title: Sigmund Freud

text: The 1922 Berlin Congress was the last Freud attended. By this time his speech had become seriously impaired by the prosthetic device he needed as a result of a series of operations on his cancerous jaw. He kept abreast of developments through regular correspondence with his principal followers and via the circular letters and meetings of the Secret Committee which he continued to attend.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: The Committee continued to function until 1927 by which time institutional developments within the IPA, such as the establishment of the International Training Commission, had addressed concerns about the transmission of psychoanalytic theory and practice. There remained, however, significant differences over the issue of lay analysis – i.e. the acceptance of non-medically qualified candidates for psychoanalytic training. Freud set out his case in favour in 1926 in his "The Question of Lay Analysis". He was resolutely opposed by the American societies who expressed concerns over professional standards and the risk of litigation (though child analysts were made exempt). These concerns were also shared by some of his European colleagues. Eventually, an agreement was reached allowing societies autonomy in setting criteria for candidature.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: In 1930, Freud received the Goethe Prize in recognition of his contributions to psychology and German literary culture.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Freud used pseudonyms in his case histories. Some patients known by pseudonyms were Cäcilie M. (Anna von Lieben); Dora (Ida Bauer, 1882–1945); Frau Emmy von N. (Fanny Moser); Fräulein Elisabeth von R. (Ilona Weiss); Fräulein Katharina (Aurelia Kronich); Fräulein Lucy R.; (Herbert Graf, 1903–1973); Rat Man (Ernst Lanzer, 1878–1914); Enos Fingy (Joshua Wild, 1878–1920); and Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff, 1887–1979). Other famous patients included Prince Pedro Augusto of Brazil (1866–1934); H.D. (1886–1961); Emma Eckstein (1865–1924); Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), with whom Freud had only a single, extended consultation; Princess Marie Bonaparte; Edith Banfield Jackson (1895–1977); Arthur Tansley (1871-1955), and Albert Hirst (1887–1974).


title: Sigmund Freud

text: In February 1923, Freud detected a leukoplakia, a benign growth associated with heavy smoking, on his mouth. He initially kept this secret, but in April 1923 he informed Ernest Jones, telling him that the growth had been removed. Freud consulted the dermatologist Maximilian Steiner, who advised him to quit smoking but lied about the growth's seriousness, minimizing its importance. Freud later saw Felix Deutsch, who saw that the growth was cancerous; he identified it to Freud using the euphemism "a bad leukoplakia" instead of the technical diagnosis epithelioma. Deutsch advised Freud to stop smoking and have the growth excised. Freud was treated by Marcus Hajek, a rhinologist whose competence he had previously questioned. Hajek performed an unnecessary cosmetic surgery in his clinic's outpatient department. Freud bled during and after the operation, and may narrowly have escaped death. Freud subsequently saw Deutsch again. Deutsch saw that further surgery would be required, but did not tell Freud he had cancer because he was worried that Freud might wish to commit suicide.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: In January 1933, the Nazi Party took control of Germany, and Freud's books were prominent among those they burned and destroyed. Freud remarked to Ernest Jones: "What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now, they are content with burning my books." Freud continued to underestimate the growing Nazi threat and remained determined to stay in Vienna, even following the Anschluss of 13 March 1938, in which Nazi Germany annexed Austria, and the outbreaks of violent antisemitism that ensued. Jones, the then president of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), flew into Vienna from London via Prague on 15 March determined to get Freud to change his mind and seek exile in Britain. This prospect and the shock of the arrest and interrogation of Anna Freud by the Gestapo finally convinced Freud it was time to leave Austria. Jones left for London the following week with a list provided by Freud of the party of émigrés for whom immigration permits would be required. Back in London, Jones used his personal acquaintance with the Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, to expedite the granting of permits. There were seventeen in all and work permits were provided where relevant. Jones also used his influence in scientific circles, persuading the president of the Royal Society, Sir William Bragg, to write to the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, requesting to good effect that diplomatic pressure be applied in Berlin and Vienna on Freud's behalf. Freud also had support from American diplomats, notably his ex-patient and American ambassador to France, William Bullitt. Bullitt alerted U.S. President Roosevelt to the increased dangers facing the Freuds, resulting in the American consul-general in Vienna, John Cooper Wiley, arranging regular monitoring of Berggasse 19. He also intervened by phone call during the Gestapo interrogation of Anna Freud.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: The departure from Vienna began in stages throughout April and May 1938. Freud's grandson, Ernst Halberstadt, and Freud's son Martin's wife and children left for Paris in April. Freud's sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, left for London on 5 May, Martin Freud the following week and Freud's daughter Mathilde and her husband, Robert Hollitscher, on 24 May.