Portrait of Sigmund Freud smoking a cigar
“Good morning,” says one psychiatrist as he passes another in the hallway.
“Hmm,” thinks the other psychiatrist, “I wonder what he meant by that.”
Is there some deep hidden meaning — as that joke suggests — in our every gesture, comment and slip of the tongue? Well, like most jokes, this one makes its point by exaggeration, but in this case it isn’t too much of an exaggeration.
Sigmund Freud, the Austrian founder of psychiatry, did believe that half-conscious gestures, or forgetting a person’s name, or other seemingly trivial incidents, could be an indicator of something deeper, and clearly in some cases he was right.
Freud was born in Freiberg in what is now Czechoslovakia on May 6, 1856. He attended the University of Vienna in Austria.
Eventually Freud became interested in a report by Dr. Breuer, a Viennese physician, that he had cured “hysteria” by encouraging a patient under hypnosis to talk about the circumstances when her symptoms began. Once recalled and expressed, she felt much better. Convinced that hypnosis was the key to treating hysteria, Freud moved to Paris to study at an insane asylum under the great French neurologist J.M. Charcot.
But Freud was a poor hypnotist. So in 1893, he began his famous “free association” method, in which he put patients on a couch with their eyes closed and asked them to recall when their symptoms first began. By encouraging them to talk and by listening carefully (even to trivialities), he could frequently get them to talk about the reason for their distress, and in expressing it, find relief. Often, he found, these symptoms related to incestuous sexual memories — whether real or imagined.
Freud came up with a three-part brain theory to tie his clinical experiences together. He divided people into “id” (the instinctive subconscious, including hunger, thirst, sexual desire, etc.), “ego” (learned responses, such as avoiding danger), and the “superego” (moral responses, such as risking your life for another person).
But at the heart of human motivation, he decided, is sex — especially incestuous sex.
Though many of Freud’s ideas were controversial when he proposed them, and while many have now been rejected, Freud deserves credit for beginning to seriously probe human motivation, and for pointing out that there is often more to the human mind than what appears on the surface.