Freud 's Interest Of Unconscious Ideas

By the 1870s, there were two schools of hypnosis in France. One was run by Dr. Jean Martin Charcot and the other by Doctors Benheim and Liebalt. Around the same time, Sigmund Freud also became interested in hypnosis and visited Benheim and Leibalt’s clinics to learn their techniques. Freud was the first to recognise the importance of the subconscious in psychological disorders, but he later became disillusioned with hypnosis and turned his attentions to psychoanalysis. As a result, the use of psychoanalysis grew in popularity during the first half of the 20th century and with this rise, hypnotherapy became less popular. By the 1950s this situation began to reverse as new research found new uses and positive benefits for using hypnosis as a therapy. Milton Erickson (1901-1980) was a psychotherapist who used hypnosis in his work. Erickson believed that the unconscious mind was

Before the time that Freud used hypnosis, treatments of mental illnesses were on the backburner. His passion for the unconscious mind led to his practice of hypnosis to treat mental illnesses. He believed that hypnosis could produce a physical symptom, in the body and the hidden part of the mind he labeled as “the unconscious”. It proved to not have an impact to end his patients’ hysterias. I believe that hypnosis was a step in the right direction to help cure, however the therapy of “the talking cure” was a better method due to most of his clients being females. Females love to talk about their feelings and feel a lot better after doing so. You can solve a lot of problems just by talking to get the back-story of where the problems first originated. You would be amazed what someone is willing to share. Freud would have needed to talk to them first before hypnotizing his patients, as a method to understand on a deeper level their suppressed memories or to influence their involuntary actions. The talking cure works just like counseling. In my personal experience, counseling is a great way to listen and interpret in order to change how we acted in the

The therapist's silence leads the patient to carry on with the talking, one thought leading to another and finding no echo in the therapist's mouth.26 The patient becomes extremely dependent to his therapist, awaiting a reply. Fédida reminds one of Ferenczi's major lessons implying that tact and contact are the two major features of psychoanalytic technic.27 Freud described the success of therapy and the psychoanalytic cure as a fiction, a Liebeskur or love cure as he reminds us in her commentary on Gradiva. Fiction is the imagination available to language. Love of language is necessary to the completeness of psychoanalysis as a creative rebirth of infantile seuxiality. The wonder of words and of the vocal in children when discovering language comes together with an extraordinary corporal awakening of sexuality.28 The difficulty of psychoanalysis lies in the fact that curing symptoms does not necessarily mean curing the psychological agitation. Slip of the tongue or forgetting appointments may be symptoms of strongly hidden, high importance conflicts. Communication within the patient may not be obvious, conscious and common sense messages might be, in some cases, beyond all awareness. Non verbal communication might have great significance worth analysing.29

Even though Freud's family had limited finances and were forced to live in a crowded apartment, his parents made every effort to foster his obvious intellectual capacities. In 1881 Freud received his doctorate and started work under Jean-Martin Charcot (Rana 97). Freud practiced and observed hypnosis as a clinical technique, and began to formulate the beginnings of his theory on the mind. There were no unusual aspects to Freuds childhood that seem to guide him in his rationing of thinking for his theories. Freuds parents realized that he would be a scholarly child and tried to accommodate him with a solid education.

Freud was presented the idea of abnormal behaviour to the world by his own theories and techniques at the first place, which was totally different and unique from relation to the old meaning of mental illness. He started using the hypnosis method in his clinical work in 1885 after he worked with Jean Martin Charcot, which he was awed by the potential of hypnosis to treat abnormal behaviour. As he began built up his theory of psychoanalysis, he created the term free association as new method and disposed hypnosis because of the crisis that he confronted when he encountered in some patients

In the one state she was sad and apprehensive, but relatively normal. In the other state she had hallucinations and "misbehaved", that is, she swore, threw pillows at people”. She could not remember events or situations that had happen in other condition. After Breuer ceased treating her both he and Freud continued to follow the course of Bertha’s illness and the “treatment success” was discussed, in private seminar Carl Gustav Jung said in 1925. Conclusion of her treatment “A legend arose about the conclusion of Pappenheim’s treatment by Josef Breuer. It was handed down in slightly different versions by various people; one version is contained in a letter from Freud to Stefan Zweig”. Freud’s purpose assumption that he wanted to make himself the sole discoverer of psychoanalysis at Breuer’s expense is contradicted by the the description of the discovery in Freud’s writings, in which he does not minimize Breuer’s role, but rather emphasizes

