The following timeline for Freud's life is taken from the Sigmund Freud Web Site (see Web Resources)
* 1856 Sigmund Freud was born on May 6, 1856 in Freiberg (Pribor), a rural town near Ostrau in northeastern Moravia. His father Jakob Freud (1815-1896) was a Jewish wool merchant from Galicia. Freud's mother Amalie Nathanson (1835-1930) was also Galician and Jakob Freud's second wife. Sigmund was the eldest son of eight children. There were two half-brothers of his father's first marriage, too.
* 1859 In October 1859 the Freud family moved to Vienna's "Leopoldstadt", or second district, where Sigmund Freud lived until June 1938.
* 1865 Sigmund Freud attended high school at "Leopoldstädter Communal-Real- und Obergymnasium" and took his "Matura" leaving exam in July 1873 (Vienna's second district, Taborstrasse 24)
* 1873 Registration at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Vienna
* 1878 He changed his first name "Sigismund" to "Sigmund"
* 1881 In March 1881 Sigmund Freud obtained his doctorate in medicine. As early as from 1876 to 1882 he worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Physiology under Ernst Brücke, with neurology as his main focus.
* From 1882 onwards he did his clinical practical at the "Allgemeines Krankenhaus" and became acquainted with clinical neurology. At the department of Dr. Scholz Freud intensified his knowledge in the fields of clinical neurology and neurological diagnosis.
* 1885 Habilitation for neuropathology
* 1885/86 One-year scholarship with Charcot at the "Salpetriere" in Paris
* 1886 On April 25 Freud opened up his first neurologist's office in Vienna, Rathausstrasse 7
* 1886 In September 1886 Freud married Hamburg-born Martha Bernays (1861-1951). The marriage was extremely happy and produced six children.
* 1887 Birth of his elder daughter Mathilde (1887-1978)
* 1889 Birth of his son Martin (1889-1967)
* 1889 Scholarship in Nancy, with Liébault and Bernheim: hypnosis studies.
* Freud studied neurotic and psychotic behavior not evidently caused by organic disorders.
* Up to 1891 the Freud family lived in the so-called "Sühnhaus" in Vienna, Maria Theresienstrasse 8. Emperor Franz had this house built on the grounds of the former "Ringtheater" destroyed by fire on December 8, 1881. In the course of this tragic event 386 people had been killed.
* 1891 Birth of Freud's son Oliver (1892-1970)
* The Freud family moved to the house Berggasse 19 in the 9th Viennese District where they lived until 1938. Earlier Dr. Viktor Adler, the founder of Austria's Social Democracy, had lived in this flat.
* 1892 Birth of Freud's son Ernst (1892-1970)
* 1893 Birth of his daughter Sophie (1893-1920)
* 1895 Birth of Freud's daughter Anna, the sixth and last child (1895-1982)
* 1895 Publication of his studies on hysteria together with Josef Breuer
* 1895-1898 Five journeys to Italy
* 1896 Freud called his new therapeutical treatment psychoanalysis. He worked on this treatment's theory for forty years. For some time Freud was also the head of the neurological department of the "Erstes öffentliches Kinderkrankeninstitut" ("First public childrens' hospital") under Prof. Kassowitz. In his book "Zur Auffassung der Aphasien" he criticized the localisation theory of contemporary neuropsychiatry. His psychogenic standpoint in psychoanalytical theory was mentioned for the first time.
* 1900 Publication of the book "Traumdeutung"/"The Interpretation of Dreams" establishing Freud's fame
* 1901 Publication of "Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens"/"Psychopathology of Everyday Life" in which Freud studied the meaning of certain disorders. Journey to Rome.
* 1902 Freud is appointed associate professor of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Vienna. However, his psychotherapeutic ideas were developed outside the university only. Freud dedicated his work extremely much time, held therapeutic sessions with patients (on his famous couch) up to 12 hours daily and wrote down his findings until three in the morning. Numerous lectures in Germany and Italy, participation in numerous psychoanalytical congresses in Budapest, The Hague and London.
* 1905 Publication of "Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten" und "Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie".
* 1908 Founding of the "Viennese Association of Psychoanalysis" that had developed from regular meetings with his followers. "First Congress of Freudian Psychology" in Salzburg.
* 1909 Guest lectures in the United States, University in Worcester, Massachusetts
* 1910 Founding of the "International Association of Psychoanalysis"
* From 1912 onwards publication of the "Yearbook of Psychoanalysis"
* From 1913 onwards publication of the "International Magazine for Psychoanalysis"
* 1917 Freud comes out with "Lectures introducing psychoanalysis"
* 1919 Publication of "The International Journal of Psychoanalysis"
* 1920 Sigmund Freud is finally appointed Professor of the University of Vienna. Publication of "Jenseits des Lustprinzips"/"Beyond the Pleasure Principle".
