, the reception of Swales's ideas, and indeed the whole controversy about Freud's love life, provide ample confirmation of many of Erich Fromm's prescient theses about Freud's personality and the politics and historiography of psychoanalysis.

Freud's prehistoric matrix‐Owing ‘nature’ a death

This paper is informed by contemporary literature in two fields‐neonatal research, on the one hand, and the burgeoning interdisciplinary interest in Moses and monotheism, on the other. The author postulates that a cluster of traumatic events during the first two years of Freud's life compelled him to repeat what could not be remembered. Embedded in charged implicit schema, these affects remained unprocessed in Freud, who alone of all psychoanalysts did not have an analysis, manifesting in an uncanny dread/allure of the ‘prehistoric’ as a dark and dangerous era relating to the archaic feminine/maternal matrix and fratricidal murderousness. Furthermore, she cites evidence to suggest that for Freud this unconsciously excluded subtext of the preoedipal era became associated with ancient Egyptian and Minoan‐Mycenaean cultures, a passionate fascination actualized in his collection of antiquities yet incongruously absent in his theoretical work, with three exceptions‐Egyptian allusions in Leonardo's unconscious attachment to his archaic mother; the ‘Minoan‐Mycenaean’ analogy on discovering the pre‐oedipal mother shortly after the death of Freud's own mother; and Egypt as cradle of humanity in his uncharacteristically rambling, troubled text of Moses and monotheism. The author sees Freud's conceptual avoidance yet compulsive reworking of the prehistoric matrix as a symptomatic attempt to expose early unformulated representations that ‘return to exert a powerful effect.’

Hidden in Plain Sight: Freud's Jewish Identity Revisited

Using a contextualizing, integrative approach, the author looks at aspects of Freud's life and the multiple levels of influence in terms of his theories. While keeping a broad overview of the historical and cultural life for Jews in 19th-century Europe, including the effects of anti-Semitism, emancipation, and the enlightenment movement, the author intertwines Freud's parents' lives and personalities as they played out in Freud's own development and in his theories. The author believes that Freud formed a particular repression linking Jewishness, passivity, femininity, and religion while elevating in his theories masculinity, activity, science, and atheism. The author specifically focuses on Freud's theories of the Unconscious and the oedipal complex as particularly representative of a split between his own Jewish home and the German high culture he was educated within. Drawing on literature within psychoanalysis and the disciplines of Jewish studies and broad cultural history, the author concludes that Freud's rejection of certain parts of his own life are embedded within his theory when considered from a multiply-layered point of view.

Psychoanalysis eats its own: or, the Heretical Saint Roazen

The author attempts a "Roazenesque" interpretation of Paul Roazen's life and work, and situates his career vis-á-vis that of other revisionist critics of Freud. To these ends, the essay charts the highs and lows of Roazen's long career as a biographer-historian of psychoanalysis. His career is divided into four phases, the first of which is arguably the most important. It was also the most controversial, producing classic books on Victor Tausk and on Freud's followers. Roazen's later work fares less well, even undermining his standing among scholars. If there is a commonality to the work of all four phases, it is Roazen's fairly constant recourse to interviews he conducted in the mid-1960s with many people intimate with Freud. On the good side, these interviews provided him unique access to details about Freud's everyday life and practice. Roazen thus became known as the historian of arcane detail. On the bad side, Roazen came to rely too heavily on these interviews and on his own singular role as interviewer. As a result his work became increasingly self-regarding and nostalgic, and thus less original, interesting, or discerning. His legacy is therefore mixed, although secure enough that future scholars will not easily ignore his contribution in a handful of good books.

