Freud: Curiosity-Driven Pioneer of the Human Mind - Essay Sample

Introduction

My impression of Freud is that he is an interesting person that likes to discover the creation of the human mind and its abilities. Viewers can be convinced that Freud was driven by curiosity to develop his theory of the interpretation of human mind. It is to mean that Freud has a range of beliefs about the events of childhood and the way they influence the adult life like shaping their personality. Freud is also a hardworking person because he spent most of his life time being dominated by his attempts to find ways to penetrate through the subtle of psychology and elaborate the process of personality for people to understand.

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I find it amazing how Freud tries to explain his theory strategically for people to understand. There are also many of his words that he developed that people use in the current days such as denial and repression. Freud definitely deserves the title of the father of psychology because of his work to introduce meaning to personality.

Freud's Idea of Psychoanalysis

Freud had the idea that making people gain insight such that they turn the unconscious thoughts to conscious could cure them. By use of psychoanalysis theory, one could release their repressed experiences and emotions hence the way to turn the unconscious to conscious. The idea of psychoanalysis for Freud is that one can understand the unconscious mind in order to treat anxiety disorders and depression.

During the therapy, Freud would tell the patient to relax on the couch as he took notes of what the patient told him about their memories. The process is quite lengthy and involves many sessions. Freud believed that one can transfer the unconscious thoughts and feelings to the conscious mind through forms of parapraxes. It is such that one can reveal what is on their mind by saying something that they do not mean to. Freud also believed that such slips of the tongue could be used to provide an insight to understand the unconscious mind as every behavior that the patient portrays is significant.

Freud's Meaning of Free Association

Freud claimed that free association was meant to make therapy complete by examining the thoughts of the patient. The practice of free association involved the therapist asking a person in therapy to share their thoughts, words and also other things that would come to mind. Such thoughts needed not be coherent but it would help a lot if they were authentic. The plan for free association is that it would be a method to explore the unconscious hence replacing hypnosis.

Free association was meant to give people complete freedom in examining their thoughts. Such freedom would be from the lack of prompting or intervention by a therapist. The technique was to help with issues in therapy such as projection, transference and resistance. In transference, the patient would be involved in the process of transferrin feelings to a different person, projection was when one would project their own qualities onto someone else while resistance was when one blocked certain memories. Freud's idea of free association is that it reveals associations and connection that would go uncovered yet they are important. This way, people in therapy may reveal their repressed emotions from these memories.

Freud's Theory of Dreams

Freud developed his theory of dreams where he believed that dreams were a representation of a disguised fulfilment for a repressed wish. Through studying dreams, it would be easy to understand the unconscious activities of the mind. Freud suggests that there are two parts of a dream which are, the latent content and the manifested content.

The manifested content refers to the dream that is remembered after one wakes while the latent content is the one that people do not remember and hence considered a part of the unconscious. The idea of Freud was that dream is a guardian of sleep. They allow a gratification of various drives through the visual fantasy. This way, dreams are considered to be main tools towards self-analysis as well as significant parts of treatment. Understanding and interpreting dreams was needed to explore the content of the brain through free association.

What I Have Learnt From Freud So Far

I have learnt that Freud developed theories that are good to explain to others but one cannot use them to predict behavior. One goal of science is to be able to predict the behavior of human beings when they are faced with different circumstances. I would say that the theory of Freud can neither be proved to be true or be refuted. The unconscious mind is something that we cannot measure objectively and hence difficult to test. However, it is true that there are unconscious processes in human mind as revealed through dreams. I believe that events and memories of childhood play a significant role in influencing the adult lives. Sigmund Freud's theories can be used to explain human behavior and treat mental illness as such therapies make it easy to understand humans.