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Sigmund Freud Biography

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Sigmund Frued, Austrian physician, neurologist, and founder of psychoanalysis. Freud was born in Freiberg (now Príbor, Czech Republic), on May 6, 1856, and educated at the University of Vienna. When he was three years old his family, fleeing from the anti-Semitic riots then raging in Freiberg, moved to Leipzig. Shortly thereafter, the family settled in Vienna, where Freud remained for most of his life. Although Freud 's ambition from childhood had been a career in law, he decided to become a medical student shortly before he entered the University of Vienna in 1873. Inspired by the scientific investigations of the German poet Goethe, Freud was driven by an intense desire to study natural science and to solve some of the challenging …show more content…

In his clinical observations Freud found evidence for the mental mechanisms of repression and resistance. He described repression as a device operating unconsciously to make the memory of painful or threatening events inaccessible to the conscious mind. Resistance is defined as the unconscious defense against awareness of repressed experiences in order to avoid the resulting anxiety. He traced the operation of unconscious processes, using the free associations of the patient to guide him in the interpretation of dreams and slips of speech. Dream analysis led to his discoveries of infantile sexuality and of the so-called Oedipus complex, which constitutes the erotic attachment of the child for the parent of the opposite sex, together with hostile feelings toward the other parent. In these years he also developed the theory of transference, the process by which emotional attitudes, established originally toward parental figures in childhood, are transferred in later life to others. The end of this period was marked by the appearance of Freud 's most important work, "The Interpretation of Dreams" (1900). Here Freud analyzed many of his own dreams recorded in the 3-year period of his self-analysis, begun in 1897. This

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