* 1923 Freud falls ill with palatine cancer
* 1923 Publication of "Das Ich und das Es"/"The Ego and the Id"
* 1924 Freud is appointed "Citizen of Vienna" by the City of Vienna
* 1930 Sigmund Freud is awarded the Goethe Prize for Literature honoring his "clear and impeccable style". Publication of "Das Unbehagen in der Kultur"/"Civilization and its Discontents".
* 1938 On March 12 Austria is annexed by Germany. On March 13 the last meeting of the "Viennese Association of Psychoanalysis" takes place. On March 22 Freud's daughter Anna is arrested by the Gestapo and held in custody for a day. Friends of Freud can finally convince the 80-year-old to leave Nazi-occupied Vienna. He emigrates to London, 20 Maresfield Gardens on June 4 with his wife, his youngest daughter Anna, his housekeeper Paula Fichtl and his nurse Josefine Stross.
* He sold the largest part of his library to a bookseller who sold it on to the New York Psychiatric Institute.
* September 23, 1939 Freud dies of cancer in London
Whatever modern experimental psychologists may say about Freud's theories, Freud himself was a passionate scientist. He meant that in the same way that Nietzsche praised science (e.g., The Gay Science) -- the sense of honest, careful, truth seeking, grounded in experience rather than in myth or metaphysics. Whether or not early psychoanalytic theory developed out of thoroughly scientific methodology is, of course, debatable but it is doubtless that some elements of that methodology were present. To completely ignore Freud or to make fun of him says more about the psychological problems of contemporary psychologists than it says about Freud and his work. One ought to have some respect for the origins of the profession and understand the potential for error in all young sciences.
By the time Freud wrote Civilization and Its Discontents his theory and practice of psychoanalysis were very well established. The book is both a good summary of that theory and a challenge to the concept of "civilization." Can people live in civilized society and be happy? Or are humans psychologically geared only to more primitive frameworks of living. The theory itself should be read in contrast to Kant's philosophical work and in the context of philosophical developments throughout the 19th Century -- especially its relation to Nietzsche's works and to James' interests in psychology. Similar issues in the psychological makeup of human beings have been discussed from Plato and Aristotle onward. The challenge to civilization had a significant impact on writers in the mid-20th Century. Various authors attempted to reply to Freud and to demonstrate that civilized life can be happy. Mill, of course, had already suggested this in his defense of Victorian "higher pleasures" in Utilitarianism. Eric Fromm authored a critical reply titled The Sane Society. Herbert Marcuse argued consistently with Freud's theoretical case in Eros and Civilization but turned it in favor of civilization by suggesting that various strategies of creativity and play could make civilized life happy. Freud's work had an enormous impact on the 20th Century in literature, the arts generally, and of course in psychotherapy practice. The discussion of civilization and Marcuse's book, in particular, framed much of the "Counter-Culture" movement of the '60s.
In brief, Freud's theory involved both a structural hypothesis and a suggestion about human psychological pathology. Structurally, the human mind (or psyche), Freud thought, is pluralistic and only a small portion of it operates in what we call "consciousness." Pathologically speaking, this complexity of the psyche develops from infancy, solving or resolving certain conflicts or puzzles precipitated by life in the world. As Freud imagined the psyche, it originates as an undifferentiated mental processor for stimuli and response that Freud called (in German) "the it." Freud's English translators consistently Latinized his nomenclature to make him appear more "scientific;" hence, this undifferentiated psyche was called the Id. The dominant theme of this primitive psyche is what Freud called "the Pleasure Principle." Action is motivated by sensual pleasure and the infant makes no distinction between self and world. Perhaps this is one reason why so few people can remember anything from the first few years of life.
Freud believed that the psyche could not survive as pure Id and that a fundamental separation between "I" and "world" is necessary for any person's practical survival. Pathologically, this happens, Freud thought, by virtue of a separation of the psyche; in particular, a new part of the psyche grows and takes active authority against the pleasure-loving Id. This part is what Freud called (in German) "the I," and it was translated as the Ego. The importance of the Ego is that it constructs a picture of the world, under what Freud called "the Reality Principle," and it restrains the Id to act safely within this world. While the Id would embrace any pleasurable activity, the Ego cancels certain activities that would be too dangerous. The Ego's power over the Id is called "repression."
Freud's background in neurophysiology at the University of Vienna included an understanding of late 19th Century thermodynamics and, in particular, the principle of conservation of energy. Since Freud viewed the impulses of the psyche as bursts of energy, it was clear to him that the Ego could not simply destroy these impulses but that it must, in some way, convert them or send them elsewhere. Thus, Freud used a term "sublimation" which Nietzsche had already used in a similar context. Repression requires sublimation; that is, the energy must be channeled elsewhere. The idea is crucial to the argument of this book because one channel for energy is self-directed aggression --- guilt and self-hate. In a very repressive society, people must suffer a significant toll of self-directed antagonism; this is very much the same claim that Nietzsche was making about the joylessness of Christian society. It is the root of civilization's discontents.
