Sigmund Freud

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Freud on 1980s 50 Austrian Schilling note.

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Philosophy

While he saw himself as a scientist, Freud greatly admired Theodor Lipps, a philosopher and main supporter of the ideas of the subconscious and empathy. Freud's theories have had a tremendous impact on the humanities--especially on the Frankfurt school and critical theory. Freud's model of the mind is often criticized as an unsubstantiated challenge to the enlightenment model of rational agency, which was a key element of much modern philosophy.

Rationality

While many enlightenment thinkers viewed rationality as both an unproblematic ideal and a defining feature of man, Freud's model of the mind drastically reduced the scope and power of reason. In Freud's view, reasoning occurs in the conscious mind--the ego--but this is only a small part of the whole. The mind also contains the hidden, irrational elements of id and superego, which lie outside of conscious control, drive behavior, and motivate conscious activities. As a result, these structures call into question humans' ability to act purely on the basis of reason, since lurking motives are also always at play. Moreover, this model of the mind makes rationality itself suspect, since it may be motivated by hidden urges or societal forces (e.g. defense mechanisms, where reasoning becomes "rationalizing").

Transparency of Self

Freud's thought challenged René Descartes' famous dictum, "Cogito ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am"). Freud considered many central aspects of a person remain radically inaccessible to the conscious mind (without the aid of psychotherapy), which undermines the status of first-person knowledge.

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Memorial plaque at his birthplace in Příbor, (Czech Republic).

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Although Freud's theories were influential, they came under widespread criticism during his lifetime and afterward. A paper by Lydiard H. Horton, read in 1915 at a joint meeting of the American Psychological Association and the New York Academy of Sciences, called Freud's dream theory "dangerously inaccurate" and noted that "rank confabulations...appear to hold water, psycho analytically". The philosopher A. C. Grayling has said that "Philosophies that capture the imagination never wholly fade....But as to Freud's claims upon truth, the judgment of time seems to be running against him." Peter D. Kramer, a psychiatrist and faculty member of Brown Medical School, said "I'm afraid [Freud] doesn't hold up very well at all. It almost feels like a personal betrayal to say that. But every particular is wrong: the universality of the Oedipus complex, **** envy, infantile sexuality." A 2006 article in Newsweek magazine called him "history's most debunked doctor."

Freud's theories are often criticized for not being real science. This objection was raised by Karl Popper, who claimed that all proper scientific theories must be potentially falsifiable. Popper argued that no experiment or observation could ever falsify Freud's theories of psychology (e.g. someone who denies having an Oedipal complex is interpreted as repressing it), and thus they could not be considered scientific.

H. J. Eysenck claims that Freud 'set psychiatry back one hundred years', consistently mis-diagnosed his patients, fraudulently misrepresented case histories and that "what is true in Freud is not new and what is new in Freud is not true".

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen claims that "The truth is that Freud knew from the very start that Fleischl, Anna O. and his 18 patients were not cured, and yet he did not hesitate to build grand theories on these non-existent foundations...he disguised fragments of his self-analysis as ‘objective’ cases, that he concealed his sources, that he conveniently antedated some of his analyses, that he sometimes attributed to his patients ‘free associations’ that he himself made up, that he inflated his therapeutic successes, that he slandered his opponents."

Among adherents of Freudian thought, a frequently criticized aspect of Freud's belief system is his model of psychosexual development, including Freud's claim that infants are sexual beings. Others have accepted Freud's expanded notion of sexuality, but have argued that this pattern of development is not universal, nor necessary for the development of a healthy adult. Instead, they have emphasized the social and environmental sources of patterns of development. Moreover, they call attention to social dynamics Freud de-emphasized or ignored, such as class relations. This branch of Freudian critique owes a great deal to the work of Herbert Marcuse.

Freud has also come under fire from many feminist critics. Freud was an early champion of both sexual freedom and education for women (Freud, "Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness"). Some feminists have argued that at worst his views of women's sexual development set the progress of women in Western culture back decades, and that at best they lent themselves to the ideology of female inferiority. Believing as he did that women are a kind of mutilated male, who must learn to accept their "deformity" (the "lack" of a ****) and submit to some imagined biological imperative, he contributed to the vocabulary of misogyny. Terms such as "**** envy" and "castration anxiety" contributed to discouraging women from entering any field dominated by men, until the 1970s. Some of Freud's most criticized statements appear in his 'Fragment of Analysis' on Ida Bauer such as "This was surely just the situation to call up distinct feelings of sexual excitement in a girl of fourteen" in reference to Dora being kissed by a 'young man of prepossessing appearance' implying the passivity of female sexuality and his statement "I should without question consider a person hysterical in whom an occasion for sexual excitement elicited feelings that were preponderantly or exclusively unpleasurable"

On the other hand, feminist theorists such as Juliet Mitchell, Nancy Chodorow, Jessica Benjamin, Jane Gallop, and Jane Flax have argued that psychoanalytic theory is essentially related to the feminist project and must, like other theoretical traditions, be adapted by women to free it from vestiges of sexism. Freud's views are still being questioned by people concerned about women's equality. Another feminist who finds potential use of Freud's theories in the feminist movement is Shulamith Firestone. In "Freudianism: The Misguided Feminism", she discusses how Freudianism is essentially completely accurate, with the exception of one crucial detail: everywhere that Freud wrote "****", the word should be replaced with "power".

Dr. Jurgen von Scheidt speculated that most of Freud's psychoanalytical theory was a byproduct of his **** use. **** enhances dopaminergic neurotransmission increasing sexual interest and obsessive thinking. Chronic **** use can produce unusual thinking patterns due to the depletion of dopamine levels in the prefrontal cortex.

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Patients

This is a partial list of patients whose case studies were published by Freud, with pseudonyms substituted for their names:

•   Anna O. = Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936)
•   Cäcilie M. = Anna von Lieben
•   Dora = Ida Bauer (1882–1945)
•   Frau Emmy von N. = Fanny Moser
•   Fräulein Elizabeth von R.
•   Fräulein Katharina = Aurelia Kronich
•   Fräulein Lucy R.
•   Little Hans = Herbert Graf (1903–1973)
•   Rat Man = Ernst Lanzer (1878–1914)
•   Wolf Man = Sergei Pankejeff (1887–1979)
Other patients:
•   H.D. (1886–1961)
•   Emma Eckstein (1865–1924)
•   Gustav Mahler (1860–1911)
•   Princess Marie Bonaparte
People on whom psychoanalytic observations were published but who were not patients:
•   Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911)
•   Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) (co-authored with and primarily written by William Bullitt)

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Freud's couch used during psychoanalytic sessions.

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