Dr. Sigmund Freud

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that most people know Dr. Sigmund Freud as the ?father of psychiatry? and associate him with the famous ?Oedipus Complex?, but very few know that, before making his discoveries about the workings of the human mind and personality, he was a physical scientist, who first used cocaine as an anesthetic during eye surgery. The author points out that Freud, believing one?s gender played a very large role in the development of one?s personality and mind, was the first physician to treat mentally and emotionally disturbed patients humanely. The paper states that, although Freud?s methodology seems to have gone out of style, Freud?s granddaughter, also a psychiatrist, believes that the core of Freud's thinking reflects, in many ways, pioneering postmodern insights compatible with current cognitive and constructivist ideas and neurophysiological brain research.

Table of Contents
Early Life
From Fear to Modernity
Same Stuff, Different Day
A Man for our Times?
Time?s Up

From the Paper:

"There were other components to his belief system, of course, often connected to boys' fears concerning their private parts. Girls were supposed to envy their brothers and fathers, something Freud connected to their differing gender-specific physical equipment, but which "looking back at how badly society in Victorian times oppressed women" might well have been a rational reaction on the part of those girls and women. They saw that they could not achieve what men did. Freud attributed that to anatomy; these days, we would attribute it to the expectations of society."

More papers on Dr. Sigmund Freud:

• Essay # 66115 : "Freud and Nietzsche, A Construction of Self"
• Book Review # 118374 : "Freud, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"
• Term Paper # 4544 : "Biography: Carl Gustav Jung"

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