Sigmund Freud: The Psychoathology Of Everyday Life

Sigmund Freud is one of the most influential people of the twentieth century for exploring the human mind more thoroughly than anyone before his time. His contributions have become embedded within the vocabulary of western society not only influencing psychology, as well as literature, art, and the parenting mechanisms of everyday people. He is the founding father of psychoanalysis which is often known as the talking cure, a method for treating mental illness and a theory which is intended to explain human behavior. He articulated and refined the concepts of the unconscious, infantile sexuality and repression, and he proposed a theory of the minds structure. Freud’s innovative treatment of human actions, dreams, and cultural artifacts has had

Freud then went on to work alone to expand the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. In 1900, he published The Interpretation of Dreams, after spending a period of time analyzing himself to a deeper degree. The book Freud argues “that the dream interpreter becomes aware of the existence of a (universal) symbol when the dreamer is unable to provide associations for a particular dream element. (Freud 24) This was followed by The Psychopathology of Everyday Life published in 1901; and by the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality published in 1905. In the beginning Freud’s psychoanalytic theory was initially not well received because people did not favor his emphasis on sexuality. In fact it was not until 1908, when the first International Psychoanalytical Congress was held at Salzburg that Freud’s importance began to be generally recognized. Such recognition led Freud to begin lecturing in the United States where he began to formulate new ideas and concepts that he further analyzed in his book Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis published in