Your own patient: oddities and phobias of Sigmund Freud

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

May 6 marks the 160th anniversary of his birth the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud … He helped patients to understand their complexes and fears and cope with neuroses, although for himself he always remained the most important patient. The great psychoanalyst suffered from a large number of phobias and demonstrated such strange behavior that it could become the subject of a special study.

At birth, Freud was given the Hebrew name Sigismund Shlomo (Solomon), his family called him Sigi for a long time, but he really did not like his real name and called himself Sigmund in the German way. At that time in Austria-Hungary, Sigismund was called the hero of anti-Semitic anecdotes, moreover, Freud was never proud of his Jewish origin.

Freud's scientific activity was accompanied by a large number of scandals and accusations of quackery and adventurism. Back in his student years, he was engaged in an experimental study of the anesthetic properties of cocaine. He conducted experiments on himself and his friends. At first, Freud was amazed at the results: "I experienced the effects of cocaine, which suppresses the feeling of hunger, drowsiness, fatigue and sharpens intellectual abilities dozens of times." Freud wrote about the therapeutic properties of cocaine and its potential for treating both physical and mental disorders.

But soon a scandal erupted: as it turned out, the use of cocaine had a serious side effect - it caused persistent addiction and caused irreparable damage to health. Many of his biographers associate a large number of phobias and oddities in Freud's behavior with the systematic use of drugs for six years.

It is said that Freud's trademark way of working with patients - with the patient lying on the couch and the doctor sitting behind him - was the result of the psychoanalyst's unwillingness to look people in the eye. And this was not Freud's only strange phobia. He was terrified of the combination of numbers 6 and 2, and for this reason he did not stay in hotels where there were more than 61 rooms, so that he would not get the "unlucky" 62nd. He considered 6 February a bad day and refrained from serious business on these dates. Seeing the numbers 6 and 2 in his new phone number, he took it as a bad omen and feared that he would die at the age of 62.

Freud didn't just need attention and love - he demanded it. In an ultimatum, he forced his wife to stop communicating with her family so that she would devote all her free time only to him. The wife had no right to contradict him and had to unconditionally fulfill his wishes.

According to biographers, Freud had a hostile attitude towards music: he avoided restaurants with a live orchestra and even forced him to throw out his sister's piano, delivering an ultimatum: "Either I, or the piano."

Freud was a heavy smoker and smoked 20 cigars daily. In 1923, he was diagnosed with a terrible diagnosis - laryngeal cancer, but even this did not make him give up the bad habit. He underwent about 30 operations, but the disease did not recede. When the pain became unbearable, he asked his personal physician to inject him with a lethal dose of morphine. So, as a result of euthanasia, the great psychoanalyst died at the age of 83.

Freud had many students and followers. His favorite student became Lou Salome - Russian muse of Nietzsche, Rilke and Freud, because of which half of Europe lost his head