Freud

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856. Today he is known as the father of psychoanalysis and his work, much like that of Carl Jung, has contributed greatly to the practice of psychology and psychiatry we have today.  Freud was a "doctor" and a "scientist" in his day.  His first love was neurology, the study of the physical brain.

Some people do not know that early in his medical career Freud did research on cerebral palsy.  It was later that he became interested in working with the mentally ill. Freud became interested in the mind and how it works, specifically how it related to human behavior and in particularly, how it worked in relation to human sexuality.

Freud liked to investigate people’s most inner thoughts and dreams and this fascination lead him to believe that dreams were the “royal road to the unconscious." He also developed theories about how a person’s childhood affected their adult life and how people repressed desires, especially of the sexual kind.  He worked with hypnosis and tried to learn how  memory works and he studied the effect of traumatic experiences on the mind. He used methods of talking and analyzing the problems his patients had that he called psychoanalysis. He is probably most known and recognized for his probing into people’s thoughts on sex and publishing his research on human sexual behaviors.

It was Freud who was bewhinds the developement of many psychology theories about the human sex drive.  He popularized for interested parties the idea that everyone had this "libido." within the "Id."  As an atheist, humanist and a strong believer that Darwin was right, he reasoned and taught that food and sex and repression of sexuality was the motivating force behind all human life and activity. He notably developed theories about the growth and development of sexuality in humans and did lots of research into the sexuality of children and infants as well as adults. His bold and aggressive research on this "taboo" subject and the dissemination of his theories got a lot of attention from the world both positive and negative.

Freud was  a contemporary of Carl Jung, and the two of them spent some time traveling together lecturing and sharing their discoveries, but they had some differences of opinions. Jung was critical of Freud’s headstrong insistence that he knew so much and Freud, being an atheist, was critical of Jung’s occult spirituality.  They ultimately went their separate ways and developed different theories, and both made a mark upon the work.  Both are still studied in universities and their ideas practiced in various fields of psychology today.

As for his personal life, Freud was born into a family full of complexity and confusion.  He had two older siblings that were from the same father, but their mother died and his father, Jacob Freud married Sigmonds mother.  Sigmond was third child in the family as well as the first of eight.   His mother married Freud’s father when she was 20 and he was 41.  It should be no wonder that Sigmund Freud was the first to document the notion that birth order as well as gender would have great influences in a persons later life.

Throughout his career in studying the mind, Freud experimented with and was addicted to cocaine. He smoked cigars and endured cancer of the jaw in a time when medical options for treatment of cancer were not as they are today.  Eventually he died of throat cancer. Well, he actually died from euthanasia, but it was because of his cancer that he asked his physician to give him a lethal dose of morphine in 1939.

As for religion, he is often quoted as believing that religion was a mere illusion, and he often called it something the whole world would be better without.  Still, the man born to Jewish parents, who grew up in the Roman Catholic town of Freiburg, Moravia and was himself saved from Hitler's Invasion of his country by a Nazi officer who liked his books and being set over the Freud family affairs, allowed him to escape to Britan.  Ironically, Frued ended his life writing his last book on the topic of religion titled,  Moses and Monotheism, (1938.) 

Freud wasn't  a convert to any particular religion, nor was that the purpose of this writing, but the now eighty year old man had obviously had given great thought to the Bible and the biblical record...his own family's heritage... and had something to say about it all.  He obviously had to come to some sort of terms with the impact of religion, and his heritage as a human being.  It seems one can simply not ignore the effect of religion and morality both in the human psyche and in the role it has in the history of the world.