Thus far, however, we have not explained why civilized existence requires repression and, hence, an excess of sublimation. Freud developed a theory of a third part of the psyche a couple decades after is psychoanalytic work began. The theory was based on observations of individuals who had clearly differentiated new parts of the psyche which became, in effect, comparable to the fundamental split of I and world. That is, these parts became operative or powerful components of the psyche. In the abnormal pathology this could explain multiple personalities. But in normal pathology, Freud called this part of the mental process the Superego (commonly called "conscience"). Within the Superego, the mind replicated the directives of the individual's chief instructors --- parents, teachers, peers, etc. Thus, the Superego is organized on what Marcuse called "the Performance Principle" and it disciplines the Ego in the precise ways that the Id must be repressed. As natural and innocent as this may sound, however, the Superego produces much more actual repression than the Ego itself would, functioning simply out of the Reality Principle and motivated only by safety. The Superego results in "surplus repression" and a large measure of it, especially in the Victorian era. With the Superego in place, we feel guilty about something socially unacceptable just thinking about it!
In this context, Freud developed what quickly became his most controversial construct, the Oedipus Complex. As Freud envisioned human development, the child forms strong relationships with his parents and these relationships, Freud argued, are fully charged with primitive components of sexual satisfaction. The little boy falls in love with his mother and is jealous of his father's intimate access to her. A subtle competition is passed through in which the boy finally succumbs to the more powerful father. The Superego develops under the rule of the Performance Principle as the child works his way through this complex situation, becoming a man and understanding the world of men. For female children, Freud imagined a similar Electra Complex, but he seems to have failed to understand the deep differences that run between male and female development.
When we examine the Pleasure Principle, we discover that sensuality in all of its diverse modes is the primary focus of primitive action. Sexuality is obviously a very important part of that activity. Thus, Freud's early work focused on how both the Reality Principle and the Performance Principle had come to repress human sexuality. The sexual drive in the Id was called Eros after the Greek word for sexual love. Freud, substantially later, developed his vision of the Id to greater complexity and added the drive Thanatos (the so-called "death instinct"). In Freud's view, all organisms express both eros and thanatos but the balance changes with age. The early period is dominated by the creative eros, and the later period is dominated by the destructive thanatos. It mirrors the passage from birth to death. The importance of this theory to the argument regarding civilization is that thanatos is a destination for repressed energy; that is, guilt and self-hate are expressed as satisfactions of the thanatos impulse. In effect, civilized humans "age" way too fast and, in that sense, they cannot be truly happy.
When we stand back and view the prospects for human development, the picture we see is one of development through a number of problems that have to be solved. The child must settle the problem of "I and world." But this is the physical world and the remaining problems relate to the human world or culture. The child's inherent hedonism and aggression have to be checked, and the parental directives must be successfully embedded under the performance principle. The family relationships and early school relationships provide instructive environments within which these problems must be solved. A child who is forced to cope with an overly structured environment or with abnormal relationships/behaviors may not succeed in solving these problems or may solve them in ways that deviate from the norm -- hence, "abnormal" psychic pathology. In most people this appears as simple neuroses -- unexplainable inhibitions, anxieties, compulsions, etc. -- but in extreme cases truly abnormal development may lead to psychoses -- schizophrenic breakdown, multiple personalities, etc. The role of civilization, of course, is the role that culture itself takes in this process and, consequently, the demands that civilized life places on the psychic development of humans who began, in some sense, as hunter-gatherers. The "discontent" that civilization requires, according to Freud, is the pain of guilt feelings, the pressure of self-hatred, and the warping tendencies of neurotic symptoms.
Freud was fascinated by the rising science of anthropology and he wrote several books which attempted a reconstruction of past human societies on grounds consistent with the psychoanalytic development of individuals. In particular, he imagined that very primitive human societies had worked their ways through something comparable to the Oedipus Complex. Thus, the social development of morality was actually to be understood from an anthropological point of view as the internalization of cooperative performance based on violent experiences of the Brother Clan with the Great Patriarch. For Freud, it was easy to see that individual human development recapitulates the track of development of society itself over a very long time span.
Incidentally, Marcuse's counter-argument, published as Eros and Civilization, was that erotic sexual energy did not have to be entirely sublimated and did not require the heavy use of sublimated thanatos as self-hate and guilt. Marcuse suggested that there are ample avenues, especially in post-industrial society, for more-or-less direct expression of erotic energy as sensuality satisfied through non-sexual erotic arts and fantasies. The Counter-Culture of the '60s pursued "love not war" and developed music, dance, dress, and behaviors that were exceedingly sensual, and sometimes sexual, while not requiring repression. Unfortunately, as time passed and Marcuse observed later, this "desublimated" energy came to be used repressively. That is, the Counter Culture as a spontaneous popular movement was displaced by a corporately promoted commercialized and shallow sensuality, available only by consumption. While our sexual attitudes, today, seem to be more permissive, the political and economic repression involved may be too high a price to pay.
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