Search Results for: Psychoanalysis

Edith Jacobson Biography

Edith Jacobson

Edith Jacobson

Biography of Edith Jacobson

Edith Jacobson (1897-1978) was a German psychoanalyst doctor who was born into a Jewish family of doctors from Lower Silesia. She was part of the first generation of women with university education after the First World War.

This psychoanalyst was a very politically committed person. The Gestapo stopped her in October 1935. Fleeing from the Nazi threat she settled in the United States of America, where she died in 1978 (Rochester, New York). In America, Jacobson was a member of the Institute of Psychoanalysis in New York. In that institute he worked as a psychoanalyst for many years.

But back to its beginnings, Edith Jacobson, who had graduated as a doctor and worked as a pediatrician in a hospital in the German city of Heidelberg, began to be interested in Psychoanalysis as a result of knowing sexuality of the kids through his work as a pediatrician.

In 1925 Edith Jacobson entered the Psychoanalytic Institute in Berlin where he had as teachers Sándor Rado, Franz Alexander and Otto Fenichel. Jacobson performed with the latter his Didactic Analysis.

In his early work Edith Jacobson included extensive and detailed clinical material of his experience in the treatment of children with psychic problems. In these studies on child psychic pathology we can be seen a clear influence of the two great founders of psychoanalysis of children, Anna Freud and Melanie Klein.

Among the most important contributions made by Edith Jacobson deserve to mention their interesting studies on the Depression, Psychosis and the Freudian psychic instances of the Self, Id and the Super-ego.

The theories of Edith Jacobson are framed within the current developed by Marxist psychoanalysts of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. Among these psychoanalysts were Wilhelm Reich and his wife Annie (the latter became a great friend of Edith), Otto Fenichel, Erich Fromm, etc. This group of psychoanalysts, we could say “from the left“, emphasized the importance of external reality for psychological development and the social influence in the development of neuroses.

In this line, Edith Jacobson argued that the environmental factor of reality was as important as the internal world of

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Sigmund Freud and Georg Groddeck

Georg Groddeck

Georg Groddeck

Did you know…..

In a letter to Sigmund Freud the German doctor Georg Groddeck wrote him the following?

“In 1912 I published a book in which there is a premature judment, whose text alone shows that at that time I did not know of the psychoanalysis more than by hearsay, it would not require an explicit confirmation that my unforgivable error was not based but in ignorance, which does not mitigate in any way .. “

Georg Groddeck was referring to the fierce and unjust criticism he had made to Psychoanalysis years earlier in his book entitled Nasamecu.

Many times have we heard or read critiques of psychoanalysis or Freud by people who, like Groddeck confessed, knew about psychoanalysis only by hearsay or had not read a single book by Freud.

(Edited by Dr. María Moya Guirao, MD)

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Skinner and Sigmund Freud

Burrhus Frederic Skinner

Burrhus Frederic Skinner

Did you know…..

that Skinner, the father of Behaviorism, quotes Sigmund Freud more than ten times in one of his books?

Perhaps many behaviorists do not know that Burrhus Frederic Skinner in his book “Science and Human Behavior“, published in 1953, speaks in very flattering terms about Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis.

Among these quotes is the following:

Skinner recognizes the importance of Freud in relating childhood events to behaviors in adult life.

He also says verbatim: “Perhaps prudent men have always known that we are predisposed to see things as we want to see them instead of how they are, but thanks to Sigmund Freud we are much more aware today of the “thought of desire”.

To explain certain aspects of the “positive reinforcement” of certain behaviors, he resorts to the Freudian concept of “Sublimation“. And he adds: “For example, A marriage without children can sublimate their paternal instinct treating their puppy as a son”.

In the chapter on punishment he says: “The fact that punishment does not permanently reduce a tendency to respond, agrees with Freud’s discovery of the survival of the activity of what he called repressed desires”.

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Maria Montessori Biography

Maria Montessori

Maria Montessori

Maria Montessori Biography

Maria Montessori (1870-1952) was an intelligent feminist, psychiatrist and Italian pedagogue, who stood out especially in she studied medicinethe field of Pedagogy, and not so much in that of Psychiatry. The most important contribution in Psychiatry was his classification of mental illnesses, curiously realized shortly after Sigmund Freud, the creator of Psychoanalysis, made his famous Classification of Neuroses.

