Personality Theorist Paper

Running head: PERSONALITY THEORIST PAPER

Personality Theorist Paper вЂ" Sigmund Freud

Oct 14, 2007

Personality Theorist Paper

This paper will examine Sigmund Freud and will delve into his Psychoanalytic Theories This paper will discuss Sigmund Freud’s school of thought, his contributions to the field of personality psychology and will further discuss occurrences in Sigmund Freud’s lifetime that may have influenced his perspectives.

School of thought

Sigmund Freud is well known for his Psychoanalytic school of thought. “This school of thought emphasized the influence of the unconscious mind on behavior. Freud believed that the human mind was composed of three elements: the id, the ego, and the superego” (Van Wagner, 2007, p. 1).

While now common to assume that Freud was alone with this school of thought, this is untrue, “In the latter part of the nineteenth century many men reared in Vienna or other leading European cities were trained in medicine and steeped in the tradition of physiological psychology, but Freud alone went on to practice neurology, then to use hypnotherapy with hysterics, and finally to invent psychoanalysis” (Hunt, 1993, p. 175).

Freud’s school of thought is based upon conflicts during childhood, with specific conflicts to overcome at each stage of psychosexual development and solving the conflict between the id, ego, and superego. The principals of his theories included pleasure principle and the Death Principle and the notion that all behavior is goal-directed.

Individual’s contributions to the field of psychology of personality

Freud is one of the best known psychologists of his day. Terms such as repression, self, the later theory (id, ego, superego), the Oedipus complex, neurosis and psychosis, transference and the unconscious to name a few, are attributed to his studies and work in psychology.

Occurrences during Freud’s lifetime that influenced perspectives

Freud was born in a small town and raised amongst siblings; however, he held a place of importance in his family unit. “At Freud’s birth, a peasant woman had prophesied to his mother that he would become a great man, and his parent often told him the story during his boyhood.” (Hunt, 1993, p. 170) During his schooling in a small school and in a small town, Freud read an essay by Goethe on Nature and decided to spend his life in science. “Law and medicine were the two professions then open to Jews, and in his final year of high school he decided to spend his life in science.

Sigmund Freud's father, Jacob, was a Jewish merchant of limited means, and a former widower. And his mother, Amalia, was Jacob’s second wife. She was at least 20 years younger than her husband and was in fact, close in age to Freud’s two stepbrothers -- part of Jacob's numerous offspring from a previous marriage. Amalia also bore several children, eight including her first born and favorite, Sigmund. He distinguished himself with intellectual brilliance from an early age, routinely excelled in school and was aided by his parents in pursuing every educational advantage that they could afford. He was overall, their most favored child. Nonetheless, Freud recalls being extremely sensitive to any outburst of criticism from his father, however rare, and to any other act of his father’s that impugned young Sigmund’s sense of worth (for example, refusing to answer back to anti-Semitic remarks when the two were together) (NNDB - Soylent Communications, 2007, p. 1).

Freud went on to be influenced by his affiliation with Ernst Brucke, “Freud was impressed by Brucke’s presentations and was charmed by his warm and fatherly demeanor. Brucke, nearly 40 years older than Freud, as was Freud’s own father, took a personal interest in his brilliant young student and became both scientific mentor and father figure to him” (Hunt, p. 170).

“Freud took his first small step toward the invention of psychoanalysis in response to a demand made by one of his patients he met through Josef Bruer, “she was, Baroness Fanny Moser, a forty-year-old widow” (Hunt, 1993, p. 175). Freud was largely influenced by his earliest psychological patients and moved into the field of Hypnotherapist when he met a young woman suffering from hysteria. “Known to history by the case-study pseudonym Anna O.,” (Hunt, p. 172). Anna O. influenced Freud’s work in hypnotherapy greatly.

Freud was also influenced by his families standing financially. “..Eventually there were seven children which made for many hard years” (Hunt, 1993, p. 169). Freud thus had reason for his lifelong anxiety about money. His status as a Jewish man was also of influential when his father threw off the Orthodox faith of his forebears and became a freethinker. Freud once told a Protestant friend the he felt himself “a totally Godless Jew” (Hunt, 1993, p. 169). One of his other famous patients was Hans. “...a four-year-old child who had developed an irrational fear of going outdoors because horses might be there and he had become terrified of them although he had never been hurt by one. Freud created a theory that used the concept of the unconscious and the child's unacceptable sexual and aggressive wishes to explain how a fear like that could have developed.” (Mischel, Shoda, & Smith, 2004, p. 1)

Freud also had a longstanding long distance relationship with Martha Bernays who later became his wife. His desire to support her in marriage was cause for him to take “the most feasible way for him to support a wife was to enter private practice, but he needed clinical experience and training in a specialty he could