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Essay on Sigmund Freud

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Sigmund Freud was a remarkable social scientist that changed psychology through out the world. He was the first major social scientist to propose a unified theory to understand and explain human behavior. No theory that has followed has been more complete, more complex, or more controversial. Some psychologists treat Freud's writings as a sacred text - if Freud said it, it must be true. On the other hand, many have accused Freud of being unscientific, suggesting theories that are too complicated ever to be proved true or false. He changed prior ideas on how the human mind works and the theory that unconscious motives control much behavior. "He applied himself to a new field of study…and struggled with an environment whose rejection …show more content…

With the help of an Austrian physician named Josef Breuer he wrote "Studies in Hysteria", and developed the therapy called the cathartic method.
The cathartic method consisted of having the patient recall and reproduce the forgotten scenes while under hypnosis. Their work was poorly received by the medical profession, and they separated shortly after due to Freud's growing conclusions that the cause of the hysteria was sexual in nature. While discussing the case history of one patient, Freud said: "In the study of hysteria, local diagnosis and electrical reactions do not come into picture, while an exhaustive account of mental processes, of the kind we were accustomed to having from imaginative writers, enables me, by the application of a few psychological formulas, to obtain a kind of insight into the origin of a hysteria" (Sigmund Freud, page 15). Freud was always changing and modifying his ideas, and in 1923 published a revised version of his earlier ideas.
Freud continued to work on his own until 1906, when he was joined by the Swiss psychiatrists Eugen Bleuler and C.G Jung, and an Austrian named Alfred Adler. In 1908 they published a journal containing their works, and in 1909 they began to gain

recognition when they were invited to give lectures at Clark University in Massachusetts. In 1910 the International Psychoanalytical Association was formed and Jung was named president. This would not last for long as both Jung

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