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Psychoanalytic Theorist

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Psychoanalytic Theorists
Sigmund Freud was born in 1956 in the Czech Republic. He was Jewish and living in a very anti-sematic area of the world. His childhood dreams of being in government he felt could not be reached so he instead entered the medical field, he worked in neurology where he studied the difference in fetal and adult brains (Cervone & Pervin, 2010). His work in Neurology led him into the training and debate of mechanism and Vitalism. Mechanism being the theory that humans are biological, chemical and physical creatures that are evolved from themselves, and Vitalism being the theory that there is a spiritual life-force, namely God, responsible for life (Cervone & Pervin, 2010). Freud was forced to go into medical practice for financial reasons and after his father died he suffered from serious bouts of depression. He started a self-analysis of himself to study his experiences in life, his dreams and his thoughts. The process of self-analysis done by Freud was the start of the field we know today of Psychoanalysis (Cervone & Pervin, 2010). Being the start of the field and developing the first main theories of the field, naturally makes Freud’s work very influential. Although many of the analysts that followed after Freud strayed from his original theories in one way or another Freud still remains the “father” of the entire field (Cervone & Pervin, 2010).
A few of the analysts that came after Freud and changed their way of thinking and theories are Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, and Erik Erikson. Erik Erikson believe that man’s development was not merely psychosexual but also psychosocial (Cervone & Pervin, 2010). He believed in social context, that all things within man were intertwined and that we were not simply sexual creatures entirely. Erikson developed the 8 psychosocial stages of development and showed how they affect personality

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