Freud Bio
...Sigmund Freud. America welcomed psychoanalysis as its new treatment for hysteria and mental illnesses. Society began to rely on psychoanalysts as not only their doctors but their personal consultants. A new outlook on the American culture and its thought began to emerge. Many found psychoanalysts to be aristocrats and others viewed it as a new tool of discovering the mind and how it worked. Psychoanalysis and psychosexual theories of Freud became the target for feminist uprisings during 1920's and 60's that changed American outlook on its culture and social roles. Freud and the emergence of psychoanalysis in the U.S. served as means of new treatment for the mentally ill, new careers and organizations for the psychology field, as well as the means to change American society and its culture.
Psychoanalysis incorporates Freudian concepts of id, ego, and the superego in their relation to repression of human thoughts and emotions. According to Feud, the id represents a portion of the human mind where all the desires and pleasures are sought to be achieved by the individual disregarding the reality. The id is the selfish pleasure seeking device. The ego interacts with the id by bringing a sense of reality to the person's mind that is acquired from an individual's contact with the social world. "The ego attempts to reduce the tensions of the id, and it tries to do so by successfully dealing with the environment" (Nye, p.13). The superego makes the final decision of right and wrong. It is associated with morals and ethics most often acquired through parents. The superego represents the values and standards of the parents, incorporated into the individual's own personality (Nye, p.14). This system of morals represents the conscious level of the person's mind, while the id mostly lies within the unconscious. The ego, when faced with stress and inability to cope with...
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