Maria Montessori was born in Chiaraballe, a village in Ancona, (Italy) and died in Noordwjek (Holland). Montessori was the first woman to graduate as a doctor in Italy. María Montessori was the daughter of Alessandro Montessori, a conservative soldier, who initially opposed she studied medicine, and Renilde Stoppani.

Before studying Medicine, María Montessori studied Engineering. Subsequently he also studied Philosophy at the University of Rome, Experimental Psychology, Anthropology, etc. With regard to the latter  subject She even became a professor at the Faculty of Anthropology, and also wrote a book entitled “Pedagogical Anthropology“.

After the unification of Italy, Maria Montessori, a deeply Catholic woman, became interested in the problems of women and children. In 1898 Montessori attended a Pedagogical Congress in Turin In that congress she affirmed that the child with intellectual delay could be

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Sigmund Freud Biograghy

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud

Who is Sigmund Freud?

Sigmund Freud, the father of Psychoanalysis, was born on May 6, 1856 in a middle class family in Freiburg (Moravia). When Freud was 4 years old his family moved to Víena.

In 1865 Freud began his secondary studies, which curiously began a year earlier than it was the usual age at that time, and ended with an excellent rating (Summa Cum Laude). Then he began Medicine at the University of Víena.

Already as a student, Sigmund Freud entered the physiological laboratory of Bruecke where he began his research career, centered in those early years in Neurology. Parallely Freud began their publications.

In 1884, Sigmund Freud investigated the anesthetic properties of the cocaine, substance that at that time in Europe was little known. At the same time his friend Carl Koller demonstrated the anesthetic properties of cocaine in Ophthalmology.
Shortly after (1884) Freud entered like professor in University of Víena.
In 1885 he received a scholarship to go to Paris to study with the famous Jean Martin Charcot at the “Hospital de la Salpêtrière“. At that time this French doctor studied the possibilities of hypnosis as a treatment of Hysteria.

After returning from France, Sigmund Freud marched to the Kassowitz Institute in Berlin where he studied the cerebral palsies of children.

Later on, in 1889, Sigmund Freud traveled to Nancy (France) to see how Liébault M.D. and Bernheim M.D. used hypnotic suggestion as a therapeutic technique, not only for Hysteria but also for other neurotic disorders.

His biographer Ernest Jones tells us that Sigmund Freud was a family man, a lover of his profession and a tireless worker.
Freud was a very cultured man who spoke French and English perfectly, as well as Spanish,  which he had learned reading “Don Quixote” in the language of Cervantes. During his youth he also translated several works by Charcot and Bernheim into German.
Sigmund Freud was a great lover of the work of Goethe and Shakespeare, as well as the Greco-Roman culture.

When he reached fame and glory, he was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw and palate against which he fought for 16 years, in the course of which Dr. Pichler performed a total of thirty-three operations under local anesthesia, in addition to radiation. The last ones were so bloody that he agreed, at the insistence of hes doctor, to administer an analgesic called Novocaine. He had previously refused to take painkillers, despite the intense pains he suffered. One of those operations was so drastic that the nasal cavity was communicated with his mouth, so he had to use a jaw and palate prosthesis.
Ernest Jones says in his biography that “he was a perfect patient … Whatever the degree of suffering, there was never a hint of irritability or annoyance in him“.

The University of Clark in the United States invited Sigmund Freud to

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Anna Freud Biograghy

Anna Freud

Anna Freud

Who is Anna Freud ?

Anna Freud (1895-1982) was born in Víena (Austria). She was the youngest of Sigmund Freud‘s six children. Anna studied pedagogy and worked as a teacher, but later on she became psychoanalyst and dedicated herself to the Psychoanalysis of children, being a pioneer in this field.

Anna Freud theories on the analysis of children were published in a small work entitled “Introduction to the technique of psychoanalysis of children“, where she raised a criticism of the theories of Melanie Klein, disagreement that lasted forever.

In 1936 she published his most important work entitled “The Ego and defense mechanisms“.

During the Second World War, already exiled in London, Anna Freud founded the Hampstead nurseries where she studied children separated from their families; The result of these studies were hers two works “War and children” and “Infants without families“, written together with Dorothy Burlingham and in which she talks about the emotional impact of mother-child separation.

Other publications of Anna Freud are:

1 “On the fact of losing and being lost“,

2- “Normality and pathology in childhood“.

