Professor Sigmund Freud, the distinguished psychologist and originator of psychoanalysis, was born in Freiberg, Moravia, and educated at Vienna and Paris. He was of Jewish extraction and fled from Austria ╤ he was then eighty-two years of age ╤ on the Nazi invasion of the country, and had since found asylum in England.
Freud╒s attitude towards psychoanalysis cannot be understood until his two fundamental beliefs are appreciated. The first is that every event in the mind can be described and explained in mental terms; the other, loaded as it is with complex philosophical implications, can only be mentioned. It is that determinism applies as rigidly to the mind as to the body. For Freud the word chance had no meaning, except in the scientist╒s sense. In his view, the wildest dreams, the most obscure delusions, the most trivial forgetting or mislaying are as much a matter of cause and effect as an eclipse of the sun. Whatever the verdict upon Freud╒s contributions to science may be in another hundred years, it is certain that he will be known as the man who forced thinkers to take dreams seriously. For the blended flippancy and boredom which characterised the writers on dreams before 1900 Freud has substituted deadly earnestness.
He believed that the dream was the functional nervous disorder in miniature, that in it indirect satisfaction was obtained during sleep for mental trends which in waking life were unsatisfied or repressed. But the system of analysis or dissection of dreams which Freud created must be carefully distinguished (and it seldom is) from the interpretation of dreams which he proposed. If a complicated piece of machinery were discovered in a new country it might be possible for several engineers to agree perfectly concerning its constituent parts while dissenting violently from each other as to its probable function. So it is with the dream. By reminding us that so-called free association is not free at all but is ruled by laws, however numerous and complicated they may be and however little we may know about them, Freud again contributed to knowledge.
For Freud the dominant factor in human life was the sex instinct. It is true that he meant by the word sexuality very much more than the narrow meaning often put upon it. But in fairness it should be recorded that he probably meant something much more related to our popular conception of it than some of his apologists would have us believe.
His belief that the dominant factor in the psychoneuroses was some disturbance of the love-life was put to a vast test on the outbreak of the Great War. Many who did not accept, or even violently opposed, some of his fundamental theories regarded his conception of repression as one of first-rate importance. In fact, there are critics who think that if Freud had broadened the basis of his theory to include the repression of what might be called the danger instincts and the self-preservation instincts, it covers very well the neuroses of war.
