Sunday, January 15, 2012

A Reaction to Freud's Five Lectures


            Freud is a Jewish, Austrian, neurologist who discovered the practice of psychoanalysis.  He is well known for his Oedipus Rex Complex and theory of infantile sexuality, which many people to this day do not support because of how farfetched it seems.  Freud also created a way to interpret dreams in a way that could get to the root of your subconscious since our subconscious is always trying to talk to us, according to Freud that is.
            Lecture one was mainly about a patient of his and Breuer’s.  This twenty-one year old woman was going through hysterics.  She had paralysis of the right side of her body and on occasion the left side of her body.  She also had a hard time speaking, eating and drinking.  She and Breuer worked through these problems through hypnosis.  Now the problem with hypnosis we find today is that we are all influenced by the media a lot more now than we were then so that is probably why the hypnosis worked this time.  When going through hypnosis they discovered many of the causes of her problems and they called these memories, reminiscences.  When they discovered these reminiscences they tried to talk about them and as they worked through each of these memories she started healing.  This just shows that our mind is the controller of practically everything in our body.
            Lecture two was all about repression.  Freud had worked with a woman who sat at her sister’s bedside while she died and after she had passed she had came to the conclusion that she could have to brother-in-law for herself.  She was so distraught about the thought that she made herself forget that she ever thought it and went into hysterics.  Freud was able to work this out of her by using hypnosis and the “talking-cure”.  It was difficult at first because of the resistance she was putting up, but in the end he was able to work through it.
            Lecture three was all about how Freud had dropped hypnosis as a practice and went straight to having his patients tell him the first thoughts that came to their minds and he would work through their problems via this avenue.  He also started doing dream interpretations since our dreams are partly our subconscious thoughts.  He found that it took longer to get to the root of the problems, but he could always tell just how deep he might have to go when new thoughts came up every visit.
            Lecture four was all about how his new theory explained our development and our repressed emotions and experiences.  This is also where he goes on to talk about infantile sexuality and how even at a young age we are sexual beings, but because we are raised to hide this sexuality we forget that we were originally sexually oriented and the thought of it now brings much disagreement and leads to people being uncomfortable.  He uses thumb sucking as an example.  This developed his Oedipus Rex Complex.
            Lecture five was basically about the uncertainties of psychoanalysis and his theories.  Freud noticed that some of this theories seems farfetched, but because of our uncertainties of the human mind these are only theories and possibilities if what really is going on in there.  He is of a strong opinion that he is correct in all of his theories since he has the patients and the experiences to support his theories, but to us his theories are just that, theories.
            As you can tell Freud was an intelligent man and really did not want to do this lecture, but did it anyways since he was asked personally to show up.  His main topic was to explain psychoanalysis and he did just that along with his theories and some of these experiences with this patients.  We can only hope that people learned from his lecture and did not just shut down because of his infantile sexuality idea.

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