With today's technology, the efficacy of Freudian analyses remains a topic of disagreement, albeit the idea of integrating psychoanalysis with drug therapy has gained good ground
Sigmund Freud was a frail kid. He was, however, a bright student - a child with endless curiosity. Although not much is known of his early life, primarily because he burned his personal papers, more than once, his later papers were strictly embargoed in the Sigmund Freud Archives - up until 2000. While some papers were only made available to Ernest Jones, his official biographer, and also select members of the interior 'loop' of psychoanalysis, there is more to them than what meets the eye.
That Freud went to medical school, and graduated with relative ease, was no surprise. The fact also is Freud, with his penchant for learning, had a liking for the unexplained, right from his formative years. He delved into his own eclectic research activity - this may not have appealed to the purists. That he soon came under the influence of the famed neurologist, Jean Charcot, was destiny - not prophecy.
Freud first set up his practice in Vienna, Austria. He spent his decisive years in exploring the human mind. He first used the term psychoanalysis in 1896 - a theory of the human mind and human behaviour and clinical techniques for attempting and helping irrational (neurotic) patients.
Freud's most significant contribution that has percolated into modern thought is his credo of the unconscious. His model of the unconscious was ground-breaking, especially in a world dominated by positivism. Freud proposed that it all existed in layers and there were thoughts occurring 'below the surface.' Dreams, he explained, were the 'royal road to the unconscious.' In his seminal work, "The Interpretation of Dreams"(1900), Freud developed the argument that the unconscious exists. He also described a method for acquiring admission to its deepest recesses. All the same, it was his psychoanalytic structure, "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality"(1905), that alienated him from the mainstream of contemporary psychiatry and also his two loyal disciples - Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung.
When Adler went on to develop his own psychology, which emphasised on belligerence with which people deficient in some quality ('inferiority complex') convey their unhappiness by 'staging,' Freud did not lament losing him; but, not Jung. Freud and Jung were close for several years, but it was Jung's aspirations and emergent fondness for religion and mysticism that pushed them apart.
Freud thought of society as composed of rules from within. Of rules meant to subdue the tides of emotional excess that surge freely within. He also believed that contentment arises from attuning one's life with one's true feelings. Freud, the plumber of the conscious, not only focussed on the vitality of self-awareness as being fundamental to psychological insight, but he also thought of the emotional brain as being full of symbolic meanings - the interaction of metaphors, stories, myths and the arts.
Freud believed that dreams represented the unconscious trying to express itself consciously. Interestingly, Freud's antipathy towards religion waslegendary. He often referred to the experience of 'nirvana' as the 'awful depths' of Eastern thought in metrical terms. His perspective, however, leaves too little space for descriptions that show the positive influence of spirituality in child development. Yet, this does not digress from Freud's celebrated theory of conscience: of how it's formed out of primitive fears, which is proximate to his brilliant analyses of human instinct and the concept of character, or the self - from infancy to maturity.
What makes Freud's work unique is his world of dreams. Of the existence of dreams for the importance and sense of it, including the elements of wish-fulfilment brought through the objective of realisation, or reduplication - of what Freud called dream work. In its totality, Freud's study of dreams also led him directly into the practical applications of psychoanalysis as a tool for neuroses. It elevated his insight to unlocking the difficulties and perplexities of the hidden side of human nature - a clear path into what makes the unconscious mental life a subject to the action of the mechanisms that are not explicable by the means at hand, or normal rationalised thinking. His expansive experimentsal so balanced the domain, while going beyond all disavowals of the unconscious.
Thanks to his primer on the 'id,' the 'superego,' and their problem-child, the 'ego,' Freud hastened the advance of scientific comprehension of our mind infinitely. In so doing, he ripped 'open' motivations that are normally imperceptible to our consciousness. While there is no question that his own prejudices and neuroses influenced some of his own observations, Freud's psychological components are less consequential than his 'paradigm shift' as a whole. That he went far too overboard at times with some of his theories, and manipulated them, is part of history; it is also just as ironical that his path-breaking work on sexuality catapulted the outstanding ability in him to embarking on his controversial walk.
With today's technology, the efficacy of Freudian analyses remains a topic of disagreement, albeit the idea of integrating psychoanalysis with drug therapy has gained good ground. All the same, the big advantage is Freud 'meditated' upon others' minds just as much as he did his own. This was a huge advance. He cogently believed it was conceivable to lay bare the content of the unconscious if one paid attention to normal behaviours, such as jokes, slips of the tongue, free associations and - most importantly and favourably - dreams.
Freud was convinced of their import. He is reported to have quipped that a marble tablet, on his home, would one day read: "Here, on July 24, 1895, the secret of the dream revealed itself to Dr. Sigm. Freud." Dreams are made this way. Freud made his own, while peering into his own mind and that of all fellow beings.
Nidamboor is a wellness physician, independent researcher and author