THEORY: Freud's Envy of Religious Experience

This article examines Freud's envy of religious experience. The author claims that the relative absence of generous and appropriate love and attention during Freud's early life created a lifelong presence of loneliness, helplessness, and hopelessness, which was evoked in the main by unconscious forebodings associated with the encroaching debilitations of old age and the specter of death. This presence was the unrecognized force that lay silently beneath the appearance of his cherished virtues all the while quietly fueling his envy of religious experience. More specifically, the author indicates that the dynamics of envy in Freud's life may be understood as (a) a particular mode of organizing experience; (b) an attempt to preserve an ideal self and ward off painful or dangerous experiences that would disrupt the ideal self; (c) a form of communication that represented traces of particular, early forms of care between Freud and his parents; (d) an unconscious attempt to gain empathic recognition of his longing and hopelessness; and (e) a defense against claiming his need for consolation and protection as well as experiences of helplessness and loneliness.

Principales théories dans la psychiatrie contemporaine

The author presents main theories of contemporaneous psychiatry. He clarifies the area and the composition of the field of psychiatry ; then he nelights the function of theory in relation with clinics, diagnosis and treatment. He distinguishes theory and theory of practice and he proposes to classify theories as intrinsic and extrinsic ones, some of these theories emerging from the field of psychiatry itself, and some others being imported from other branches. He then presents these theoretical trends referring himself to such taxinomy. Intrinsic theories : reference to the central nervous system (role of pattern of aphasia for verbal hallucinations), notion of process, neuropsychology, biotypology ; reference to psychogenesis : reactional pattern, psychoanalysis at diverse steps of its historical development (during S. Freud's life and post-freudian works), Henri Ey and organo-dynamism, English antipsychiatry. Extrinsic theories : reflexology, behaviorism, cognitivism, sociogenetic conceptions, Palo Alto, Italian antipsychiatry. Apart, phenomenology and ethnopsychiatry. The author specifies how these theories have an application in psychiatry.

Idiodynamics and Applied Psychoanalysis

This communication explores the implications of Rosenzweig's idiodynamic method for applied psychoanalytic studies. After reviewing the methodological problems intrinsic to applied psychoanalysis, the author summarizes the idiodynamic method. Rosenzweig's idiodynamic studies of loss and creativity in Freud's life (and the lives of creative individuals) are briefly reviewed. With Rosenzweig's insights in mind, Freud's methodological problem in Totem and Taboo is identified and explored in terms of its psychological meaning. Freud's split with Jung was an important factor in the composition of Totem and Taboo. The Freud–Jung split also influenced the insular nature of organized psychoanalysis and contributed to the relative neglect of empirical methods within psychoanalysis in the twentieth century. The idiodynamic method is intended to foster empirical rigor. For applied psychoanalytic studies, the idiodynamic method would place actual known events, with consequent patterns and meanings emerging over time, above any theoretical scheme. Although his method does not resolve all of the methodological problems of applied psychoanalysis, Rosenzweig offers a disciplined method for creative psychological inquiry.

Freud's struggle with misogyny: homosexuality and guilt in the dream of Irma's injection.

The highly condensed dream element trimethylamin is central to the dream of Irma's injection. After a brief review of the medical literature on timethylamine (TMA), it is suggested that two important meanings of this chemical and its properties lie in its disguised reference to disparaging views of women, as well as to Freud's homosexual connection to Wilhelm Fliess. Freud's misogynistic and homosexual impulses were stimulated by Fliess's recent surgical error committed while operating on Freud's patient Emma Eckstein. Evidence is presented that the collaboration between Freud and Fliess in performing an aggressive act toward a woman was for Freud an enactment of a childhood situation in which he and his nephew John had ganged up on John's sister Pauline. The later relationship between Freud, Jung, and Sabina Spielrein is seen as an additional reenactment of this childhood triangle. An examination of Freud's associations to and analysis of the Irma dream, as well as some of his later relationships with women, indicates that guilt and the wish to make reparation were also prominent themes in Freud's inner life.

Freud's Relevance to Hypnosis: A Reevaluation

In this paper we examine Freud's life and thinking, based on his collected works, and reevaluate some of his ideas in the light of various aspects of contemporary hypnosis research. Although Freud has often been blamed for simplistic thinking about hypnosis and for its eclipse during the opening decades of this century, his writings reveal a rich theory of hypnosis and a frank acknowledgement of the debt psychoanalytic theory and practice owe to it. Even though he abandoned hypnosis as a clinical tool, Freud maintained a theoretical interest in the subject and in many respects anticipated issues in current research. Whereas his emphasis on the hypnotist's skill may have been exaggerated, his insights concerning attention, social expectations, group dynamics, reality testing, and the relationship between hypnosis and sleep have been borne out by empirical investigations.

Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision

Louis BREGER: Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision. Wiley, New York, 2000, 472 pp., $30.00, ISBN: 0-471-31626-8. Another biography of Freud? Surely this must be one of the first questions asked by psychoanalytic students, especially those familiar with the many biographies that have already been published. Freud's life is one of the most documented of the twentieth century, and he has been deified and demonized so often that one wonders what else can be said about the creator of psychoanalysis. Apart from his profound influence on psychology, psychiatry, social work, literature, history, cinema, and popular culture, Freud has been the object of fascination for countless scholars. To analyze the analyst has proven irresistible, particularly since Freud disapproved of any attempt other than his own to present his life story. The history of Freud biographies is itself worthy of a book-length study. The first biography was Fritz Wittels's Sigmund Freud: His Personality and His School (1924), which despite its largely sympathetic treatment provoked its subject's wrath. You know my attitude to this book; it has not become friendlier, Freud wrote scoldingly to Wittels upon receiving the English translation. I still maintain that someone who knows as little about a person as you do about me is not entitled to write a biography about that person. One waits till the person is dead, when he cannot do anything about it and fortunately no longer cares (p. 350). Ernest Jones did wait until his subject was dead before publishing his three-volume hagiographic biography, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1953-1957), but the study is marred by Jones's hero worship and his biased, vitriolic comments about those who deviated from orthodox theory. The biographies written by psychoanalysts, such as Max Schur's Freud: Living and Dying (1972), tend to offer a portrait largely in accordance with the one that Freud perpetuates in his own writings. Those biographies written by non-psychoanalysts, such as Roland Clark's Freud: The Man and the Cause (1980) and Peter Gay's bestselling Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988), offer more balanced portraits but nevertheless fail to evaluate classic psychoanalytic theory from the perspective of contemporary psychological research. Louis Breger's Freud is the most thoughtful, balanced, and comprehensive biography to date, a book that will appeal to scholars, clinicians, and the general public. Breger, Professor of Psychoanalytic Studies, Emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology and founding President of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, has been a practicing psychoanalyst and psychotherapist for thirty-five years. He writes with the imaginative sympathy of a novelist, the acute insight of a clinician, and the skeptical questioning of a research psychologist. Breger is not afraid to pay eloquent tribute to Freud for his many pioneering discoveries, such as his recognition of the importance of childhood experience in shaping adult life and his theory of transference and countertransference. Nor is Breger afraid to criticize Freud for his overemphasis of sexuality and his devaluation of women. Breger presents us with a Freud who remains one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century-his immortality will be assured despite all attempts to pronounce his creation dead. Nevertheless, we see a Freud who was not only seriously flawed as a person but who unconsciously transmuted these flaws into a theory that he then claimed was universal for all people. Breger demythologizes and-though he never uses the word- deconstructs Freud, showing how the real person was far different from the public persona. There are no earth-shattering historical or biographical revelations in Breger's biography, nothing that will radically change our conception of the man or his work. It is not likely that any new sensationalistic discoveries will emerge. What is new-and controversial-is Breger's attempt to analyze Freud in terms of a traumatic childhood that left a legacy of fear, insecurity, and unhappiness. …

Decadent Trends in Hebrew Literature: Bialik, Berdychevski, Brener [Brenner] (review)

