Sigmund Freud and his revolutionary theory

After WWI, an important psychologist, Sigmund Freud, revolutionized the perception of sexuality during that period. He changed sexuality forever. Many of the social and cultural changes of the interwar period centered around the sexual and psychological theories of Sigmund Freud.




Freud, the inventor and chief practitioner of psychoanalysis, developed the idea of the “unconscious,” a repository of sexual desires and dreams. Freud’s theories helped some American women break free from small-town, white, Protestant values in favor of increasingly permissive and tolerant attitudes toward the sexual freedoms and desires of women. Sigmund Freud human behavior was motivated by unconscious drives, primarily "Sexual Energy". He called his therapy Psychoanalysis. His work provoked a serious challenge to prudishness by saying that children emerged from the Oedipus complex, a sexual desire towards their parent of the opposite sex. According to Freud's theory, in the earliest stage in a child's psychosexual development, the oral stage, the mother's breast became the formative source of all later erotic sensation.




The effects of Freud’s ideology were many, some of them we can still see today: Freud said, and many Freudians still believe that many mental illnesses, particularly hysteria, can be traced back to unresolved conflicts experienced during childhood, or to events which otherwise disrupt the normal pattern of infantile development. He also changed and explained homosexuality. Before Freud homosexuals were persecuted, imprisoned or killed. Freud explained that homosexuality is a failure to resolve the conflicts of the Oedipus complex, particularly a failure to identify with the parent of the same sex.


Freud also allowed for sexual freedom, especially in women. Before Freud women were seen as objects. They had to fulfill their spouse’s wishes. They couldn’t feel desire because it was frowned upon. Women who were sexually active were seen as neurotic and sent to mental hospitals. Women couldn’t express sexual desire. Freud postulated that when a person experiences an instinctual impulse to behave in a manner which the super-ego deems to be reprehensible, then it is possible for the mind to push this impulse away, to repress it into the unconscious. However, the repressed instinctual drive, as an energy-form, is not and cannot be destroyed when it is repressed–it continues to exist intact in the unconscious.


To conclude, Freud´s ideas, even though discussed and challenged by the men in his time, were so strong that psychoanalysts to this day treat people´s minds following his philosophy. Freudians explain behaviors and desires as impulses that one can control if we understood our psyche. This is how some of the most important criminals in our times have been freed, because lawyers following Freud’s ideas explained their behavior after childhood traumas.

Arianne Velez