Sigmund Freud

1) http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/freud/ex/66.html

2) http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/freud/freud02.html

3) http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/freud/freud03a.html

4) http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/freud/freud03.html

5) http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/freud/freud01.html

6) http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/freud/freud03a.html

7) http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?pp/ils:@filreq(@field(NUMBER+@band(cph+3g04946))+@field(COLLID+cph))

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WIT AND ITS RELATION TO THE UNCONSCIOUS

View manuscript page with highlighted passage View title page - page 172 - page 173

Freud thought that jokes revealed something important that we might not want to consider directly. He saw in this joke the problem of what determines the truth and how truth is affected by who tells it to whom.

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Library of Congress Library of Congress Help Desk ( November 20, 2001 )

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Images of hysterics under hypnosis at Salpêtrière, from D.M. Bourneville and P. Régnard.

[ Upper Left, Upper Right, Lower Left, Lower Right ] Photographic Iconography of Salpêtrière.

Paris: 1876-1880 Copyprint (29)

I felt no particular partiality for the position and activity of a physician in those early years, nor, by the way, later. Rather, I was moved by a sort of greed for knowledge.

-- Sigmund Freud, 1925

#3 Nazism and Freud

The German army marched into Vienna in March 1938, and Hitler annexed Austria to the Reich. As a Jew and as the founder of psychoanalysis, Freud was regarded as an enemy of the new Germany. Shortly before he was allowed to leave the country in June, a photographic record was made of Freud's residence, Berggasse 19. In his final interview with the Gestapo, who insisted that he sign a statement saying he was not mistreated, the 82-year-old Freud is said to have sarcastically asked if he could add: "I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone."

" Burning in Berlin (note on Nazi book burning)," May 11, 1933 Freud's short diary entries Manuscript Division Library of Congress (183)

"Hitler in Vienna," March 14, 1938 Freud's short diary entries Manuscript Division Library of Congress (186A)

Book burning in Hamburg's Opernplatz, May 10, 1933 Joseph Schorer, photographer © 1987 Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin (182)

Psychoanalysis is the malady which considers itself the remedy.

-- Karl Kraus, n.d.

Psychoanalysis a cult, unimportant because transitory; it is a pernicious influence of decadent modern life, leading to broken homes, immorality, and violent death; it is an interesting phase of a developing science and it is the salvation of the human race.

-- Review of Reviews, 1927

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ORIGINS

Freud saw that society creates mechanisms to ensure social control of human instincts. At the root of these controlling mechanisms, he thought, is the prohibition against incest. He further speculated that this taboo had its genesis in the guilt stemming from the murder of a powerful patriarch: after the tyrannical father is killed, the sons continue to follow the patriarchal dictates by which they have always lived. For Freud, the past is not something that can be completely outgrown by either the individual or society but rather is something that remains a vital and often disruptive part of existence. The emphasis on the past being alive in the present is a central theme in psychoanalytic approaches to the individual and society.

Evolution and Inheritance

In his writings on the origins of society, Freud combined his own theories of psychological conflict with Darwinian views on how the earliest humans lived in organized groups. Freud borrowed freely from contemporary anthropology. He even adopted ideas that had already lost scientific credibility, such as the notion that we physically inherit aspects of our ancestors' experience.

James G. Frazer. "Taboo and the Perils of the Soul," Part II of The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion.

[ page one | page two ] London: 1936

General Collections Library of Congress (160)

[The] primitive stages can always be re-established; the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable.

-- Sigmund Freud, 1915

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SECTION ONE Formative Years

Sigismund Schlomo Freud was born on May 6, 1856, in the small town of Freiberg, now part of the Czech Republic. In 1860 the family settled in Vienna where Sigmund, as he came to call himself, received an education emphasizing classical literature and philosophy -- an education that would serve him well in developing his theories and conveying them to a wide audience. The cultural ferment, ethnic tensions, and class conflicts of fin-de-siècle Vienna were part of Freud's daily existence. The city was a hothouse for radical innovations in politics, philosophy, the arts, and sciences. Freud chose early to concentrate on research in neurology, a field in which the frontiers of knowledge were changing dramatically. Financial concerns eventually led him to pursue clinical work with patients. His analyses of patients and of himself became the chief sources for his professional writings.

Religion and the "Godless Jew"

Many have investigated and speculated about the role of religion in Freud's thought. Born into a Jewish family with religious roots, Freud would live a secular life while continuing to identify himself as a Jew. Jacob Freud, Sigmund's father, dedicated a copy of the family Bible to his adult son, with a Hebrew inscription calling it a "keepsake and a token of love."

Sigismund Schlomo Freud Birth certificate, May 6, 1856 Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (2)

In my youth I felt an overpowering need to understand something of the riddles of the world in which we live and perhaps even to contribute something to their solution.

-- Sigmund Freud, 1927

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Freud's letter to the editor in Time and Tide, November 26, 1938 Manuscript Division Library of Congress (185)

Emigration

Freud left Vienna on June 4, 1938, and arrived in London two days later. "The triumphant feeling of liberation," he wrote, "is mingled too strongly with mourning, for one had still very much loved the prison from which one has been released."

Whatever we may ultimately come to think of psychoanalysis as a technical method, it supplied an immense emphasis to the general recognition and acceptance of sex in life.

-- Havelock Ellis, 1939

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Repression

"Repression" is Freud's term for the mechanism that turns our unacceptable desires away from us. Those unruly desires are repressed, made inaccessible to our thinking. The "unconscious" and later the "id" are the terms Freud uses for this realm of inaccessibility. Our repressed desires, according to psychoanalysis, only appear to us disguised as dreams, symptoms, and other seemingly incoherent, uncontrolled actions.

"The Unconscious" Holograph manuscript, 1915

Manuscript Division Library of Congress (72)

Sigmund Freud, ca. 1921 Max Halberstadt, photographer Prints & Photographs Division

Library of Congress (75)

Exploring the Mind

In the spring of 1915, Freud wrote a series of papers on metapsychology, the fundamental principles that guide the mechanisms of the mind. He destroyed some of these essays but did publish five. This particular one explains why Freud thought it crucial to posit the existence of an unconscious that interacts with conscious life.

He who has eyes to see and ears to hear becomes convinced that mortals can keep no secret. If their lips are silent, they gossip with their fingertips; betrayal forces itself through every pore.

-- Sigmund Freud, 1905

The theory of repression is the cornerstone on which the whole structure of psychoanalysis rests.

-- Sigmund Freud, 1914

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TITLE: [Sigmund Freud, half-length portrait, facing left, holding cigar in right hand]

CALL NUMBER: Unprocessed [item] [P&P]

REPRODUCTION NUMBER: LC-USZC4-4946 (color film copy transparency) LC-USZCN4-306 (color film copy neg.)

MEDIUM: 1 photographic print.

CREATED/PUBLISHED: [ca. 1921]

CREATOR:

Halberstadt, Max, photographer.

NOTES:

Mount blind stamped: Max Halberstadt, Hamburg.

Unprocessed in PR 13 CN 1978:209.29

SUBJECTS:

Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939.

FORMAT:

Portrait photographs 1910-1930. Photographic prints 1910-1930.

REPOSITORY: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

DIGITAL ID: (color film copy transparency) cph 3g04946 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3g04946

CARD #: 98514770