Founder of psychology: Who is Sigmund Freud?

(1856-1939) Austrian psychoanalyst. He developed the psychoanalytic theory and introduced the psychoanalytic treatment of the mentally ill to the world. He was born on 6 May 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia (today Prvibor in Czechoslovakia) and died on 23 September 1939 in London. He was the son of a middle-class Jewish wool merchant. He settled in Vienna with his family in 1860. He began his medical studies at the University of Vienna in 1873. In 1876, in addition to his studies, he began working with Ernst Brücke at the Vienna Institute of Physiology. In this institute, where he continued his research for six years, he worked especially on the central nervous system and published his first articles on anatomy and physiology.

He completed his higher education as a medical doctor in 1881. A year later, due to financial difficulties, he left the Institute of Physiology and transferred to the Vienna General Hospital. After working in various departments of the hospital, he started doing research on brain anatomy and the nervous system in Theodor Meynert's Psychiatric Service and was appointed as the assistant of the hospital. During these years, he published his discoveries on the neuropathology of eel and crayfish. Also in this period, after his monograph revealing that cocaine can be used as an anesthetic was published, it received great attention, but a few years later, when it was found that cocaine was habit-forming, it was the target of harsh criticism.

He became an associate professor of neuropathology in 1885. Between 1885 and 1886, he worked with the famous neurologist Charcot at the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris. He learned the technique of hypnosis from him and was impressed by his view that emphasized the role of sexuality in hysteria. Between 1886 and 1893 he conducted Studies on neurology, especially cerebral palsy in children, at the Kassowitz Institute in Vienna. On the other hand, he started to apply the hypnosis technique he learned from Charcot to his patients. However, when he couldn't get the results he wanted, he became interested in what Josef Breuer, a Viennese medical doctor used at the time, called "chimney cleaning", technically called abreaction, which aims to heal the patient through speech. Two scientists applied speech therapy to hysterics, with positive results. Differences of opinion soon emerged between them, as Freud argued that sexual conflicts were the main problem in hysteria.

After leaving Breuer, Freud continued his work alone. He developed the free association technique based on the view that Breuer's method of emotional release and Charcot's hypnosis provide only temporary relief. Thus, he saw the role that sexuality plays in human life and the power of the unconscious.

Freud's Die Traumdeutung (Dreams and Interpretations), published in 1900, is his most important book in which he reveals the basic principles of psychoanalytic theory. After that, his fame increased with the articles he published one after the other, and young doctors from many countries began to gather around him. He became a professor in 1902. In the same year, he launched the famous "Wednesday Meetings" with the participation of Alfred Adler, Max Kahane, Rudolf Reitler, and Wilhelm Stekel. The number of those who regularly attended these meetings, where discussions on psychoanalysis were held, increased. Famous psychoanalysts of the future such as British Ernst Jones, Swiss Carl Jung, US Brill, Hungarian Sandor Ferenczi, and German Karl Abraham were among the new participants. This group, which reached 22 people in 1908, founded the Vienna Psychoanalysis Institute. In 1909, Freud was invited to Clark University in the USA with Carl Jung and gave a series of lectures. In 1910, the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute became the International Psychoanalytic Association. But soon there were disagreements and splits among psychoanalysts. Alfred Adler pioneered the school of individual psychology, and Carl Jung was the forerunner of the analytical psychology school.

After the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, Freud's books were burned in Berlin. After the German armies invaded Austria in 1938, Freud had to leave his country and went to London with his family. His two sons' participation in the war, the massacre of the Jews, and his own Jewishness influenced the ideas he developed after that. After he died of jaw cancer, his daughter Anna added innovations to his views and became one of the pioneers of ego psychologists.

The psychoanalytic view, the seeds of which were planted in 1886, went through many different stages until 1939. Freud developed his theory in the light of new observations and information based on clinical experiments on psychopathology, and later criticized the thesis he defended in his previous article.

Freud divides the psychic structure of man into three with a structural view: id, ego (I), and superego (superego). The id is the repository of instincts, in other words, the source of human life. The reason why the unconscious is kept under strict control through censorship and is not conscious is the id. The instinctive trait does not disappear with development or education, it is asocial, that is, it is unaware of a society outside of itself. For this reason, things like laws, rules, shame, and prohibitions are out of the question for the id. The id, which cannot wait, seeks instant gratification, must be kept in check, that is, rendered unconscious.

Freud calls the ego the structure that controls the id and renders it unconscious. Some of the tools of the ego, which is the most important structure of the personality, are innate in an undeveloped form, while others are acquired through development. The former is called the innate primary means of the ego, and the latter is called the secondary instrument. For example, making sounds, and speaking are primary tools, and defense mechanisms and ways of adaptation are secondary tools. The ego, which is undifferentiated at birth, develops over time and takes on some important duties in the execution of the personality. The ego perceives the outer and inner worlds and evaluates the facts. Evaluation of reality determines one's mental health level in one respect.

The third structure of the spiritual world is the superego, which does not exist at birth but develops gradually through social relations and is well formed at the age of five. The superego contains the prohibitions of society. It is the superego that tells what is right, what is wrong, what can be done, and what cannot. Like the id, much of the superego is unconscious and therefore irrational, harsh, and harsh. The conscious part of the superego is called the conscience.

One of the duties of the ego is to reconcile the non-social demands of the id with the irrational rules of the superego, to provide unity in the personality, and to maintain this unity. The ego that achieves this is healthy, the one that fails is in conflict with the id. In this conflict, the superego takes the side of either the ego or the id. The anxiety caused by the conflict forces the ego to resort to a number of defenses, which Freud called repression or censorship. The ego may deny internal or external stimuli that may cause anxiety, suppress an emotion such as love, and show anger.

The most complex, but fundamental, concepts of the psychoanalytic theory are the pleasure principle and the true principle, which are handled with a dynamic view. The id adopts the pleasure principle and seeks immediate gratification. The ego, which has adopted the principle of truth, prefers to think and seek the most appropriate way of satisfaction rather than taking immediate action and incurring great harm. In other words, the truth principle ultimately serves the pleasure principle. This hedonistic approach, emphasized in psychoanalytic theory, also caused Freud to be harshly criticized.

The method used by the ego, whose task is to reconcile the demands of the id with the rules of the superego, to harmonize the pleasure principle with the reality principle, is explained by the "spiritual economy" view of psychoanalytic theory. According to Freud, Man is a mass of energy. Like bodily movements, mental processes are formed by energy distributions. The source of spiritual energy is instincts, that is, the id. Spiritual energy at birth is purely instinctive, so it is slippery, pervasive, slippery, and unbridled. With development, this slippery mass that flows stray begins to decompose, become attached to certain mental and bodily functions, lose its instinctive qualities, and become neutral.

The psychoanalytic view developed by Freud is one of the most discussed topics of the 20th century. The concepts and mechanisms he proposes have been the subject of intense research at the scientific level, and some supporting findings have been revealed, but the validity of almost none of them has been conclusively proven.

Freud's views led to debates in a wide area ranging from a Cartesian understanding of man to Marxism at the philosophical and political level, in which criticism gained weight. Despite the criticisms directed at his views, Freud's anthropology, education, etc. It has had an impact on science, literature, religion, and almost every aspect of life. In the field of psychiatry, Wilhelm Reich, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, Melanie Klein, David Leing, etc. They followed Freud and developed the psychoanalytic view by adding innovations to their views.