Blackwell Reference Online

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Sigmund Freud's pioneering focus on unconscious motives arising from infant experiences offers a distinctive approach to understanding human motives. His focus on how the super-ego internalizes societal demands offered a way of understanding how social norms affect individuals. His approach has had an enduring influence in sociology, shaping important research especially in gender, family, and religion. Freud was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Moravia. Freud, who had two half-brothers from his father's previous marriage, was the favored first son of his mother, to whom he was strongly attracted. Freud recalled strong jealousies toward his younger brothers and contempt for his father, who was two decades older than his mother and whom Freud perceived to be intellectually weak and unable to confront anti-Semitism. Freud spent most of his life in Vienna, where his family moved when he was four. After studying medicine, philosophy, and science at university, he worked as a physician studying neurology. In the late nineteenth century he rejected the medical emphasis on chemical imbalances as the cause of hysteria, focusing instead on how mental processes cause physical problems. For the rest of his life, he used his psychoanalytic work with patients to develop a theory of the mind that is his lasting contribution. Freud emphasized that the motives that impel action are unconscious. ... log in or subscribe to read full text