Psychology is defined as the scientific study of the behavior of living organisms, with special attention to human behavior. It is chiefly concerned with what makes people behave as they do. Psychologists are interested in topics such as learning, emotion, intelligence, heredity and environment, differences between individuals, the nature and development of personality, group behavior. Psychology is a science because it is systematic and empirical, and it is dependent upon measurement. If psychology is a science; therefore, psychologist is a scientist, not a pseudo-scientist.
A psychologist is grounded by the different fundamental characteristics such as: human behavior follows an orderly pattern. Even if there is a change in a person’s life, there is a degree of order and regularity in its nature. The change pattern can be understood. Human behavior can be known. It can be empirically observed; therefore, it can be investigated. Knowledge of human behavior is tentative but superior to ignorance. We must pursue knowledge not only for its own sake but also to be able human conditions. Natural phenomena have natural causes. All natural events have natural causes.
Science rejects the belief in the supernatural forces to cause events. Nothing is self evident. Truth must be claimed and established when they are demonstrated objectively. Scientists never rely on traditional, subjective beliefs. They are skeptical and critical in their approach to truths. Rational criticism is the core of any scientific enterprise. Knowledge is derived from the acquisition of experiences. Anything in this world must be empirically explained. Perceptions are achieved through our senses, although one should not be limiting the term sense to the five sense organs. Knowledge is a product of experience.
This research was conceptualized and constructed to introduce and discern fully the life of Sigmund Freud specifically his contribution to the field of developmental psychology. Early childhood developmental, parents, schools, illnesses, etc. Sigismund Freud was born on May 6, 1856 at Freiberg, presently known as Pribor in Moravia, currently known as Czech Republic. At the age of 22 Sigismund decided to change his name into Sigmund. He was also given a Jewish name called Schlomo, as one of the Jewish traditions. His father, Jacob Freud, was a wool merchant with a keen mind and a great sense of humor, where Sigmund inherits the same quality.
Jacob Freud, his father married at the age of seventeen and had two children: Emmanuel and Philipp (Chiriac, J. 2007). After he became a widower, he remarried in 1851 or 1852 with Rebecca. For the third time Jacob marries again with a young woman of twenty, Amalia Nathansohn that was on the year of 1835-1930. His mother was a lively woman, and 20 years younger than his father. Jacob Freud and Amalia Nathansohn’s first son was Sigmund Freud and succeeded by Julius, who died at eighteen months, Anna, Rosa, Mitzi, Dolfi, Paula and Alexander (Chiriac, J. 2007). Amalia, Sigmund’s mother called him “my golden Sigi” (Chiriac, J.
2007). When Sigmund was four or five his family moved to Vienna, because of economic crisis that ruins his father business. When Sigmund was five Jacob, gave him and his sister Anna a book with colored plates describing a journey through Persia (Puner, H. W. , 1992). The only other memory he retained from this period is one which, curiously enough, also revolves around the theme of destruction. When Sigmund was six years of age, one of the first lectures his mother taught him was that human beings are made of dust, and from the dust human being will return into dust.
The boy doubted this information. He asked for evidence. Then his mother gave him a confirmation by rubbing her hand and showed Sigmund the dust flakes. Sigmund was surprised and then persuaded. After fourteen years of married, Jacob and Amalia had produced seven children, two sons and five daughters. Sigmund was the only member of the family who has especial treatment, a cabinet and while the occupants of the other bedrooms used candles to light their way, Sigmund’s cabinet boasted the family’s only oil lamp.
In this room the boy lived and worked until he became an internee at the General City Hospital. Privileges were granted to Sigmund because of his indulgent. Sigmund was an industrious and pertinent student. He was instructed exclusively by his self-taught father before he entered the gymnasium. His mother’s devotion was so complete that she could not bring herself to deny him anything, even when his wishes and needs came into conflict with those of the rest of the family. She was for example very musical, a talent which had skipped Sigmund, but been passed on to his sister, Anna.
