Freud Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Freud - Essay Example cre ability to hypnotize, necessarily took on a more imaginative turn that revolutionized the way people approached the treatment of the mind (Robbins, 1999). Although others had been doing work to understand the inner workings of the mind before him and others have come after him to refine and build on his theories, as well as add theories of their own, Freud is generally credited with the first break-through in treating the mind as an entity separate from the body. His identification of different levels of thought and how these levels interact and intertwine led to his development of psychotherapy. Within this theory, Freud outlines three major components of an individual’s psyche – the id, the ego and the superego. This intuitive leap, however, did not occur by accident. To understand Freud’s theories, his concept of the human mind and how that translates into his theories regarding human culture, then, it is necessary to understand a little bit about how thes e ideas were developed as well as how Freud himself expressed them. With his origins in the medical field, it should not be surprising to learn that Freud’s psychoanalytic theory had its earliest basis in the fields of 19th century biology and physics. One of the theories that held particular importance to Freud’s theories was that of Hermann von Helmholtz. According to Helmholtz’s dynamic theory of energy, â€Å"energy cannot be destroyed but can only be transformed into other states. Drawing upon this notion of undestroyable energy, Freud formulated a dynamic psychology, one of whose key points is that whenever a psychic drive or urge is suppressed, repressed or driven below (or out of) consciousness, its energy inevitably appears elsewhere† (Landow, 1988). This idea is supported in Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents ( ) as he discusses the aggressive energy associated with the super-ego. â€Å"According to one view, that energy merely carries on the punitive energy of the