Sigmund Freud's works
The Oedipus complex
Immediately subsequent to his graduation as a doctor in 1881
Sigmund Freud spent several years in Vienna working as a
practical psychologist and lecturer in psychology. In 1885 a
government grant facilitated the spending a number of months in
Paris working at the Salpêtrière Mental Hospital
under the guidance of the famous neurologist Jean-Martin
Charcot.
During these months in Paris he became familiar with the use
of hypnotic suggestion by Charcot in the treatment of nervous
disorders. His medical colleagues in Vienna were greatly opposed
to the use of hypnotic suggestion "treatments" for various forms
of hysteria.
Freud worked in association with another Viennese
hypnotherapist named Josef Breuer in the preparation and
publication a learned paper (1893) that was later developed into
their publication Studies on Hysteria (Cathartic Method)
(1895). In this work Freud and Breuer tended to attribute
hysterical symptoms to the existence of untoward emotional
energies that seemingly arose from unresolved, and conciously
forgotten, psychic traumas. They sought to treat the hysterical
symptoms by hypnotising patients so that they might be induced to
recall or re-enact the traumatic experience producing a effective
purgation or catharsis of their pent up, untoward, emotional
energies.
In 1896 Freud coined the term Psychoanalysis to refer to the
investigation of the psychological causes of mental disorders.
From these times hypnotism was increasingly abandoned by Freud in
favour an analysis based upon the patient's flows of thought.
Patient's were encouraged to be completely uninhibited by
any consciousness of such things as foolishness, repetition, or
outrage, in expressing such flows of thought. Freud gave the name
"free association" to his investigation of a disturbed patient's
spontaneous flow of thought for decisive clues as to the cause of
their disorder. (It would appear that in any case Freud was not
all that adept as an Hypnotist).
Freud discovered that people's mind's tended to
effectively repress memories of painful events and to
resist any attempts to draw any such memory back into
conscious awareness. Freud seemed to consider that such traumas
were most often related to sex and sexuality. Freud's interest in
unresolved, repressed, resisted, mental phenomena led him to be
increasingly drawn to the Interpretation of Dreams. Freud
considered that his successful Interpretation of Dreams began
with one of his own in 1895. He gave this dream the name "The
Dream of Irma's injection". Freud also recognised the existence
of "Freudian slips" where people's utterances, as seemingly
modified by involuntary psychological promptings, gave important
clues as to the true state of their less-concious minds.
In 1899, The Interpretation of Dreams, the book that
Sigmund Freud regarded as his most important work was
published.
Freud's interest in the Interpretation of Dreams led him to
propose that people were often subject in an early "phallic"
stage of development (typically between the ages of three and
five) to a so-called Oedipus complex where individuals were
erotically attached to their parent of the opposite sex and were
hostile to the parent of the same sex.
The orthodox medical world still continued to regard Freud's
work with hostility. His The Psychopathology of Everyday
Life (1904) and his Three Contributions to the Sexual
Theory (1905), were both followed by increased repudiations
by regular medical circles. Given the continued hostility of
orthodox medical circles Freud continued to work largely alone
choosing to regard his professional state as being one of
"splendid isolation"
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![[Sigmund Freud, Oedipus complex]](../local/enlightenment.gif)