FREUD AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

This article provides an overview of psychoanalysis discovered by Sigmund Freud. Freud is as yet too contemporary a figure to enable final evaluation of his life and career. There is little doubt, however, that he will be regarded as the outstanding medical personality of his time. His place in psychology and the social sciences may indeed prove to be of an importance no less impressive than in the medical field. Freud initially approached his life work in the spirit of the physician seeking to be helpful to his patients. Always interested in man as man, he was among the first to express, in his investigative and clinical work, the attitude toward problems of conduct now fairly common to psychiatrists and other students of behavior, namely, that conduct must be understood in terms of the total personality of the individual, reacting in a significant physical and social environment. Indeed, this current attitude is doubtless attributable in great measure to the influence of Freud‘s teachings. The story of Freud’s approach to the development of psychoanalysis is well known. Freud’s contributions are based initially upon meticulous observation of his patients. The tremendous reactions against Freud and psychoanalysis, provoked by his discoveries relative to the role of disturbances in the sexual impulses in determining neurosis, is familiar. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)