When Anna’s practicing penetrated the quiet of Sigmund’s hall bedroom and bothered him at his studies, he told his mother that either the piano must go or Sigmund would (Puner, H. W. 1992). The piano disappeared; his sister Anna remembered many years afterward, and with it, all opportunities for his sisters to become musicians (Puner, H. W. 1992). This request for peace and quiet environment while he was working controlled the whole family, though Sigmund was not spoiled and demanding in other aspects, specifically in food, clothing and entertainment.
Sigmund Freud was a heavy cigar smoker; undergo more than 30 operations during his life because of oral cancer. In September 1939 Sigmund prevailed on his doctor and friend Max Schur to assist him in suicide. Teen years During his teens, Sigmund Freud seldom joined the family at meals, but he took them alone in his room where he pored endlessly over his books (Jacobs, 2003). Sigmund Freud’s first ambition was to study law but on his seventeenth birthday, he decided to become a medical student.
The friends he began to make when he entered the gymnasium were less boys to play, with whom Dr. Josef Breuer, a Viennese physician whom he had met in Bruecke’s laboratory (Jacobs, 2003). A man had come up to Breueron his walk, and when Breuer was free again, Freud recalled, he told me in his kindly, teacher like manner that this was the husband of a patient who had brought some news about her. The wife, he added, behaved in so conspicuous a manner when in company, that she had been turned over to him for treatment as a nervous case (Jacobs, 2003).
Another such incident, Freud recalled, had taken place at one of Charcot’s evening receptions. Freud had been standing near Charcot, who was describing to a colleague a case that had interested him enormously. The case involved a young married couple. The wife was extremely nervous and had a husband either impotent or exceedingly awkward. Early adult years As a medical student at the University of Vienna from 1873 to 1881, Freud received not only a basic medical education but some of the best training in scientific research that Europe had to offer (Runco, M.
A. & Pritzker, S. R. 1999). The professors with whom he worked closely were distinguishing in their fields, and Freud was expected to follow their paths in anatomy and physiology. Carl Claus, Hermann Nothnagel, Theodor Meynert and Ernst Brucke. However, in contrast too much of today’s scientific training especially in psychology, the research skills Freud developed there were not experimental or correlational but observational, mainly involving dissection and microscope work.
Freud became a scientist without ever performing a controlled experiment (Runco, M. A. & Pritzker, S. R. 1999). His initial interest was physiological paper answered a long-standing question by establishing the presence of testes in the male ell. His other research topics included the nerve cells of fish and crayfish. Sigmund Freud was one of the first scientists to suggest the general outlines of the modern neuronal theory of the nervous system (Runco, M. A. & Pritzker, S. R. 1999).
Later in his life, long after he had abandoned physiological research altogether, Freud continued to compare his explorations of the deeper layers of the unconscious to the process of peeling away surface layers of skin or tissue-the kind of thing he had done as a physiologist when he was trying to get at a nerve cell (Runco, M. A. & Pritzker, S. R. 1999). Though Freud was regarded by his professors as a promising neurophysiologist, this was not a career in which he could make enough money to support a family.
He had already fallen in love, not long after he completed his research training, with a young woman named Martha Bernays. So his professors advised him to go into clinical practice, specializing in neurological problems. Getting the necessary clinical experience and establishing a practice took him four years beyond medical school, during that time Sigmund and Martha remained engaged even though often away from each other. Among the factors that frequently separate Freud from his continuing effort to obtain the most progressive training available.
Sigmund went to Paris to observe the treatment of hysteria and other psychological syndromes by the great Jean Martin Charcot, and to Nancy in France to study the hypnotic techniques of Hippolyte Bernheim. In his own early psychiatric work, Sigmund Freud became an expert on aphasia and a respected authority on childhood paralyses. When he began to treat patients whose main symptoms were evidently psychological rather than physical, Freud administered the latest therapies such as electric shock and hynosis but found them unsatisfactory.
Then Sigmund tried a technique developed by other prominent scientist, Josef Breur, who was already a fatherly friend and mentor to him. Several years earlier Breuer had treated a friend of Martha Bernays, with some success. That patient later became pioneering social worker under her real name Bertha Pappenheim, but she has gone down in psychological history under the pseudonym of Anna O. On September 23, 1939, Schur administered three doses of morphine over many hours that resulted in Freud’s death.
