Shades of Freud

To me, Freud has always been an interesting, if somewhat eccentric and ahead-of-his-time individual.  He challenged all kinds of the established views of life, dreams, sex, and human development; often he put forth ideas that his contemporaries had never even considered before.      

Although discussing sex and sexuality in class is something that will probably never be a comfortable topic for anyone, I really have to admit that Freud introduced some very interesting ideas for people to discuss and ponder.  His claim that all psychic disorders can be blamed on repressed sexual urges is fascinating, to say the least.  I also find it interesting that a scientist of his caliber would discuss certain aspects of sexuality, such as sadism and machos; these topics are, as the book writes, often considered taboo subjects that most people would never consider discussing in polite society.

Freud chose to discuss topics that for most people cause a lot of embarrassment if it ever comes out that they are influenced by these issues or tendencies.  The fact that Freud choose to openly discuss them and to do research into them helped immensely to bring them from the pits of “pretend they do not exist” to “just hide them behind the door.”  

But more than his research in to the stems of psychic disorders, he made great strides into the somewhat esoteric field of dream meanings, something that even more than seventy years after his death, we still cannot understand, and thus relegate dream interpretation to psychic hotlines and charlatans.  He chose to assign the meaning of dreams to the expression of the three parts of the mind: 1) the id, as the place where human instincts reside 2) the ego, the portion that provides the id with the ability to act on those instincts and 3) the conscience, the portion of the psyche that determines the morality of the desires of the id and the method of expression chosen by the ego.

Freud, with his revolutionary theories and radical ideas, made himself a permanent fixture in the search to understand the human psyche, what makes humans tick.  I’d like to leave you with a few words from Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents:

                       

The hermit turns his back on the world and will have no truck with it.  But one can do more than that; one can try to re-create the world, to build up in its stead another world in which its most unbearable features have been eliminated and are replaced by others that are in conformity with one’s own.