The Life Of Sigmund Freud, Part One

Freud is now such a part of all of our lives, but perhaps in not the way that old Siggy himself would have liked. Everyone is savvy with the term Freudian, we all know that the dude paved the way into analysing our dreams and psychoanalysis remains with us, albeit in a much more limited way. For Freud, his theories were science more akin to biology than psychology. However, his theories were not drawn up nor developed in a scientific manner, being intensely metaphorical and far from entirely verifiable. Wittgenstein dismissed psychoanalysis as mere speculation rather than theory but there can be no doubting Freud was a great thinker, an immense heavyweight in the development of the human mind and our awareness of ourselves. He admitted himself in later life that his theories were exploratory, that perhaps he was more of a conceptualist than he would have readily admitted before. Indeed, Freud is open to countless interpretations and perhaps that's what maintains his ascendant position in our modern consciousness. Like a great dramatist, study of his work constantly opens up new avenues, he can be read over and over ad finitum and fresh insights will always be garnered. Indeed, like a novelist, Freud looked to his own life first, appropriating the parts that he thought could contribute insights on a universal level. But instead of concentrating on his real life experiences, he looked to his dreams, prevalent in them were the themes of an underlying hostility he felt towards his father and an incestuous, forbidden lust that he held for his mother when he was a child. Link this to an ancient Greek myth and abracadabra you have a theory which will capture the world's dirty imagination forever.

When Freud revealed his theory or his method or his drama, it was immediately seized upon and a circle of supporters began to form around Sigmund. But encouraging people that the solution of their inherent problems is in their dreams causes a massive problem, does it not? A snowball effect of gigantic proportions is set-off because everybody's dreams are of course different, so you are going to have to constantly develop theories to try to keep up with the sludge of dreams that are being explained. In addition, dreams are vague, fractured, objective and I for one can never remember them, not a jot of them, thus - problems, problems, problems...I mean just because Sigmund had these thoughts, it doesn't meant that everyone has them. Others may have even more disturbing dreams but unlike Freud they keep them hush-hush and don't get flung headlong down this exploratory avenue but then again Freud would admit that this is his very point, would he not? Freud though seems to have rushed his research, experimenting briefly and then proclaiming his revelations to the public, many times they came back to bite him in the ass, for example when he waxed lyrical about the merits of cocaine, prescribing it to friends and family before it's addictive and destructive elements were discovered. For this and other accusations (such as mis-diagnosing patients and fraudulently misrepresenting case histories) Freud gained many caustic critics of his work, they attacked his baffling concepts as singular and seriously subjective. Take his super-ego theory - the notion that all actions, reactions, treatments of others, views of the world can be shaved down to what the hell is bouncing around the super-ego - nothing whatsoever seems to matter about what is done to the individual, what befalls them, what direct real life experience occurs. Or am I just hesitant that all that befalls me are direct results of self-punishments that I am inflicting on myself, that anything bad is due to myself and not conspiring world forces?