Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, specialized in the treatment of neurotic disorders. He believed that earlier traumas harbored bad thoughts in one’s subconscious, and only by bringing those past thoughts to the surface, could one free him or herself from emotional trauma. Freud also specialized in the role that dreams played in a person’s consciousness. These are some of the points from his works.
· The term unconscious designates ideas with a certain dynamic character, ideas keeping apart from consciousness in spite of their intensity and activity.
· When a patient prepares to perform a task under hypnosis, he or she will still perform the task when awakened, although having no memory of how or why he or she did it
· What they have appeared to have lost the memory of during hypnosis, can actually be brought up to the surface if a certain force commands them to remember how they created the thought.
o For instance, a psychiatrist demanding that the patient knows more although the patient believes he has told all that he remembers
· The force that was maintaining the pathological condition became apparent in the form of resistance on the part of the patient.
· Freud gave the name “repression” to this whole hypothetical process and considered that it was proved by the undeniable existence of resistance
· Traumatic memories that have been repressed in the subconscious, yet cause depression and other mental instabilities, can be brought to the surface through this process, thereby helping the patient cope with the trauma
· Secondly, Freud disputed the earlier theories that applauded the general goodness of man. He believed that man had a natural aggression towards his fellow men, “Homo homini lupus”, and that man was competitive for whatever reason that drove their existence (i.e. sexual partners, private property)
o In this way Freud disagreed with the views of communists, who believed that private property had corrupted man
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