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: By the end of the month, arrangements for Freud's own departure for London had become stalled, mired in a legally tortuous and financially extortionate process of negotiation with the Nazi authorities. Under regulations imposed on its Jewish population by the new Nazi regime, a Kommissar was appointed to manage Freud's assets and those of the IPA whose headquarters were near Freud's home. Freud was allocated to Dr Anton Sauerwald, who had studied chemistry at Vienna University under Professor Josef Herzig, an old friend of Freud's. Sauerwald read Freud's books to further learn about him and became sympathetic toward his situation. Though required to disclose details of all Freud's bank accounts to his superiors and to arrange the destruction of the historic library of books housed in the offices of the IPA, Sauerwald did neither. Instead, he removed evidence of Freud's foreign bank accounts to his own safe-keeping and arranged the storage of the IPA library in the Austrian National Library, where it remained until the end of the war.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Though Sauerwald's intervention lessened the financial burden of the "flight" tax on Freud's declared assets, other substantial charges were levied concerning the debts of the IPA and the valuable collection of antiquities Freud possessed. Unable to access his own accounts, Freud turned to Princess Marie Bonaparte, the most eminent and wealthy of his French followers, who had travelled to Vienna to offer her support, and it was she who made the necessary funds available. This allowed Sauerwald to sign the necessary exit visas for Freud, his wife Martha, and daughter Anna. They left Vienna on the Orient Express on 4 June, accompanied by their housekeeper and a doctor, arriving in Paris the following day, where they stayed as guests of Marie Bonaparte, before travelling overnight to London, arriving at London Victoria station on 6 June.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Among those soon to call on Freud to pay their respects were Salvador Dalí, Stefan Zweig, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf, and H. G. Wells. Representatives of the Royal Society called with the Society's Charter for Freud, who had been elected a Foreign Member in 1936, to sign himself into membership. Marie Bonaparte arrived near the end of June to discuss the fate of Freud's four elderly sisters left behind in Vienna. Her subsequent attempts to get them exit visas failed, and they would all die in Nazi concentration camps.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: In early 1939, Sauerwald arrived in London in mysterious circumstances, where he met Freud's brother Alexander. He was tried and imprisoned in 1945 by an Austrian court for his activities as a Nazi Party official. Responding to a plea from his wife, Anna Freud wrote to confirm that Sauerwald "used his office as our appointed commissar in such a manner as to protect my father". Her intervention helped secure his release from jail in 1947.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: In the Freuds' new home, 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, North London, Freud's Vienna consulting room was recreated in faithful detail. He continued to see patients there until the terminal stages of his illness. He also worked on his last books, "Moses and Monotheism", published in German in 1938 and in English the following year and the uncompleted "An Outline of Psychoanalysis", which was published posthumously.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: By mid-September 1939, Freud's cancer of the jaw was causing him increasingly severe pain and had been declared inoperable. The last book he read, Balzac's "La Peau de chagrin", prompted reflections on his own increasing frailty, and a few days later he turned to his doctor, friend, and fellow refugee, Max Schur, reminding him that they had previously discussed the terminal stages of his illness: "Schur, you remember our 'contract' not to leave me in the lurch when the time had come. Now it is nothing but torture and makes no sense." When Schur replied that he had not forgotten, Freud said, "I thank you," and then, "Talk it over with Anna, and if she thinks it's right, then make an end of it." Anna Freud wanted to postpone her father's death, but Schur convinced her it was pointless to keep him alive; on 21 and 22 September, he administered doses of morphine that resulted in Freud's death at around 3 am on 23 September 1939. However, discrepancies in the various accounts Schur gave of his role in Freud's final hours, which have in turn led to inconsistencies between Freud's main biographers, has led to further research and a revised account. This proposes that Schur was absent from Freud's deathbed when a third and final dose of morphine was administered by Dr. Josephine Stross, a colleague of Anna Freud, leading to Freud's death at around midnight on 23 September 1939.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Three days after his death, Freud's body was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium in North London, with Harrods acting as funeral directors, on the instructions of his son, Ernst. Funeral orations were given by Ernest Jones and the Austrian author Stefan Zweig. Freud's ashes were later placed in the crematorium's "Ernest George Columbarium" (see "Freud Corner"). They rest on a plinth designed by his son, Ernst, in a sealed ancient Greek bell krater painted with Dionysian scenes that Freud had received as a gift from Marie Bonaparte, and which he had kept in his study in Vienna for many years. After his wife, Martha, died in 1951, her ashes were also placed in the urn.