Freud and Caligula
Freud and CaligulaSigmund Freud was born on May 6, 1856 in Freiberg (which is now Pribor, Czech Republic) . At the age of three, he and his family moved to Leipzig to get away from the Anti-Semitic riots that were raging at that time. Shortly thereafter, they moved into Vienna where he was educated. In 1886 he began his work by opening a private practice center for the treatment of hysteria. Then ten years later he started to use his term "psychoanalysis" to describe his theory of the mind, and his ideas of therapy. Freud first used "defense" as one of his psychoanalytic terms in 1894, and with this came the beginning to his various defense mechanisms. Both he and his daughter Anna contributed to the defense mechanisms that are used so widely in our society today.
According to Freud, the core of personality was made of the id, ego and superego. The id is based on the pleasure principal and required immediate gratification. It also enveloped the life and death instincts. The ego is based on the reality principal as it is rational and logical-where defense mechanisms come into play. The superego supercedes both the conscious and unconscious. It is the part of the mind containing the traditional values & taboos of society.
Psychosexual development had five stages: the oral stage is the time during which the infant is orally fixated; the anal stage is the time during which the child finds gratification through excrement; the phallic stage is the stage during which children begin to choose sexual preference with their parents. This is the stage of the Oedipus and Electra complexes for boys and girls respectively; latency is the period during which both sexes repress their Oedipal attachments and identify with their own sex; finally, the genital stage is characterized by a re-emergence of sexual instinct and sexual conflicts.
Primary defense mechanisms consist of techniques such as repression, and denial, while secondary defense mechanisms include projection, reaction formation, altruism, and isolation. There are numerous defense mechanisms with which people handle their pain. Repression is the act of burying a painful feeling or thought from one's awareness. For example, after a tragic death in the family one may try to forget about the funeral, and it eventually becomes completely forgotten. Denial is the second defense mechanism in which a person refuses to accept reality because it is too painful for them. A person might have a drinking problem, and even after getting in trouble for it, he/she refuses to believe their problem. Regression is considered an immature way of handling stress in that for the most part, it results in a person acting in a childish manner, i.e. stomping, pouting, or whining after an argument. Projection is when one attributes his own unacceptable feelings to someone or something else. This defense mechanism is commonly seen in families,...
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