Freud 2
Freud 2Freud
Freud was born in Freiberg, on May 6, 1856, and educated at the University of Vienna. When he was three years old his family, fleeing from the anti-Semitic riots then raging in Freiberg, moved to Leipzig. Shortly thereafter, the family settled in Vienna, where Freud remained for most of his life. Although Freud's ambition from childhood had been a career in law, he decided to become a medical student shortly before he entered the University of Vienna in 1873. Inspired by the scientific investigations of the German poet Goethe, Freud was driven by an intense desire to study natural science and to solve some of the challenging problems confronting contemporary scientists. In his third year at the university Freud began research work on the central nervous system in the physiological laboratory under the direction of the German physician Ernst Wilhelm von Br�cke. Neurological research was so engrossing that Freud neglected the prescribed courses and as a result remained in medical school three years longer than was required normally to qualify as a physician. In 1881, after completing a year of compulsory military service, he received his medical degree. Unwilling to give up his experimental work, however, he remained at the university as a demonstrator in the physiological laboratory. In 1883, at Br�cke's urging, he reluctantly abandoned theoretical research to gain practical experience.
Freud spent three years at the General Hospital of Vienna, devoting himself successively to psychiatry, dermatology, and nervous diseases. In 1885, following his appointment as a lecturer in neuropathology at the University of Vienna, he left his post at the hospital. Later the same year he was awarded a government grant enabling him to spend 19 weeks in Paris as a student of the French neurologist Jean Charcot. Charcot, who was the director of the clinic at the mental hospital, the Salp�tri�re, was then treating nervous disorders by the use of hypnotic suggestion. Freud's studies under Charcot, which centered largely on hysteria, influenced him greatly in channeling his interests to psychopathology. In 1886 Freud established a private practice in Vienna specializing in nervous disease. He met with violent opposition from the Viennese medical profession because of his strong support of Charcot's unorthodox views on hysteria and hypnotherapy. The resentment he incurred was to delay any acceptance of his subsequent findings on the origin of neurosis. Freud's first published work, On Aphasia, appeared in 1891; it was a study of the neurological disorder in which the ability to pronounce words or to name common objects is lost as a result of organic brain disease. His final work in neurology, an article, “Infantile Cerebral Paralysis,” was written in 1897 for an encyclopedia only at the insistence of the editor, since by this time Freud was occupied largely with psychological rather than physiological explanations for mental disorders.
His subsequent writings were devoted entirely to that field, which he had...
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