Professor Sigmund Freud, the distinguished psychologist and originator of psychoanalysis was born in Freiberg, Moravia, and educated at Vienna and Paris.
He was of Jewish extraction and fled from Austria - he was then eighty-two years of age - on the Nazi invasion of the country, and had since found asylum in England.
Freud's attitude towards psychoanalysis cannot be understood until his two fundamental beliefs are appreciated. The first is that every event in the mind can be described and explained in mental terms; the other, loaded as it is with complex philosophical implications, can only be mentioned. It is that determinism applies as rigidly to the mind as to the body. For Freud the word chance had no meaning, except in the scientist's sense. In his view, the wildest dreams, the most obscure delusions, the most trivial forgetting or mislaying are as much a matter of cause and effect as an eclipse of the sun. Whatever the verdict upon Freud's contributions to science may be in another hundred years, it is certain that he will be known as the man who forced thinkers to take dreams seriously. For the blended flippancy and boredom which characterised the writers on dreams before 1900 Freud has substituted deadly earnestness.
He believed that the dream was the functional nervous disorder in miniature, that in it indirect satisfaction was obtained during sleep for mental trends which in waking life were unsatisfied or repressed. But the system of analysis or dissection of dreams which Freud crated must be carefully distinguished (and it seldom is) from the interpretation of dreams which he proposed. If a complicated piece of machinery were discovered in a new country it might be possible for several engineers to agree perfectly concerning its constituent parts while dissenting violently from each other as to its probable function. So it is with the dream. By reminding us that so-called free association is not free at all but is ruled by laws, however numerous and complicated they may be and however little we may know about them, Freud again contributed to knowledge.
For Freud the dominant factor in human life was the sex instinct. It is true that he meant by the word sexuality very much more than the narrow meaning often put upon it. But in fairness it should be recorded that he probably meant something much more related to our popular conception of it than some of his apologists would have us believe.
His belief that the dominant factor in the psychoneuroses was some disturbance of the love-life was put to a vast test on the outbreak of the Great War. Many who did not accept, or even violently opposed, some of his fundamental theories regarded his conception of repression as one of first-rate importance. In fact, there are critics who think that if Freud had broadened the basis of his theory to include the repression of what might be called the danger instincts and the self-preservation instincts, it covers very well the neuroses of war.
In the second period of Freud's constructive thinking he showed increasing awareness that to describe repression was not enough. To discover the nature of the mental forces which brought about the repression was just as important. He then produced his picturesque, attractive, baffling concept of the super-ego, the integration of the moral elements in oneself. Though it has much in common with familiar concepts of conscience it cannot be equated with them. Particularly penetrating was his suggestion that the neurotic's symptoms are often self-punishments, and that an almost-healthy person's super-ego may oppress his life with undue severity, causing him to be austere towards himself and cruel to others, all with a moral or quasi-moral motive or excuse. In a person placed in authority such a state of mind may cause agony to millions of innocent people.
Freud often seemed to be on the verge of giving substantial help to the psychology of society. But he was perhaps too closely confined to his own "culture pattern," even to his consulting-room. His ideas have permeated psychological writings so thoroughly that it is difficult to criticise him without using his own language. And the applications of those ideas have led many patients from suffering to serenity. The suggestiveness of Freud's work for other branches of knowledge has stimulated persons in many branches other than that of medicine and has caused a production of a vast amount of literature of very varying quality in sociology and pure letters. The obvious importance of Freud's work to the ethnologist never seems to have been taken sufficiently seriously either by himself or by his disciples. His explanation of symbolism by the fundamental similarity of the human mind ought to have been affected by the challenging work of Rivers (who in his later days was very much influenced by Freud), Elliott Smith, and Perry. There is no necessity to believe that Freud's explanation is useless. But there is every reason to revise the simple belief in mental similarities.
