Psychoanalyst---Sigmund Freud

There are no neutrals in the Freud wars. Admiration, on one side; skepticism, on the other. But on one thing the contending parties agree: for good or ill, Sigmund Freud, more than any other explorer of the psyche, has shaped the mind of the 20th century.

The very fierceness and persistence of his detractors are a tribute to the staying power of Freud's ideas. There is nothing new about such confrontations; they have dogged Freud's footsteps since he developed the luster of theorieshe would give the name of psychoanalysis. His fundamental idea has struck many as a romantic, scientifically improvable notion.

His contention that the catalog of neurotic ailments to which humans are susceptible is nearly always the work of sexual maladjustments, and that erotic desire starts not in puberty but in infancy, seemed to the respectable nothing less than obscene. His dramatic evocation of a universal Oedipus complex, in which the little boy loves his mother and hates his father, seems more like a literary conceit than a thesis worthy of a scientifically minded psychologist.

The book that made his reputation in the profession—although it sold poorly—was “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900), an indefinable masterpiece—part dream analysis, part autobiography, part theory of the mind, part history of contemporary Vienna. The principle that underlay this work was that mental experiences are part of nature.

The most nonsensical notion, the most casual slip of the tongue, the most fantastic dream, must have a meaning and can be used to unriddle the often incomprehensible maneuvers we call thinking. In 1974, he published another book.

A glance at its chapter headings will indicate some of the aspects of behaviour covered by the book:Forgetting of proper names, Forgetting of foreign words, Childhood and concealing memories, Mistakes in speech, Mistakes in reading and writing.

Broadly, Freud demonstrates that there are good reasons for many of the slips and errors that we make. We forget a name because, unconsciously, we do not wish to remember that name. We repress a childhood memory, because that memory is painful to us. A slip of the tongue or of the pen betrays a wish or a thought of which we are ashamed.

Freud was intent not merely on originating a sweeping theory of mental functioning and malfunctioning, he also wanted to develop the rules of psychoanalytic therapy. As to the first, he created the largely silent listener who encouraged the analysand to say whatever came to mind, no matter how foolish, repetitive or outrageous, and who intervened occasionally to interpret what the patient was struggling to say.

The efficacy of analysis remains a matter of controversy, though the possibility of mixing psychoanalysis and drug therapy is gaining support.