Freud’s body was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium in England during a service attended by Austrian refugees, including the author Stefan Zweig. Sigmund Freud ashes were placed in the crematorium’s columbarium. They rest in an ancient Greek urn which Freud had received as a present from Marie Bonaparte and which he had kept in his study in Vienna for many years. After Martha Freud’s death in 1951, her ashes were also laid in that urn. Golders Green Crematorium becomes the final resting place for Anna Freud, Dorothy Burlingham, and for several members of the Freud family. Contributions to Developmental Psychology
Sigmund Freud is one of the most influential and controversial psychological theorist of 20th century. His theories include the concept of the Oedipus complex which has had a vast influence on art and literature as well as in social thinking. Freud’s fundamental idea was that all humans are subjected to an unconscious in which potent sexual and aggressive drives, and defenses against them, struggle for supremacy. Freud mentioned: “The only unnatural sexual behavior is none at all. ” For three consecutive years Sigmund Freud moved round different departments in the General Hospital in Vienna.
He became interested in the properties of cocaine, and began taking the drug both as a stimulant when depressed and to help him to relax in social settings. The cocaine episode is one example of his failure to pursue his ideas (Atkinson, R. L. et al. , 1996). Sigmund Freud believed that many of the impulses that are forbidden and punish by parents and society during childhood are derived from innate instincts (Atkinson, R. L. et al. , 1996). Childhood amnesia, this phenomenon was discovered by Sigmund Freud. It is particularly striking because the first three years of child development are so rich in experience.
So what is new in a way that never will be again; we develop from helpless new born to crawling, babbling infants to walking, talking children but these remarkable transitions leave little trace on our memory. (Atkinson, R. C. et al. , 1996). Sigmund Freud combined the cognitive notions of consciousness, perception, and memory with ideas about biologically based instincts to forge a bold new theory of human behavior (Prochaska, J. O. & Norcross, J. C. , 2007). In the early 1900s, Sigmund Freud’s risky work began to be recognized by scholars, such as the dying William James, as the system that would shape 20th-century psychology.
Shape it he did, along with the incredibly brilliant group of colleagues who joined the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Most of these colleagues contributed to the development of psychoanalysis (Prochaska, J. O. & Norcross, J. C. , 2007). Professional education and credentials Sigmund Freud’s education was at the Viennese equivalent of a British grammar school. His schooling, typical of that time, gave him a classical education and included Greek mythology, philosophy and literature. Freud was always very well read and immersed in the arts as much as the sciences (Jacobs, 2003).
His Father insisted that Freud should follow his own preferences in respect of selection of profession although Freud writes: neither at that time, nor indeed in later life, did I feel any particular predilection for the career of a doctor (Jacobs, 2003). There are two reasons Freud gives, although the motives for his choice are rather harder to unravel. Freud’s university career led him through philosophy and zoology, but with medicine winning out in the end. Yet he was never happy with the various branches of medicine proper, apart from psychiatry.
Sigmund Freud worked as a research scholar in an institute of physiology, to earn his Medical Degree in 1891 and his residency in neurology; he expected that his hard work and commitment would result in recognition and financial success (Prochaska, J. O. & Norcross, J. C. , 2007). During the time spent on research Freud studied the central nervous system in fish as well as the sexual organs of the common eel (Jacobs, 2003). He was able to work with and learn from some of the greatest authorities in Vienna. This was also the point at which he met his first collaborator, Josef Breuer.
Freud’s earliest published papers date from this time, and detail findings that are far from trivial , although several times he failed to see some of his research through far enough to earn the honor of major achievement. Sigmund Freud, biographer Ernest Jones comments that he narrowly missed world fame in early life because of not trying to pursue his thoughts to their logical. What is their theory? Sigmund Freud, a famous physician and psychiatrist, attempted to find a cause and cure of personality disorders.
