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Freud Essay
“Evaluate the extent to which Freud’s theory of psychosexual development can help us to understand a client’s presenting issue?”
Freud is the founding father of Psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud was born in Freiberg, Morovia in 1856. The family moved to Vienna in 1865 and Freud went to Vienna University, planning to study law but joined the medical faculty instead and studied to be a physician. He studied philosophy, physiology and zoology.
Freud started work in a psychiatric unit a t Vienna in 1882. During this time, Freud came to realise that patients suffering with hysteria, could suffer with the physical symptoms or disabilities related to many ailments while not actually suffering with the physical illness. (David Stafford-Clark, 1965).
In 1885, Freud moved to Paris to study with Jean-Martin Charcot, a renowned neurologist who specialised in the study of hysteria and was conducting scientific research into hypnosis and this interested Freud. He later recalled his experience working with Charcot as causing him to change course and study medical psychopathology instead neurology. The reason for this was that Freud began to notice how patients who had been hypnotised could be made to demonstrate the same symptoms as hysterical patients by the suggestion being made, while under hypnosis, that they had a particular disease, in their minds and bodies. According to “What Freud really said”, (David Stafford-Clark, 1965), Freud asked himself whether these powerful subconscious mechanisms which could be reproduced under hypnosis actually existed in all human beings and could play an important part in their lives, causing them to exhibit particular habits or behaviours without them being aware of the reason. This started Freud’s in depth studies and marked the beginnings of his famous psychodynamic theory.

In 1905 Freud published “Three Essays on the theory of Sexuality and other Works”, one of those essays was titled “Infantile Sexuality”. In this essay Freud sets

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