The Freudian Revolution
...al illnesses. One of his favorite methods was psychoanalysis, which consists of dream analysis and free association. Psychoanalysis releases repressed desires that are the cause of our emotional distress. Freud’s most famous belief is that all human drives are somehow affected by sex. He believed that most psychological disorders were due to sexual traumas from childhood. The child has an unconscious attachment to the parent opposite of their gender and jealousy, also being unconscious, towards their parent of the same sex. The phenomenon is referred to “Oedipus Complex”. Freud was not warmly welcomed with this revolutionary belief. People were very uneasy with the idea that the lives of human beings are being formed by age five. As we all know, Freud would eventually be accepted and most of his theories became true. Freud always favored his research of dream analysis, as shown in his “The Interpretation of Dreams” published in 1900. In the book, Freud argues for the scientific uses of dream analysis. “The Sexual Life of Human Beings” is one of his most controversial lectures. He gave it to a group of medical students at the University that he graduated from. The lecture examined the psychological roots of sadism, homosexuality, fetishism, and voyeurism. These subjects were to never be talked about out loud in that time. He believed that most psychological behavior was dictated through three major components: the ego, id, and superego. The ego manages our thought processes and controls our id to fit what we need and can get in the world. The id is all our basic needs, from eating to sexual desires. The superego is also known as our conscience, where it monitors what we do and tells us if we are being “good or bad”. Of course ...