Everyone loves a bit of Freud

After the Continental and Anglophone philosophers had drifted apart the analytic tradition had started to dominate in English speaking countries. The most influential continental thinker on Anglo-American philosophy was Sigmund Freud. Freud didn't see him self as a philosopher more as a Scientist. Freud was born into an Austrian family in 1856 he trained as a doctor in the University of Vienna were he specialised in Brain Autonomy but became fascinated by neurology. In 1895 he published work on mental illness, Freud was originally a fan of hypnosis but later went onto develop a new form of therapy which he called psychoanalysis which he stated consisted of nothing more than a conversation between Patient and doctor. Freud felt that the hysterical symptoms of his patients were forged by a trauma that had been repressed and that by provoking them into remembering and discussing they could be helped. Being Freud he believed most of these traumas to have been caused by sexual encounters in the patients youth.

In 1900 Freud published his most important work 'The interpretation of dreams' which he believed let people express their repressed sexual desires. He made many adaptations to his original theory and book over the next few years slightly tweaking the theories. In 1923 he published a new work the ego and the id in which he described his thoughts on the unconscious mind. Freud was forced to flee to England after the Nazi's banned psychoanalysis and after 16 years of suffering from jaw cancer he was euthanised by his physician in 1939.

Freud summed up his psychoanalytic theses in a set of lectures between 1915 and 1917. These were that the greater part of our mental life was unconcious and secondly that sexual impulses were vital in maintaining a healthy mental state. He believed that if one suppresses these emotions due to them be deemed unacceptable by society they could later surface in the form of a mental illness. Freud believed the unconscious is manifested in three ways ; trivial mistakes, reports of dreams and symptoms of neurosis. He felt that his psychoanalytic approach could reveal patterns in a persons unconcious. From this development Freud developed the Oedipus complex. In Freud's opinion the most important stage in development to help understand a persons unconscious is to look into their sexual development. According to Freud infantile sexuality starts with an oral fixation followed by an anal stage between the ages 1-3 and then the phallic stage in which a person is fascinated by their genitals. This is when the oedipus complex kicks in as a male child becomes aroused by his mother and therefore resents his father, however the boy fears his father will castrate him so drops the feelings for his mother and begins to identify with his father. His female equivalent to Oedipus was never fully worked out.

His later work was more focused on his theories the ego and the Id. In its most simplest form the ego is the level headed part of someones soul. The Id represents the devil we see appear on someones shoulder in cartoons the part of our psyche that wants to act on impulse and fulfil our desires. The superego is the angel and basically the conscience that tries to cancel out the ID. Freud believed that as long as there was a healthy balance people would be less likely to display neurotic symptoms.