Hebrew Studies 41 (2000) 350 Reviews For his part, Lewis can reciprocally rely on Zangwill. Thus there is a complicated echo among these translations, each of which bequeaths its imprint to its successor. That imprint is also the record of the translator's personal meeting with the Hebrew poet and his work. So do we need another translation of the Keter Malkhut? Well, why not? It would be easy to quibble with Slavitt for his wording here and there. More seriously, he has sent a difficult text into the world with few references to the world from which she came, let alone her indebtedness to previous sponsors. Nonetheless, Slavitt's rendition is overall a pleasant "read." The Keter Malkhut has moments of strange and wonderful kind of poetry. All three translations testify in some way to its marvels, even as they grope along the path to the royal palace of their source. To paraphrase Ibn Gabirol, some translations will be like blind men on this journey, while some stride unwaveringly to their goal. Still, for those who respect the miracle of translation, "it is all the same mystery, and if they each have different names, they all go to one place." (Keter Malkhut, section III.) By 2040, we will be ready for a new companion on the road. Susan Einbinder Hebrew Union College Cincinnati, OH 48220 seinbinder@huc.edu DECADENT TRENDS IN HEBREW LITERATURE: BIALIK, BERDYCHEVSKI, BRENER [BRENNER]. By Hamutal Bar-Yosef. pp. 416. Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1997. The subject of Decadence is timely for both Israeli and American culture. The acclaimed feature film "Eyes Wide Shut" has reminded Americans of Arthur Schnitzler's Vienna and of the role Jews played in the depiction of the darkness in the lives of twentieth century urban dwellers-living in apparent light but seeking secret places in which to avoid the glare. The re-emergence of Sigmund Freud in current discourse further enlivens our interest in decadence, and three prominent museum exhibits of Freud's life have enriched that discourse. Additional attention to decadent theme and personality-and the moral contrast with the hypocrisies of mainstream social values-became prominent subjects in two movies and a wildly successful play about the life and trial of Oscar Wilde. Hebrew Studies 41 (2000) 351 Reviews Israelis, for their part, are experiencing a renewed soul searching about their own cultural environment and about the role of "classic" scribes in adding unconventional themes to the canon of Hebrew fiction and poetry. Thus, Hamutal Bar-Yosef's book on Bialik, Berdyczewski, and Brenner and their relationship to decadence brings together two ostensibly disparate worlds which she links with both dexterity and first rate scholarship. Her book could be the ideal study for Israeli-American discourse-a discourse which too rarely engages intellectuals with shared concerns. (The problem of readership even for the Hebrew literate is another issue.) Historically, of course, Wilde and the trend known as Decadence had considerable importance for Hebrew literature, and Wilde's work was translated surprisingly early within the Yishuv's translation industry. For some readers, attention to the indulgent denizens of urban environments and the fascination with bourgeois arrangements remains a surprising little comer of the early Zionist movement which based itself on optimistic social programs and which attached itself to values which-though not "transcendant" theologically--certainly were understood to transcend (in the sense of over-ride) the pressure of quotidien life. Wilde's appearance on the Zionist scene is, on the other-hand, no more surprising than his appearance among the Colorado miners or Iowa farmers he addressed on his legendary visit to America in the early 1880s. But Wilde-inspired "decadence" is only one perspective on this wide ranging trend of the eady twentieth century. Bar Yosef describes an array of elements that found their way in one degree or another into the works of modem Hebrew's remarkable literary triad. Her four hundred plus page book peers into almost every aspect of decadence in the three writers and she traces sources of influence-its methods and its themes--challenging earlier critics to re-examine the significance of the works these three writers must have read. Because Bialik has not...

'My bad diagnostic error': once more about Freud and Emmy v. N. (Fanny Moser).

The author examines two aspects of the case of Fanny Moser (Emmy von N. in the 'Studies on Hysteria'): first, a hitherto unknown letter written by Sigmund Freud to Fanny Moser's daughter in 1935, in which he revises his diagnosis of half a century before, describing it as 'a bad diagnostic error' and apologising to the daughter; second, the dates of Fanny Moser's treatment. All previous attempts have failed to date it consistently. The author combines all the information about the case of Fanny Moser and the circumstances of Freud's life in that period and shows that Freud took over the case in 1888, not in 1889. In addition, he suggests that Emmy von N. has had a significant influence on Freud's papers on 'Hysteria' and on his comparative study 'Organic and hysterical motor paralyses'.