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Sigmund Freud and Erik Erikson

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Sigmund Freud and Erik Erikson
Sigmund Freud and Erik Erikson are two of psychology's developmental forerunners, each one having his own theory behind personality and the elements of advancing through the stages of life. Erikson’s theories came after Freud's and build on Freud's original work. Both of these psychologists have some common similarities and some differences as well in life, their careers and how we use their work and theories still.
Sigmund Freud was born in Freiberg. Austria on May 6, 1856. When he was four his family moved to Vienna, where he would live and work for most of the remainder of his life. He received his medical degree in 1881 and married the following year. He had six children—the youngest of whom, Anna, was to herself become a distinguished psychoanalyst. After graduation, Freud set up a private practice and began treating various psychological disorders. Considering himself first and foremost a scientist, rather than a doctor, he strived to understand the journey of human knowledge and experience. Early in his career, Freud was greatly influenced by the work of his Viennese colleague, Josef Breuer, who had discovered that when he encouraged a hysterical patient to talk openly about the earliest events of the symptoms, the symptoms sometimes gradually decreased. Inspired by Breuer, Freud proposed that neuroses had their roots in deeply traumatic experiences that had transpired in the patient's past. He believed that the original occurrences had been forgotten and hidden from consciousness. His treatment was to empower his patients to recall the experience and bring it to consciousness, and in doing so, confront it. He believed one could then release it and rid oneself of the neurotic symptoms. Freud and Breuer published their theories and findings in Studies in Hysteria (1895) In January 1933, the Nazis took control of Germany, and Freud's books were prominent among those they burned and destroyed. Freud quipped: "What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages

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