In 1950, Anna Freud traveled to Clark University, where his father had also been invited years before, where he gave a lecture entitled “The Contribution of Psychoanalysis to Genetic Psychology“, and she was honored as Doctor Honoris Causa.
The honors and recognitions continued in subsequent years, and thus she also received the title of Doctor Honoris Causa for the Universities of Víena, Columbia, Harvard and Frankfurt.

Anna Freud death was on October 9, 1982 in London, the city where she lived since her departure from Vienna because of the persecution of Nazism.

(Edited by Dr. María Moya Guirao, MD)

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Biography of Abraham Maslow

Maslow Pyramid

Maslow Pyramid

Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) was an American psychologist famous for advocating what was called “The Third Force in Psychology“.  This third force proposed a Psychology based on a humanistic approach, the so-called Humanistic Psychology. It was called third force since it came to occupy the third place, after the other prevailing psychologies, which were those of dynamic orientation (Psychoanalysis), and the Behaviorist.

Maslow received his doctorate in Philosophy in 1934. He also studied Watson’s Behaviorism and researched in the area of animal behavior. Later on he was appointed Professor of Psychology at Brandeis University (USA: US), and held the position of President of the American Psychological Association for several years

Furthermore this american psychologist affirmed that Psychology had taken too much care to the study of Psychopathology, that is to say to the sick “psyche“, and had forgotten the healthy or Eusychic mind. From the above he concluded that Psychology, having emphasized the pathological or “sick”, had obtained a partial image of the human being and a pessimistic vision of its potentialities.

In his studies on healthy people Maslow highlighted the value of spontaneity, self-acceptance, impulsive awareness, naturalness and liberation as agents that oppose destructive tendencies. He also highlighted the scope of the inherent potentialities of humanity.

Abraham Maslow affirmed that the human being has certain basic needs. These needs are:

1.- The necessities necessary for the maintenance of life, which would be, on the one hand, hunger and thirst, and on the other the gratification of the impulses of affection and self-esteem. He called these needs D or Deficiency needs.

2.- Needs B or “Meta-needs”. They are what drive a person to self-realization, such as impulses to freedom, beauty, goodness, unity and justice.

Abraham Maslow said: “The restriction of the basic needs can lead the person to neurotic needs that, being really impossible to satisfy, give how to waste human potentiality and exhaust human energy. And this is the fundamental tragedy of mental illness development outcome“.

All the above was captured in a graphic way in his famous pyramid, the “Maslow Pyramid” as it is known

Maslow with his “Psychology of the Third Force” advocated a “Self-Realizing Creativity” that would lead to health and growth. And he added that real people who accept themselves and others are self-realizing. These people would be spontaneous, creative and independent subjects.

In his last studies he talks about “Maximum Experiences” to refer to mystical or self-transcendental experiences.

Most of Maslow theories were exposed in his book “Towards a Psychology of Being“.

(Edited by Dr. María Moya Guirao, MD)

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Eric Kandel y el psicoanálisis

Eric Kandel
Eric Kandel

¿ Sabías que…..

Eric Kandel, Premio Nobel de Fisiología y Medicina, publicó en The American Journal of Psychiatry un interesante artículo titulado “Biology and the future of psychoanalysis: A new intellectual framework for psychiatry revisited” ?

En dicho articulo decía, entre otras cosas, lo siguiente:

– El psicoanálisis todavia representa la visión más coherente e intelectualmente satisfactoria de la mente.

– Freud nos enseñó a escuchar con atención a los pacientes y de una nueva manera, en una forma que nadie había usado antes.

– Sigmund Freud y sus alumnos hicieron importantes contribuciones al conocimiento de los procesos mentales inconscientes y a las motivaciones.

– Freud es el gran pensador moderno sobre las motivaciones humanas.

– El siglo XX ha sido marcado por la comprensión profunda de Freud de los problemas psicológicos que históricamente han ocupado la mente occidental.

– Los puntos fuertes del psicoanálisis son su alcance y la complejidad de las cuestiones que aborda.
Eric R. Kandel nació en Austria en 1929, pero ha desarrollado toda su carrera en los Estados Unidos de América donde ha sido profesor en las Universidades de Columbia y de Nueva York. Kandel es un neuropsiquiatra que ha realizado importantísimas aportaciones al conocimiento de la Fisiología de la memoria y el aprendizaje.

Entre sus numerosas publicaciones merece la pena citar “Principios de neurociencia” y “Psiquiatría, psicoanálisis y la nueva biología de la mente“.

.
(Editado por la Dra. Moya Guirao)

 

Foto de Eric R. Kandel

Eric R. Kandel

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