Sigmund Freud
If there is a single name in all psychology that is synonymous with personality theory, it is Sigmund Freud. Born on the Continent in 1856, he spent his early years as a member of a tightly knit family in Central Europe. Reportedly, his youth was marked by serious personality problems, including severe bouts with depression and anxiety states. These difficulties apparently started him on a journey of discovery aimed at understanding the roots of personality and gaining insight into the relationship between personality structure and actual behavior. It was to be a long and productive professional journey, beginning with his graduation from medical school at the University of Vienna in 1881. His career extended all the way to the beginning of World War Ⅱ in 1939.
After completing his medical studies, he became increasingly interested in diseases of the nervous system. Instead of continuing to look for physical and physiological reasons, he shifted his attention toward a new arena, the mind. If diseases such as hysteria, high-anxiety states, and deep personal depression were not connected to a physical cause, then the usual types of medical treatment, from actual operations on nerves to prescriptions for drugs, were bound to fail. Such activities were merely treating symptoms. Often, after these treatments, patients simply developed a new set of symptoms. As a result of these ideas, Freud decided to study with Joserf Breuer, a physician famous for his treatment of hysteria through hypnosis. Freud found that inducing hypnotic trances was somewhat limited as a treatment of choice. Some patients could not be successfully hypnotized and others simply shifted symptoms.
Freud began to experiment with unique treatment methods, primarily asking patients to free-associate and to report on their dreams. In some ways this appeared an outrageous procedure for a physician to use. Imagine Freud asking a patient to stretch out on his soon-to-be-famous couch, then suggesting that he or she say whatever came to mind. (The first rule of psychoanalysis was to speak out and not repress any hidden thoughts). All the while Freud himself was sitting behind the couch quietly jotting down notes, rarely speaking. Such a procedure seemed the work of a mad genius at best or of a charlatan at worst. Not only did Freud break with the traditions of his time completely, but he even went so far as to carry on psychoanalytically oriented treatment via the mail to the father of a child patient. In the famous case of little Hans, he successfully treated a young boy by writing to the father and explaining step-by-step how to cure the patient of a severe case of horse phobia. Since horses provided most transportation in those days, Hans’ malady can be compared to a child who today would run and hide at the sight of an automobile.
Always an innovator, Freud continued to evolve creative treatment techniques throughout his life; however, his major contribution was his insight into the causes of behavior. Through hours of quiet listening to patients’ free associations and dreams, he began to construct a theory of personality. He heard the same themes repeated over and over again and in time created his theory of infant sexuality. Adult patients were helped to gradually recall early feelings, thoughts, and sexual fantasies from their childhood. To suggest to the world that innocent little children had such sexual feelings was almost too much for the Victorian age to accept. Nevertheless, despite the enormous criticism generated and the departure of some of his closest associates, Freud continued to expand on the importance of sexuality as a determinant of personality during the early years of life. His three-part typology of the mind—the id, the ego, and the superego—combined with his three layers of conscious, preconscious, and unconscious led to his famous dictum that all human behavior was over determined. His clinical approaches demonstrated that our present behavior is related to a whole series of causes. The task of the psychologist is to uncover great amounts of psychic material and then gradually help the patient understand how many of the factors from the past had been regulating his or her present behavior. In fact, Freud said that the psychologist is like an archaeologist-carefully and systematically digging through the past in order to slowly uncover the intrapsychic traumas of a person of early history. Here he found the structure of the past influencing present behavior; here was the repository of events, feelings, disconnected ideas, fantasies rooted in the unconscious.
The unconscious, according to Freud, is the key to human behavior. Even though individuals may try to suppress or repress inner thoughts and feelings and push them into the unconscious, the repressed material sneaks out in disguised form. Slips of the tongue, unfortunate accidents, forgetting important events, getting names of familiar people mixed up, and similar people mixed up, and similar unusual human behavior are not just incidental activities or randomly determined. He was able to show how such events are instead a direct expression of an individual’s unconscious motivation. For example, a guilt-ridden criminal might "accidentally" leave a trail a mile wide from the scene of a crime in order to bring about his own punishment. Other examples abound in everyday life.
The insights of Freud changed our level of understanding in dramatic ways. It has been said that the greatest contribution was to end, once and for all, the age of innocence. Also, some have remarked that it would have been impossible to understand the horrors of the twentieth century without his theories of why and how people react. These theories demonstrated the importance of both sexual and aggressive human drives. The adverse interpersonal relationships so common in this age are current reminders of this insight. The desolation created by two major world wars, the total annihilation of innocent populations, the use of ultimate weapons from A-bombs to gas chambers—these products of a so-called advanced civilization can be better understood through his views. It is to be hoped that his insights will teach the world the importance of recognizing and gradually developing control over these destructive human drives. Ironically, he spent many of his last years as a captive of the most demonic human being of this century in Nazi Germany. His final year of life was spent in England in 1939. He watched the world he knew collapse once again in a paroxysm of hatred, tragic testimony to his deepest fears for humanity.
According to the passage, Freud’s childhood’s severe bouts had actually paved the way for ______.
A. his final discovery of personality
B. his becoming a pychologist
C. the birth of personality theory
D. the relationship between personality structure and actual behavior
