Status Updates From Knowledge in a Nutshell: Si...

• According to Masson, Freud's attachment to patriarchal thinking was so strong that he was prepared to say that children were mistaken in their accounts of being sexually abused in order to have his theory accepted. These criticisms and others resulted in the 'Freud Wars' of the 1980s and '90s. Today these controversies are still un-resolved, with battle lines firmly entrenched and positions staunchly defended.

• The feminist critiques of psychoanalysis are, in effect, also critiques of the scientific status of psychoanalysis since they argue that Freud, with his discovery of the Oedipus complex and his difficulty of conceptualizing the psychosexual development of females, was simply repeating in his theorizing the patriarchal social organization of the late 19th-century society to which he belonged.

• Hans Eysenck's work on evaluating the effectiveness of psychoanalysis has been influential, setting clinical psychology down a road which has been, on the whole, anti-psychoanalytic.

• Freud's critics such as Karl Popper and Ernest Geliner have argued that psychoanalysis is not a science and its pretentions to scientific status are ill founded.
• Other critics, including Adolt Grünbaum, have argued that psychoanalysis is a science but it is a science that is not supported on firm evidence and should be rejected.

• The theory of psychoanalysis was refined and elaborated by Freud, who was firmly in control of any conceptual developments and jealously guarded the central concepts of the Oedipus complex and infantile sexuality. Any deviation resulted in expulsion from the psychoanalysis societies.

• In a matter of 20 years, Freud became a world figure and his small circle of friends and colleagues developed into an institution with associations all over Europe and the United States.
• Psychoanalysis, which had been introduced in The Interpretation of Dreams, had become a recognized therapy delivered by trained professional practitioners.

• In the essays, he defined five phases of psychosexual development and the Oedipus complex, where the child loves the mother and feels jealousy and hostility towards the father.

• Freud argued that the first step to understanding psychosexual development is to recognize that the whole of the human body is capable of becoming sexually excited. He used the term libido' to refer to a specifically sexual energy that was linked to the instinct for reproduction.

• Freud presented Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in which he addressed sexual aber-rations, infantile sexuality, the body as a site for sexual excitation and the shift from sexual excitation from ones own autoerotic excitement to another person and adult sexuality.

Having distinguished repression, resistance and transference, Freud began to understand the structure of the psyche in terms of the id, ego and superego.

• The analyst must pay attention to everything the patient says, following the same fundamental rules that governed the patient's free association.
• Patients might apparently not want to be cured.
Their resistance might take the form of repres-sion, transference and countertransference.

Freud regarded the psyche as being made up of the unconscious, pre-conscious and conscious thoughts, with repression acting like a process of censorship.
• In Freud's method of free association, the patient was required to hold nothing back, no matter if it was unpleasant, trivial or apparently irrelevant.

• Ranging from the relatively simple (Little Hans) to the complex and convoluted (Wolf Man), the studies demonstrate the importance of infantile sexuality for understanding adult dysfunction and show how free association and dream analysis could be used to reveal unconscious infantile wishes.

Between 1905 and 1918, Freud wrote up four extended case studies on his patients and a fifth study based on the autobiography of a psychiatric patient.
• The case studies provide an insight into Freud's psychoanalytic practice and illustrate how he used his method to treat hysteria, obsessional neurosis, phobia and infantile neurosis.

• The Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1900, explaining the process of dream-work.
• Freud had shifted from a position of understanding neuroses as a problem of reminiscence to one of dealing with impulses and instincts.

In 1895, Freud embraced dream analysis and recognized dreams as the fulfilment of wishes.
• In 1897, he began his own self-analysis.
• In 1897, he repudiated his seduction theory in letters to Fliess. The following year, he began to write a book about dreams.

• Freud and Breuer published Studies in Hysteria
(1895), in which hysteria was understood as the defence against the return of traumatic memo-ries.
• In 1895, Freud tried to tie his clinical work to the underlying structure and organization of the nervous system.
• In 1898, Freud's association with Breuer ended after Freud presented the seduction theory of
neuroses.

Josef Breuer discovered the cathartic method when treating a young hysterical woman named
'Anna O' in 1883.
• In 1885, Freud visited the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris and learned about hysteria and hypnotism.
• In 1889, Freud visited Nancy in France to learn about hypnotic suggestion.
• In 1892, Freud treated Fräulein Elisabeth von R with Breuer's cathartic method.

• In 1876, he studied Darwinism and rejected philosophical thinking.
• Mentoring from Ernst Brücke, Josef Breuer and Wilhelm Fliess contributed to the development of Freud's concept of psychoanalysis.
• As an assistant to Theodor Hermann Meynert (1833-1892), Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna, Freud gained his first experience with psychiatry and mentally ill patients.

• A conference on Goethe's argument that the world should be understood not as a giant machine manipulated by God or the souls of humans but as a structured whole that needed to be seen as a system of dynamic relationships influenced Freud's thinking at the age of 17.
-In 1873 Freud enrolled as a medical student at the University of Vienna, where he remained for eight years before graduating.

Freud grew up in a large and happy family, the favourite child of his mother.
• A highly able student, he gained a strong background in the humanities, which was to influence his theories.

• Freud attended lectures by Bren-tano, who proposed that psychology was to be the scientific study of mental phenomena and that the methodology for investigating mental phenomena was introspection.
• When Freud started his medical training in the 1870s, the treatment of mentally ill people was turning from mere containment in asylums to a more humane approach of compassion and the search for alleviation.

• His students founded the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft (German Physical Society) and vowed to explain physiological phenomena only in terms of physics and chemistry; one of them, Ernst Brücke, was to become Freud's mentor.

The publication of Johannes Müller's Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen für Vorlesungen (Handbook of Physiology) provided a new understanding of the relationship between morphology and physiology for Freud's generation of medical researchers.
• Müller's concept of 'life energy' that left the body after death was rejected by his students as too closely resembling the religious concept of 'soul.

Why is Freud so obsessed with sexual stuff? in his dream-work he talks about a box representing a vagina and a cigar representing a penis WITH NO EXPLANATION AT ALL

WOW! I think it is exploring one of my original thoughts on reincarnation and if Descartes can argue properly for himself that would mean that I will get more points supporting my theory of reincarnation.