freud sigmund civilization and its discontents

Early life and trainingįreud’s father, Jakob, was a Jewish wool merchant who had been married once before he wed the boy’s mother, Amalie Nathansohn. If, as the American sociologist Philip Rieff once contended, “psychological man” replaced such earlier notions as political, religious, or economic man as the 20th century’s dominant self-image, it is in no small measure due to the power of Freud’s vision and the seeming inexhaustibility of the intellectual legacy he left behind. Despite repeated criticisms, attempted refutations, and qualifications of Freud’s work, its spell remained powerful well after his death and in fields far removed from psychology as it is narrowly defined.

His creation of psychoanalysis was at once a theory of the human psyche, a therapy for the relief of its ills, and an optic for the interpretation of culture and society. (Read Sigmund Freud’s 1926 Britannica essay on psychoanalysis.)įreud may justly be called the most influential intellectual legislator of his age. Sigmund Freud, (born May 6, 1856, Freiberg, Moravia, Austrian Empire -died September 23, 1939, London, England), Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis.

SpaceNext50 Britannica presents SpaceNext50, From the race to the Moon to space stewardship, we explore a wide range of subjects that feed our curiosity about space!įreud is famous for inventing and developing the technique of psychoanalysis for articulating the psychoanalytic theory of motivation, mental illness, and the structure of the subconscious and for influencing scientific and popular conceptions of human nature by positing that both normal and abnormal thought and behaviour are guided by irrational and largely hidden forces.

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Freud sigmund civilization and its discontents