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Freud began his study of medicine at the University of Vienna in 1873. He took almost nine years to complete his studies, due to his interest in neurophysiological research, specifically investigation of the sexual anatomy of eels and the physiology of the fish nervous system, and because of his interest in studying philosophy with Franz Brentano. He entered private practice in neurology for financial reasons, receiving his M.D. degree in 1881 at the age of 25. Amongst his principal concerns in the 1880s was the anatomy of the brain, specifically the medulla oblongata. He intervened in the important debates about aphasia with his monograph of 1891, "Zur Auffassung der Aphasien", in which he coined the term agnosia and counselled against a too locationist view of the explanation of neurological deficits. Like his contemporary Eugen Bleuler, he emphasized brain function rather than brain structure.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Freud was also an early researcher in the field of cerebral palsy, which was then known as "cerebral paralysis". He published several medical papers on the topic and showed that the disease existed long before other researchers of the period began to notice and study it. He also suggested that William John Little, the man who first identified cerebral palsy, was wrong about lack of oxygen during birth being a cause. Instead, he suggested that complications in birth were only a symptom.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: The origin of Freud's early work with psychoanalysis can be linked to Josef Breuer. Freud credited Breuer with opening the way to the discovery of the psychoanalytical method by his treatment of the case of Anna O. In November 1880, Breuer was called in to treat a highly intelligent 21-year-old woman (Bertha Pappenheim) for a persistent cough that he diagnosed as hysterical. He found that while nursing her dying father, she had developed some transitory symptoms, including visual disorders and paralysis and contractures of limbs, which he also diagnosed as hysterical. Breuer began to see his patient almost every day as the symptoms increased and became more persistent, and observed that she entered states of "absence". He found that when, with his encouragement, she told fantasy stories in her evening states of "absence" her condition improved, and most of her symptoms had disappeared by April 1881. Following the death of her father in that month her condition deteriorated again. Breuer recorded that some of the symptoms eventually remitted spontaneously and that full recovery was achieved by inducing her to recall events that had precipitated the occurrence of a specific symptom. In the years immediately following Breuer's treatment, Anna O. spent three short periods in sanatoria with the diagnosis "hysteria" with "somatic symptoms", and some authors have challenged Breuer's published account of a cure. Richard Skues rejects this interpretation, which he sees as stemming from both Freudian and anti-psychoanalytical revisionism — revisionism that regards both Breuer's narrative of the case as unreliable and his treatment of Anna O. as a failure.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: In the early 1890s, Freud used a form of treatment based on the one that Breuer had described to him, modified by what he called his "pressure technique" and his newly developed analytic technique of interpretation and reconstruction. According to Freud's later accounts of this period, as a result of his use of this procedure, most of his patients in the mid-1890s reported early childhood sexual abuse. He believed these accounts, which he used as the basis for his seduction theory, but then he came to believe that they were fantasies. He explained these at first as having the function of "fending off" memories of infantile masturbation, but in later years he wrote that they represented Oedipal fantasies, stemming from innate drives that are sexual and destructive in nature.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Another version of events focuses on Freud's proposing that unconscious memories of infantile sexual abuse were at the root of the psychoneuroses in letters to Fliess in October 1895, before he reported that he had actually discovered such abuse among his patients. In the first half of 1896, Freud published three papers, which led to his seduction theory, stating that he had uncovered, in all of his current patients, deeply repressed memories of sexual abuse in early childhood. In these papers, Freud recorded that his patients were not consciously aware of these memories, and must therefore be present as "unconscious memories" if they were to result in hysterical symptoms or obsessional neurosis. The patients were subjected to considerable pressure to "reproduce" infantile sexual abuse "scenes" that Freud was convinced had been repressed into the unconscious. Patients were generally unconvinced that their experiences of Freud's clinical procedure indicated actual sexual abuse. He reported that even after a supposed "reproduction" of sexual scenes the patients assured him emphatically of their disbelief.