Sigmund Freud's Suicide

Sigmund Freud was born on May 6, 1856, in Germany. He received a medical degree and treated psychological disorders. Freud had many theories, but for the theory of evil, he believed that human’s purpose in

Suicide is, according to Sartre, “an opportunity to stake out our understanding of our essence as individuals in a godless world” (Stanford, 2004). Fundamentally, existentialism argues all individuals are free and therefore responsible for their actions. Thus, it is up to the individual to create an ethos of personal ideology, which is the only way one is able to rise above the human condition of suffering, death and finality (Guigon, 2001). Suicide is seen as the individual’s act of giving in to the absurdity of human life. In other words, when a human is unable to create meaning out of the absurdity that surrounds him or herself, her or she live the typical life of pain, suffering, death and thus make suicide a natural act of existence

The poem “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note” by Amiri Baraka uses vivid images of sights, sounds, and daily activities to symbolize a heartfelt story. In the poem, Amiri, is one of the African American slaves who is frustrated about the discriminatory treatment by whites. So frustrated he wants to commit suicide. The writer used transition words starting with “lately”, “now”, and “then” for each stanza. He was imagining how he acted before his death and how his daughter reacted to his death.

Suicide is the act of killing yourself. It is the 11th leading cause of death in America (CDC 2009). I have never had any intentions on committing suicide and I never really understood why people commit suicide that’s why I chose this topic to help me understand what problems people go through that makes them do such a thing. Sociology is the study of social behavior and the culture of humans. There are numerous reasons like financial stress, family problems or mental health disorders that lead to suicide. The number one cause of suicide is untreated depression. The issues that were just listed are some social conditions from society that results in a suicidal

American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. (2016). A model school policy on suicide prevention: Model language, commentary, and resources. Retrieved from:

Mikva and Rosenthal. “Guns and the Rising Rate of Suicide.” New York Times. 14 Dec. 2015:

Durkheim argues that the suicide rate is a social factor that can be interpreted as an indicator for social solidarity within a society (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01114474).

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 considered a career in law but found legal affairs dull, and so, though he later admitted to "no particular predilection for the career of a physician" he chose a medical career. In 1873 he entered the University of Vienna but did not graduate until 1881.

Sigmund
Freud
was
born
into
a
modest
 Jewish
 family in 1856 in Freiberg, who eventually relocated to Vienna in 1860. After a victorious graduation, Freud
 enrolled into
 the
Medical
Faculty
at
Vienna. Even though, he was avid
about
 his
 new
 area
 of
 education, he postponed his completion in order to chase his interest in employment as a research assistant in the physiological workroom of Ernst
 Brücke. Later, in 1885, Freud had the chance to travel to train in Paris for several months beneath Jean-Martin Charcot, a recognized neurologist who focused in the study of emotion and weakness to hypnosis. Not too long after traveling back home, he established his psychoanalytic practice and shaped the many theoretic ideas that made him notorious throughout Europe and the United States. In
 1905, soon
 after
 Freud
 distributed
 one
 of
 his
 first
 major
 pieces
 titled,

Traditionally, suicide was thought to be a purely individual decision but French sociologist Emile Durkheim recognized that the phenomenon had a social dimension. He believed in the influence of society on the individual and that if anything can explain that relation, it is suicide. His use of the data of suicide, not specific cases and reports, to study the societal trends reveals his true subject of study: society as a whole and its role in the individual experience. Durkheim uses the study of suicide via the quantitative methodological approach as a tool to study society as a broader whole.

In the textbook, the authors discuss Freud’s psychoanalytic theory in which, according to Freud, individuals acted out their desires and behaviors in response to a mental system made up of the ego, superego, and id (Cervone & Pervin, 2013). The ego seeks reality. On one hand the ego wants to meet the desires of the id, but at the same time the ego also wants to satisfy the demands of the superego. The superego controls the moral and social acceptable aspects of an individual’s behavior. The id is the part of the system that functions under the pleasure principle. Simply put, the id wants to achieve pleasure and it wants to avoid pain. Individuals entered states were they would seek to relive tension and to achieve pleasure. These states are called instincts or drives.

Freud was the oldest of eight children from his mother and father. However, he had two older brothers from his father’s previous marriage. “Young Freud became the focus of his mother's most extravagant hopes…”

Instead of research, Freud studied private practice medicine at the University of Vienna in 1873. After graduation, Freud worked at the Vienna General Hospital where he worked with Josef Breuer in creating a treatment for hysteria by hypnosis and served as a research assistant at the Institute of Physiology. In 1881, Freud obtained his doctorate’s degree in medicine. Then in 1885, Freud traveled to Paris on a one year scholarship to be a student of Jean Charcot, a neurologist. Upon returning to Vienna in 1886, Freud created his own private practice that specialized in brain and nervous disorders. Later that same year, Freud married Martha

When considering religion, various theories by Sigmund Freud can be quite controversial yet interesting. Some of Freud’s theories and views with regards to religion involve; the origin of religion, the basis of guilt or sin for obedience, and God as a heavenly father a mere projection made by humans based on their needs. Before going into depth on some of the theories of Freud, we can gather from his book Totem and Taboo, that he was in fact of Jewish background and ultimately an atheist as he describes himself as “in his eternal nature a jew with no desire to alter that nature” but also “completely estranged from the religion of his father and any other religion” (Freud 1930). We can also gather that Freud had a reductionist approach, which argues “objects or beliefs, including super human entities, are nothing more than human constructions that can be ‘reduced’ to human basics”. (Nye 2009) Within this approach it continues to also reduce God to “merely what humans want him/her/it to be, a projection of one of more aspects of human behavior.” (Nye