Freud began his career as an Austrian neurologist. He first garnered fame in the medical community for coming up with an “effective” prescription to remedy concentration loss and fatigue, cocaine. He also frequently used cocaine to help him pursue his clinical research and practice as well as deal with his depression. Reports of cocaine addiction, abuse, and other health risks began to spread and tainted his reputation as a doctor. Eventually, he stopped supporting cocaine use although he continued to use it himself. Freud’s later work focused on the nature of the unconscious. He believed that most of human behavior was not conscious and was governed by areas in the brain that were out of our immediate control. He sought to unlock repressed thoughts through dream interpretation and formulating a theory of psychoanalysis that was heavily based on sexual urges.
The first lasting contributions to the theory of the unconscious were the stages of psychosexual development. From birth until one year of age, we are in the oral stage. Our sexual sensations are focused on our mouths. If you give anything to a newborn, his/her immediate reaction is to place the object into the mouth. The next stage occurs from one to three years of age, the anal stage. During this stage, you can either develop the pleasure to retain your feces or the pleasure to expend it. People who develop the former will be obsessively neat and orderly while those who develop the latter will be disorganized, messy, and possibly coprophiliac. The phallic stage then occurs from three to six years of age. This is when boys and girls start to develop their sexualities. The boy wants to have sex with his mother but realizes that she is taken by his father; the boy develops a fear of having his penis cut off by his father so his anxiety turns into a hatred for his father and desires to kill him; he soon realizes that it is better to befriend and model his father so that one day he can find a woman who is like his mother. This is called the Oedipus complex. A girl will develop an Electra complex where she envies her father’s penis and wants to have sex with him but he is taken by her mother; this is basically the female equivalent of the Oedipus complex but penis envy replaces castration anxiety.
The next additions to his theory were the id, ego, and super-ego. The id is what we are first born with. It is the most basic part of our minds that tell us to act on the “pleasure principle,” to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Then we develop the ego which acts on the “reality principle,” to balance reality with the desires of the id; it provides our common sense and reason. The last part that we develop is the super-ego which acts on the “moral principle,” to ensure we behave in a socially acceptable and ethical manner. The super-ego often acts against the id, causing the ego much distress. A simplified analogy would be the following: the ego is Tom the Cat, id the devil on his left shoulder telling him to eat Jerry the Mouse, and the super-ego is the angel on his right shoulder telling him to let Jerry go.
Freud attempted to cover almost every aspect of social life in the 20th century. His ideas about religion, God, morality, advanced civilizations, fetishes, and psychiatric disorders are still well-known among Western academics. American feminists and pious Christians frown on him while European feminists and secularists admire him. Right or wrong, his ideas are worth considering to give you an idea of how to think in a creative and unconventional way. (To this day, one of the most interesting books I read was his Civilization and Its Discontents.)
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