He postulated on the existence of unconscious mental processes which influenced an individual’s behavior in various indirect ways. Psychoanalysis is the third school to emerge next to structuralism and functionalism, had its roots in medicine. Sigmund Freud was the first person to include the unconscious mind in a formal psychological theory. Freud advanced the belief called psychic determinism which explains that unconscious psychological conflicts in the human mind usually related to sex and aggression motivate both normal and abnormal human behavior.
Freud attributed the irrationality of human behavior and the causes of behavior disorders to psychic determinism. He further assumed that all memories of early childhood, whether conscious or unconscious, which are stored in the unconscious level of the mind motivate one’s behavior in later childhood, adolescence and adulthood. How is their theory applied? This school of thought whom Sigmund Freud started exerted much influence on personality theory and on methods of treating personality disorders.
The Freudian theory or psychoanalytic theory stressed the role of motives and cravings, often hidden and repressed in the subconscious or unconscious mind, which result in abnormal behavior. Freud asserted that the sex urges in the unconscious constitute the main human drive. This is known as the libido theory. His method of treatment, called psychoanalysis, emphasizes free association, as letting the patient freely associate on his thoughts and experiences and, with the help of the psychiatrist, analyzes the causes of his difficulty. He drew his theory from various case studies of his female patients who suffered from conversion hysteria.
He attributed the symptoms of the disorder such as leg paralysis, loss of speech and body sensation without observable physical causes to a woman’s psychological conflicts about sex because of the cultural prohibitions at that time against women’s enjoyment of sex. Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of explaining human behavior created much controversy among his colleagues and shocked the public as well. The theory was criticized for it’s locked of scientific data on sexual motives, unconscious processes and early childhood experiences.
Freud never tested his theory formally, instead, he based it on the notes that he wrote tediously for long hours after his sessions with his patients. His detractors claimed that he violated good scientific practice by generalizing his findings to all people. Nevertheless, the psychoanalytic theory exerted much influence on the practice of psychoanalysis in the clinical setting. His views expanded the fields of study in psychology with topics like motivation, dream work, creativity, development, personality and psychotherapy.
Conclusion Psychology as a science started only in the later part of the nineteenth century. It is a science because it is systematic and empirical and is dependent upon measurement. Its origin may be found in the writings of ancient Greek philosophers. German psychologists and physicists of nineteenth century laid the foundation for scientific psychology. The opening of Wundt’s laboratory at Leipzig, Germany in 1879 is usually taken as the beginning of modern psychological research. There are several schools of thought that followed.
Among them were functionalism, headed William James and John Dewey; behaviorism, founded by John Watson; Gestalt, founded by Max Wertheimer; psychoanalysis, advocated by Sigmund Freud; and purposivism, headed by William McDougall. In the course of these developments, many general fields of psychology began to emerge. These are educational psychology, clinical psychology, social psychology, child psychology and adult psychology. Psychology today is best defined as the study of the nature and behavior of man and animals.
It is referred to as biological science since the behavior of human being is grounded both in biology and in social interaction. Psychology has made great strides in the development of principles and methods and the discovery of facts; which find useful application in various aspects of everyday life. It is a scientific method applied to the study of behavior which aims to help man understand himself so that he can adjust to his environment better; to predict human behavior; and to influence or control the behavior of the individual so that he can achieve the goal he desires.
References
Atkinson, R.L. et al. (1996). Hilgard’s Introduction to Psychology. 12th ed. Philadelphia: Harcourt Brace & Company. Chiriac, J. (2007). Sigmund Freud’s Childhood. Retrieved May 7, 2008, from http://www. freudfile. org/childhood. html Jacobs, M. (2003). Sigmund Freud. 2nd ed. London: Sage Publication. Prochaska, J. O. & Norcross, J. C. (2007). Systems of Psychotherapy: a Transtheoretical Analysis. 6th ed. Australia: Thomson. Puner, H. W. (1992). Sigmund Freud: His Life and Mind. New York: Howell, Soskin. Runco, M. A. & Pritzker, S. R. (1999). Encyclopedia of Creativity: i-z. SanDiego: Academic Press.