Word: freuded
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Storms of Childhood. After examining a large group of neurotics, Freud was surprised to discover that they all had one thing in common: a frustrated sex life. The neuroses," he declared, "[are] without exception disturbances of the sexual function...
...unhappy marriages or love affairs of adult life that were mainly responsible for neuroses. For the same experiences that normal .persons took in their stride were sufficient to bowl neurotics over. The foundations of neuroses, Freud discovered, were laid in the sex experiences of early childhood. Upon this astonishing fact, which Freud painstakingly confirmed in hundreds of cases, he built his famous theories of the libido (Latin for lust) and the Oedipus complex...
Most powerful force which drives human beings, said Freud, is a primeval sex instinct, the libido. During childhood the libido is bound up with such experiences as eating, excreting and thumbsucking. In later years the libido may be transferred to another person (marriage), may remain grounded in childish sex play (perversion), or may overflow as artistic, literary, or musical creation (sublimation). In fact, said Freud, greatest source of creative work is the sex instinct...
There is no escaping the Oedipus complex, said Freud, for it is our heritage from primitive ancestors, who killed their fathers in fits of jealous rage. "We are all omnibuses in which our ancestors ride, and every now and then one of them sticks his head out and embarrasses us," perceptively observed Oliver Wendell Holmes in his pre-Freudian novel The Guardian Angel...
Friends & Enemies. In light-hearted pre-War Vienna, which boasted of its sexual freedom, Freud was jeered at and shunned. Prudish physicians complained that he made too much of sex, that he destroyed beautiful illusions (such as the innocence of childhood), that he invaded his patients' privacy...