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: As well as his pressure technique, Freud's clinical procedures involved analytic inference and the symbolic interpretation of symptoms to trace back to memories of infantile sexual abuse. His claim of one hundred percent confirmation of his theory only served to reinforce previously expressed reservations from his colleagues about the validity of findings obtained through his suggestive techniques. Freud subsequently showed inconsistency as to whether his seduction theory was still compatible with his later findings. In an addendum to "The Aetiology of Hysteria" he stated: "All this is true [the sexual abuse of children], but it must be remembered that at the time I wrote it I had not yet freed myself from my overvaluation of reality and my low valuation of phantasy". Some years later Freud explicitly rejected the claim of his colleague Ferenczi that his patients' reports of sexual molestation were actual memories instead of fantasies, and he tried to dissuade Ferenczi from making his views public. Karin Ahbel-Rappe concludes in her study "'I no longer believe': did Freud abandon the seduction theory?": "Freud marked out and started down a trail of investigation into the nature of the experience of infantile incest and its impact on the human psyche, and then abandoned this direction for the most part."


title: Sigmund Freud

text: As a medical researcher, Freud was an early user and proponent of cocaine as a stimulant as well as analgesic. He believed that cocaine was a cure for many mental and physical problems, and in his 1884 paper "On Coca" he extolled its virtues. Between 1883 and 1887 he wrote several articles recommending medical applications, including its use as an antidepressant. He narrowly missed out on obtaining scientific priority for discovering its anesthetic properties of which he was aware but had mentioned only in passing. (Karl Koller, a colleague of Freud's in Vienna, received that distinction in 1884 after reporting to a medical society the ways cocaine could be used in delicate eye surgery.) Freud also recommended cocaine as a cure for morphine addiction. He had introduced cocaine to his friend Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, who had become addicted to morphine taken to relieve years of excruciating nerve pain resulting from an infection acquired after injuring himself while performing an autopsy. His claim that Fleischl-Marxow was cured of his addiction was premature, though he never acknowledged that he had been at fault. Fleischl-Marxow developed an acute case of "cocaine psychosis", and soon returned to using morphine, dying a few years later still suffering from intolerable pain.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: The application as an anaesthetic turned out to be one of the few safe uses of cocaine, and as reports of addiction and overdose began to filter in from many places in the world, Freud's medical reputation became somewhat tarnished. After the "Cocaine Episode" Freud ceased to publicly recommend the use of the drug, but continued to take it himself occasionally for depression, migraine and nasal inflammation during the early 1890s, before discontinuing its use in 1896.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: The concept of the unconscious was central to Freud's account of the mind. Freud believed that while poets and thinkers had long known of the existence of the unconscious, he had ensured that it received scientific recognition in the field of psychology.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Freud states explicitly that his concept of the unconscious as he first formulated it was based on the theory of repression. He postulated a cycle in which ideas are repressed, but remain in the mind, removed from consciousness yet operative, then reappear in consciousness under certain circumstances. The postulate was based upon the investigation of cases of hysteria, which revealed instances of behaviour in patients that could not be explained without reference to ideas or thoughts of which they had no awareness and which analysis revealed were linked to the (real or imagined) repressed sexual scenarios of childhood. In his later re-formulations of the concept of repression in his 1915 paper 'Repression' ("Standard Edition" XIV) Freud introduced the distinction in the unconscious between primary repression linked to the universal taboo on incest ('innately present originally') and repression ('after expulsion') that was a product of an individual's life history ('acquired in the course of the ego's development') in which something that was at one point conscious is rejected or eliminated from consciousness.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: In his account of the development and modification of his theory of unconscious mental processes he sets out in his 1915 paper 'The Unconscious' ("Standard Edition" XIV), Freud identifies the three perspectives he employs: the dynamic, the economic and the topographical.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: The dynamic perspective concerns firstly the constitution of the unconscious by repression and secondly the process of "censorship" which maintains unwanted, anxiety-inducing thoughts as such. Here Freud is drawing on observations from his earliest clinical work in the treatment of hysteria.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: In the economic perspective the focus is on the trajectories of the repressed contents ("the vicissitudes of sexual impulses") as they undergo complex transformations in the process of both symptom formation and normal unconscious thought such as dreams and slips of the tongue. These were topics Freud explored in detail in "The Interpretation of Dreams" and "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life".


