Word: freuds
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That conviction reflects a growing consensus among scientists that dysfunctions like depression and schizophrenia -- and indeed most mental disorders -- are at their core disruptions of normal brain chemistry and can often be treated as such. The talk-therapy tradition pioneered by Freud and others still has its place. Subconscious issues are believed to affect brain chemistry, and most studies show that drug treatments work best when administered along with some form of talk therapy. But it is the psychopharmacologists, not the psychiatrists, who are making the breakthroughs in mental-health circles...
...schizophrenia and Prozac (fluoxetine) for depression, scientists can link moods and feelings to the action of certain chemicals in the brain. The result is a burst of new ideas about how the mind works -- and what is going on when it does not -- unequaled since the days of Freud and Jung...
Feminists complain that Freud's view of women, as mercurial creatures with a deficient sense of moral standards, was downright misogynistic. Even some orthodox Freudians concede that his emphasis on sexuality as the root cause of all neuroses was too narrow. Nonetheless, Freud's ideas still have impact. Says Arnold Cooper, past president of the American Psychoanalytic Association: "You and everybody you know is a Freudian, and they probably don't even know it. We have all drunk in basic Freudian tenets." Freud was a pioneer in mapping the unconscious mind and theorizing how it could be reached and interpreted...
...rightly regarded as the father of modern psychiatry -- as revolutionary a thinker as Darwin, as daring an explorer of the interior world as Columbus was of the exterior. Sigmund Freud not only developed the most profound theory to explain the workings of the human mind, but he also devised much of the terminology -- from Oedipus complex to penis envy -- that has become part of the language. The discipline he founded, psychoanalysis, became the world's most famous technique for helping the troubled come to grips with the demons haunting their minds...
Relatively little of Freud's voluminous work is devoted to the empirical study of clinical depression. His writings discuss only four patients who were known for certain to have suffered from major depression, and he published only one paper on the subject -- "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917) -- which contrasted ordinary grief and acute depression. He wrote somewhat more extensively about schizophrenia, which he called "paraphrenia." But he was always doubtful that psychoanalysis would be of much help in treating it. The schizophrenic's lack of interest in the external world, Freud wrote, made him inaccessible to transference. That...