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Evaluate the Extent to Which Freud's Theory of Psychosexual Development Can Help Us to Understand a Client's Presenting Issue

In: Philosophy and Psychology

Submitted By Gaduntas
Words 1906
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Sigmund Freud explored the human mind more thoroughly than any other who became before him. Words he introduced through his theories are now used by everyday people, such as anal (personality), libido, denial, repression, cathartic, Freudian slip, and neurotic.
Freud was the founding father of psychoanalysis, a method for treating mental illness and also a theory which explains human behavior. Psychoanalysis is often known as the talking cure. Freud would encourage his patients to talk freely regarding their symptoms and to describe exactly what was on their mind.

The case of Anna O marked a turning point in the career of Sigmund Freud. It even went on to influence the future direction of psychology as a whole.
Anna suffered from hysteria, a condition in which the patient exhibits physical symptoms (e.g. paralysis, convulsions, hallucinations, loss of speech) without an apparent physical cause. Her doctor Josef Breuer succeeded in treating Anna by helping her to recall forgotten memories of traumatic events. Breuer discussed the case with his friend Freud. Out of these discussions came the germ of an idea that Freud was to pursue for the rest of his life.
In Studies in Hysteria (1895) Freud proposed that physical symptoms are often the surface manifestations of deeply repressed conflicts. However Freud was not just advancing an explanation of a particular illness. He was proposing a revolutionary new theory of the human psyche itself. This theory emerged slowly as a result of Freud’s clinical investigations and it led him to propose that there were at least three levels to the mind.

Freud (1900, 1905) developed a model of the mind, whereby he described the features of mind’s structure and function. In this model the conscious mind (everything we are aware of) is seen as the tip of the iceberg, with the unconscious mind a repository of a ‘cauldron’ of

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