Psychoanalyst
Sigmund
Freud
He
opened a window on the unconscious--where, he said, lust, rage and repression
battle for supremacy--and changed the way we view ourselves
BY PETER GAY
There
are no neutrals in the Freud wars. Admiration, even downright adulation,
on one side; skepticism, even downright disdain, on the other. This is
not hyperbole. A psychoanalyst who is currently trying to enshrine Freud
in the pantheon of cultural heroes must contend with a relentless critic
who devotes his days to exposing Freud as a charlatan. But on one thing
the contending parties agree: for good or ill, Sigmund Freud, more than
any other explorer of the psyche, has shaped the mind of the 20th century.
The very fierceness and persistence of his detractors are a wry tribute
to the staying power of Freud's ideas.
There
is nothing new about such embittered confrontations; they have dogged Freud's
footsteps since he developed the cluster of theories he would give the
name of psychoanalysis. His fundamental idea--that all humans are endowed
with an unconscious in which potent sexual and aggressive drives, and defenses
against them, struggle for supremacy, as it were, behind a person's back--has
struck many as a romantic, scientifically unprovable notion. His contention
that the catalog of neurotic ailments to which humans are susceptible is
nearly always the work of sexual maladjustments, and that erotic desire
starts not in puberty but in infancy, seemed to the respectable nothing
less than obscene. His dramatic evocation of a universal Oedipus complex,
in which (to put a complicated issue too simply) the little boy loves his
mother and hates his father, seems more like a literary conceit than a
thesis worthy of a scientifically minded psychologist.
Freud
first used the term psychoanalysis in 1896, when he was already 40. He
had been driven by ambition from his earliest days and encouraged by his
doting parents to think highly of himself. Born in 1856 to an impecunious
Jewish family in the Moravian hamlet of Freiberg (now Pribor in the Czech
Republic), he moved with the rest of a rapidly increasing brood to Vienna.
He was his mother's firstborn, her "golden Siggie." In recognition of his
brilliance, his parents privileged him over his siblings by giving him
a room to himself, to study in peace. He did not disappoint them. After
an impressive career in school, he matriculated in 1873 in the University
of Vienna and drifted from one philosophical subject to another until he
hit on medicine. His choice was less that of a dedicated healer than of
an inquisitive explorer determined to solve some of nature's riddles.
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