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in Morvia, now the Czech Republic. He studied medicine, specifically neurology and psychiatry, “directing more efforts at problems plaguing patients” (Friedman & Schustack, 2012, p.62). Over time, Freud began to take an interest in hysteria, which he characterized as “involving both sexual repression and exaggerated sexual cravings” (Cogan et al., 2007) and hypnosis methods. Freud discovered that hypnosis was an inadequate treatment approach; “moving from suggestive techniques to techniques of free association” (Friedman & Schustack, 2012, p.62).

“[W]e are not in a position to force anything on the patient about the things of which he is ostensibly ignorant or to influence products of the analysis by arousing an expectation. I have never once succeeded…in altering or falsifying the reproduction of memories or the connection of events.”(Breuer & Freud 295);

While Freud was a medical student he was introduced to Josef Breuer through physiologist Ernst Brucke. Josef Breuer eventually became friends with Freud and later on introduced Freud to Wilhelm Fliess. Fliess and Breuer were two influential individuals in Freud's life and Breuer greatly influenced the development of psychoanalysis. Josef Breuer was a Viennese physician who used hypnotism to treat hysteria and eventually Freud also used hypnosis to treat his own patients which helped him form his ideas on unconscious desires. “Freud adopted 'Breuer's cathartic method' in the treatment of his own patients and it was here that he developed his ideas about the role of unconscious conflicts in hysteria and other forms of neurosis in great depth”

This is however false, as Freud based his research from long- time friend and companion Josef Breuer, as he had made clear in 1909 (Freud, 1914). Psychoanalytical talking cures only began be seen as useful once Freud rejected the idea of hypnotic therapy, though it is understood to have been capable to unravel the disremembered memories of trauma patients, which is proven with a particular study of Anna O. When Freud and Breuer were first introduced to Anna O, she had been paralyzed with extensive pains due to the obsessive repressions of her feelings and memories, which can occur when individuals in their childhood start to repress their emotions and needs that they put added pressure on other parts of themselves (Salter, 2013). It was only when Anna was able to begin to murmur words of her past involvements, was when she started to become better and able to do things again, as the added stresses of her emotional shame were being relieved (Freud 1910). It was after Anna that Freud had begun to use the talking methods on other patients with sufferings like Anna’s and distresses formed by the same form of emotional grief. This is when Freud states his ideologies that our future emotional anguishes begin at a non-beneficial reaction from our past (Freud

“Freud’s case histories illustrate very clearly some of Freud’s most basic theories, such as his theories of identification, the role of transference, and the way in which the symptom is a formation of the unconscious.”

The psychoanalytical approach focuses on the influence of the “unconscious” – Freud believed that much of our behaviour is motivated by unconscious desires and drives. Freud worked with his colleague, Dr Breuer, on the Anna O case of hysteria which is thought to be a turning point in psychoanalysis and influence Freud’s theory greatly (Sulloway, 1979). Freud discovered three major things during his work with Dr Breuer and is cites in his co-authored book, Studies on Hysteria. The first thing he

Four years after Freud graduated, he moved to Paris to study under Jean Martin Charcot, a famous neurologist. At the time, Charcot was working with patients who suffered from hysteria. Some of these people had no physical defects, but seemed to be blind or paralyzed. Charcot believed that their real problem was mental, and that the physical symptoms could be erased by hypnosis. Freud carefully analyzed Charcot’s work and began to assemble his own thoughts and theories.

Sigmund Freud was the discoverer and inventor of psychoanalysis and coined the term in 1896 after publishing studies on Hysteria with Joseph Breuer in 1895. Psychoanalysis still remains unsurpassed in its approach to understanding human motivation, character development, and psychopathology. Freud’s insights and analyses of psychic determinism, early childhood sexual development, and unconscious processes have left an indelible mark on psychology (Korchin, 1983).

Freud was interested by how Charcot used a hypnosis to treat hysteria. Freud started to experiment with hypnotherapy. He concluded that hypnotherapy effected patients and it could be