What Influenced Sigmund Freud

Freud’s development of thought was profoundly shaped and influenced by several interrelated but distinct factors, which sometimes coincided with each other. However, it must be noted that despite these influences, Freud was notoriously a highly original thinker. Charcot and Breuer had a direct and unwavering impact upon Sigmund Freud, but some of the other factors, though no less imperative than these, were of a rather different nature (Thornton, n.d). First, the emotional crisis that Freud suffered after the death of his father and the series of dreams to which this gave rise, were the origins of his self-analysis and also formed the core of his masterpiece, The Interpretation of Dreams. Although he felt love and admiration for his father, his analysis disclosed that these were mixed with very contrasting feelings of shame and hate, which he called ambivalence. Freud also revealed that as a child, he fantasized that his half-brother Philip was really his father, possibly since Philip was Freud’s mother’s age – this formed the seemingly personal basis of his theory of the Oedipus complex. Convinced by other signs, Freud believed that the underlying meaning of his fantasy was that his father was his rival for his mother’s affections and therefore, he wanted his real father dead.
Second, during the 19th century, Charles Darwin, who had published his radical Origins of Species when Freud was about four years old, seemed to be the most soaring scientific figure at the time.
The predominant conception of man was fundamentally altered by Darwin’s evolutionary doctrine, where man was now seen different from non-human animals only in degree of structural complexity (Thornton, n.d). As a result, man could now be treated as an object of scientific investigation – examining human behavior and its motivation – as this was now made plausible by Darwin. Freud implicitly accepted this new world-view, fueled by his colossal esteem for
science. Further to this, the second half of the 19th century was widely transformed by advances in the field of physics, which significantly influenced Freud. Ernst Brücke, who Freud worked under at the University of Vienna and greatly admired, published a book on energy systems and living organisms in 1874. This new “dynamic physiology” was rapidly adopted by Freud, which quickly led to his to his view that the human personality is also an energy system. From this, the cornerstone of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory was formed by his groundbreaking claim of “psychic energy” and his belief was that psychology should explore the transmissions, conversions and modifications of psychic energy within the personality which shape and determine it (Thornton, n.d).