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Whereas both these former perspectives focus on the unconscious as it is about to enter consciousness, the topographical perspective represents a shift in which the systemic properties of the unconscious, its characteristic processes, and modes of operation such as Condensation and Displacement, are placed in the foreground.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: In his later work, notably in "The Ego and the Id" (1923), a second topography is introduced comprising id, ego and super-ego, which is superimposed on the first without replacing it. In this later formulation of the concept of the unconscious the id comprises a reservoir of instincts or drives, a portion of them being hereditary or innate, a portion repressed or acquired. As such, from the economic perspective, the id is the prime source of psychical energy and from the dynamic perspective it conflicts with the ego and the super-ego which, genetically speaking, are diversifications of the id.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Freud believed the function of dreams is to preserve sleep by representing as fulfilled wishes that which would otherwise awaken the dreamer.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: In Freud's theory dreams are instigated by the daily occurrences and thoughts of everyday life. In what Freud called the "dream-work", these "secondary process" thoughts ("word presentations"), governed by the rules of language and the reality principle, become subject to the "primary process" of unconscious thought ("thing presentations") governed by the pleasure principle, wish gratification and the repressed sexual scenarios of childhood. Because of the disturbing nature of the latter and other repressed thoughts and desires which may have become linked to them, the dream-work operates a censorship function, disguising by distortion, displacement, and condensation the repressed thoughts to preserve sleep.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: In the clinical setting, Freud encouraged free association to the dream's manifest content, as recounted in the dream narrative, to facilitate interpretative work on its latent content – the repressed thoughts and fantasies – and also on the underlying mechanisms and structures operative in the dream-work. As Freud developed his theoretical work on dreams he went beyond his theory of dreams as wish-fulfillments to arrive at an emphasis on dreams as "nothing other than a particular form of thinking... It is the dream-work that creates that form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming".


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Freud's theory of psychosexual development proposes that following on from the initial polymorphous perversity of infantile sexuality, the sexual "drives" pass through the distinct developmental phases of the oral, the anal, and the phallic. Though these phases then give way to a latency stage of reduced sexual interest and activity (from the age of five to puberty, approximately), they leave, to a greater or lesser extent, a "perverse" and bisexual residue which persists during the formation of adult genital sexuality. Freud argued that neurosis and perversion could be explained in terms of fixation or regression to these phases whereas adult character and cultural creativity could achieve a sublimation of their perverse residue.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: After Freud's later development of the theory of the Oedipus complex this normative developmental trajectory becomes formulated in terms of the child's renunciation of incestuous desires under the fantasised threat of (or fantasised fact of, in the case of the girl) castration. The "dissolution" of the Oedipus complex is then achieved when the child's rivalrous identification with the parental figure is transformed into the pacifying identifications of the Ego ideal which assume both similarity and difference and acknowledge the separateness and autonomy of the other.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Freud hoped to prove that his model was universally valid and turned to ancient mythology and contemporary ethnography for comparative material arguing that totemism reflected a ritualized enactment of a tribal Oedipal conflict.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Freud proposed that the human psyche could be divided into three parts: Id, ego, and super-ego. Freud discussed this model in the 1920 essay "Beyond the Pleasure Principle", and fully elaborated upon it in "The Ego and the Id" (1923), in which he developed it as an alternative to his previous topographic schema (i.e., conscious, unconscious and preconscious). The id is the unconscious portion of the psyche that operates on the "pleasure principle" and is the source of basic impulses and drives; it seeks immediate pleasure and gratification. Freud acknowledged that his use of the term "Id" ("das Es", "the It") derives from the writings of Georg Groddeck.