In existographies, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) (IQ:185|#75) [RGM:75|1,500+] (Murray 4000:18|M) (Gottlieb 1000:15) (Becker 139:119) (Stokes 100:66) (Bloom 100:19) (Scott 50:11) [HD:51] (FA:122) (GA:13) (RMS:75) (GPhE:32) (GSE:#) [CR:297] was an Austrian psychiatrist noted for his 1895 "A Project for Scientific Psychology", the 1896 coining of the term "psychoanalysis", the scientific analysis of the mind, the view that mental processes operate owing to the movement of particles in the mind governed by chemistry and energy (chemical thermodynamics, in the modern terms), albeit described verbally. This general subject later came to be known as known as psychodynamics, energy psychology, Freud's psychical energy model, dynamic psychology, among others.See main: Freudian atheismFreud privately admitted remote intellectual connections with Immanuel Kant, Voltaire, and Ludwig Feuerbach; he also acknowledged that Arthur Schopenhauer's "will" (see: Schopenhauerian will) was the same as his "unconscious desire". [8]
“Neither in my private life nor in my writings have I ever made a secret of being an out-and-out unbeliever.”— Sigmund Freud (c.1920), “Letter to Charles Singer” (Ѻ)
“Have you learned nothing from history? Recall how short lived and miserably ineffectual the experience of the French revolution and Robespierre was. Furthermore, the same experiment is being repeated in Russia at the present time, and we need not feel curious as to its outcome. Isn’t it obvious people need religion?”— Demopheles (1927), the ‘people’ character
“The idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase.”— Reality (1927), the ‘Freud’ character
See main: Freud-Schiller drive theory; Sex DriveIn 1930, Freud, in his Civilization and its Discontents, stated that the starting point for his famous 1895 conceived free energy and bound energy connected 1910 "drive theory" basis for his libido energy (id, ego, superego) model of the "theory of instincts" of psychoanalysis from the final line of Schiller's 1795 poem, which according to the 1961 translation by James Strachey, Freud quotes as follows:
“Hunger and love are what moves the world.”— Friedrich Schiller (1795), Quoted by Freud in Civilization and its Discontents (1930) (Ѻ), as basis if his drive theory (Ѻ)
“It is as if Freud’s key scientific references seem to cull their major hypotheses from Goethe’s Elective Affinities (1809), which, along with Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Plato, would have also served as the literary and philosophical source of inspiration for the metaphysical theses in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.”
See main: Death driveFreud is said to have derived his “death instinct” theory, as described in his 1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, from a combination of thermodynamics and chemistry, i.e. that combination and dissolution of elements into aggregate substances are balancing processes. In his own words: [3]
“Starting from speculations on the beginning of life and from biological parallels, I drew the conclusion that, besides the instinct to preserve living substance and to join into ever larger units, there must exist another, contrary instinct to seek to dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primeval, inorganic state. That is to say, as well as Eros there was an instinct of death. The phenomena of life could be explained from the concurrent or mutually opposing action of these two instincts.”
See main: Helmholtz school; PsychodynamicsThe origin of Freud's mental dynamic theories came from his interactions at medical school. Freud started medical school in 1873 at the University of Vienna. His first-year adviser was German physiologist Ernst Brücke, director of the director of the Physiology Laboratory at the University, close friend and previous medical school lab partner to none other than German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz one of main founders of thermodynamics and one of the three-main formulators of the first law of thermodynamics (conservation of energy). Over the next six years, initially concentrating on biology, Freud did research under Brücke.
| ||
| A circa 1880 photo of Martha Bernays, whom Freud married in 1886, fathering six children with (Ѻ). | ||
“I feel that I have done for human ‘reason’, what Copernicus did for the ‘universe’, and Darwin did for our ‘origins’.”— Sigmund Freud (c.1930) [8]
“Religion is a neurosis of mankind. Its grandiose powers [are but the result of] a neurotic obsession in individuals.”— Sigmund Freud (1939), Moses and Monotheism (pg. 68)
