Psychoanalyst---Sigmund Freud
There are no neutrals in the Freud wars.
Admiration, on one side; skepticism, on the other.
But on one thing the contending parties agree:
for good or ill, Sigmund Freud,
more than any other explorer of the psyche,
has shaped the mind of the 20th century.
The very fierceness and persistence of his detractors
are a tribute to the staying power of Freud's ideas.
There is nothing new about such confrontations;
they have dogged Freud's footsteps
since he developed the luster of theories
he would give the name of psychoanalysis.
His fundamental idea has struck many as a romantic,
scientifically improvable notion.
His contention that the catalog of neurotic ailments
to which humans are susceptible is nearly always
the work of sexual maladjustments,
and that erotic desire starts not in puberty but in infancy,
seemed to the respectable nothing less than obscene.
His dramatic evocation of a universal
Oedipus complex, in which the little boy
loves his mother and hates his father,
seems more like a literary conceit than a thesis
worthy of a scientifically minded psychologist.
The book that made his reputation in the profession¡ª
although it sold poorly¡ªwas ¡°The Interpretation of Dreams¡± (1900),
an indefinable masterpiece¡ªpart dream analysis,
part autobiography, part theory of the mind,
part history of contemporary Vienna.
The principle that underlay this work was that
mental experiences are part of nature.
The most nonsensical notion,
the most casual slip of the tongue,
the most fantastic dream, must have a meaning
and can be used to unriddle the often
incomprehensible maneuvers we call thinking.
In 1974, he published another book.
A glance at its chapter headings will
indicate some of the aspects of behaviour covered by the book:
Forgetting of proper names
Forgetting of foreign words
Childhood and concealing memories
Mistakes in speech
Mistakes in reading and writing
Broadly, Freud demonstrates that
there are good reasons for many of the slips
and errors that we make. We forget a name because,
unconsciously, we do not wish to remember that name.
We repress a childhood memory
because that memory is painful to us.
A slip of the tongue or of the pen betrays a wish
or a thought of which we are ashamed.
Freud was intent not merely on originating a sweeping theory
of mental functioning and malfunctioning,
he also wanted to develop the rules of psychoanalytic therapy.
As to the first, he created the largely silent listener
who encouraged the analysand to say
whatever came to mind, no matter how foolish,
repetitive or outrageous,
and who intervened occasionally to interpret
what the patient was struggling to say.
The efficacy of analysis remains a matter of controversy,
though the possibility of mixing psychoanalysis
and drug therapy is gaining support.