Psychoanalyst, SIGMUND FREUD,CO POWIECIE O NIM?

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Psychoanalyst
Sigmund Freud

He opened a window on the unconscious--where, he said, lust, rage and
repression battle for supremacy--and changed the way we view ourselves
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BY PETER GAY

There are no neutrals in the Freud wars. Admiration, even downright
adulation, on one side; skepticism, even downright disdain, on the other.
This is not hyperbole. A psychoanalyst who is currently trying to enshrine
Freud in the pantheon of cultural heroes must contend with a relentless
critic who devotes his days to exposing Freud as a charlatan. But on one
thing the contending parties agree: for good or ill, Sigmund Freud, more
than any other explorer of the psyche, has shaped the mind of the 20th
century. The very fierceness and persistence of his detractors are a wry
tribute to the staying power of Freud's ideas.

There is nothing new about such embittered confrontations; they have dogged
Freud's footsteps since he developed the cluster of theories he would give
the name of psychoanalysis. His fundamental idea--that all humans are
endowed with an unconscious in which potent sexual and aggressive drives,
and defenses against them, struggle for supremacy, as it were, behind a
person's back--has struck many as a romantic, scientifically unprovable
notion. His contention that the catalog of neurotic ailments to which humans
are susceptible is nearly always the work of sexual maladjustments, and that
erotic desire starts not in puberty but in infancy, seemed to the
respectable nothing less than obscene. His dramatic evocation of a universal
Oedipus complex, in which (to put a complicated issue too simply) the little
boy loves his mother and hates his father, seems more like a literary
conceit than a thesis worthy of a scientifically minded psychologist.

Freud first used the term psychoanalysis in 1896, when he was already 40. He
had been driven by ambition from his earliest days and encouraged by his
doting parents to think highly of himself. Born in 1856 to an impecunious
Jewish family in the Moravian hamlet of Freiberg (now Pribor in the Czech
Republic), he moved with the rest of a rapidly increasing brood to Vienna.
He was his mother's firstborn, her "golden Siggie." In recognition of his
brilliance, his parents privileged him over his siblings by giving him a
room to himself, to study in peace. He did not disappoint them. After an
impressive career in school, he matriculated in 1873 in the University of
Vienna and drifted from one philosophical subject to another until he hit on
medicine. His choice was less that of a dedicated healer than of an
inquisitive explorer determined to solve some of nature's riddles.