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: The super-ego is the moral component of the psyche. The rational ego attempts to exact a balance between the impractical hedonism of the id and the equally impractical moralism of the super-ego; it is the part of the psyche that is usually reflected most directly in a person's actions. When overburdened or threatened by its tasks, it may employ defence mechanisms including denial, repression, undoing, rationalization, and displacement. This concept is usually represented by the "Iceberg Model". This model represents the roles the id, ego, and super-ego play in relation to conscious and unconscious thought.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Freud compared the relationship between the ego and the id to that between a charioteer and his horses: the horses provide the energy and drive, while the charioteer provides direction.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Freud believed that the human psyche is subject to two conflicting drives: the life drive or libido and the death drive. The life drive was also termed "Eros" and the death drive "Thanatos", although Freud did not use the latter term; "Thanatos" was introduced in this context by Paul Federn. Freud hypothesized that libido is a form of mental energy with which processes, structures, and object-representations are invested.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: In "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" (1920), Freud inferred the existence of a death drive. Its premise was a regulatory principle that has been described as "the principle of psychic inertia", "the Nirvana principle", and "the conservatism of instinct". Its background was Freud's earlier "Project for a Scientific Psychology", where he had defined the principle governing the mental apparatus as its tendency to divest itself of quantity or to reduce tension to zero. Freud had been obliged to abandon that definition, since it proved adequate only to the most rudimentary kinds of mental functioning, and replaced the idea that the apparatus tends toward a level of zero tension with the idea that it tends toward a minimum level of tension.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Freud in effect readopted the original definition in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle", this time applying it to a different principle. He asserted that on certain occasions the mind acts as though it could eliminate tension, or in effect to reduce itself to a state of extinction; his key evidence for this was the existence of the compulsion to repeat. Examples of such repetition included the dream life of traumatic neurotics and children's play. In the phenomenon of repetition, Freud saw a psychic trend to work over earlier impressions, to master them and derive pleasure from them, a trend that was before the pleasure principle but not opposed to it. In addition to that trend, there was also a principle at work that was opposed to, and thus "beyond" the pleasure principle. If repetition is a necessary element in the binding of energy or adaptation, when carried to inordinate lengths it becomes a means of abandoning adaptations and reinstating earlier or less evolved psychic positions. By combining this idea with the hypothesis that all repetition is a form of discharge, Freud concluded that the compulsion to repeat is an effort to restore a state that is both historically primitive and marked by the total draining of energy: death. Such an explanation has been described by some scholars as "metaphysical biology".


title: Sigmund Freud

text: In his 1917 essay "Mourning and Melancholia", Freud distinguished mourning, painful but an inevitable part of life, and "melancholia", his term for pathological refusal of a mourner to "decathect" from the lost one. Freud claimed that, in normal mourning, the ego was responsible for narcissistically detaching the libido from the lost one as a means of self-preservation, but that in "melancholia", prior ambivalence towards the lost one prevents this from occurring. Suicide, Freud hypothesized, could result in extreme cases, when unconscious feelings of conflict became directed against the mourner's own ego.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Freud's account of femininity is grounded in his theory of psychic development as it traces the uneven transition from the earliest stages of infantile and childhood sexuality, characterised by polymorphous perversity and a bisexual disposition, through to the fantasy scenarios and rivalrous identifications of the Oedipus complex and on to the greater or lesser extent these are modified in adult sexuality. There are different trajectories for the boy and the girl which arise as effects of the castration complex. Anatomical difference, the possession of a penis, induces castration anxiety for the boy whereas the girl experiences a sense of deprivation. In the boy's case the castration complex concludes the Oedipal phase whereas for the girl it precipitates it.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: The constraint of the erotic feelings and fantasies of the girl and her turning away from the mother to the father is an uneven and precarious process entailing “waves of repression”. The normal outcome is, according to Freud, the vagina becoming “the new leading zone” of sexual sensitivity, displacing the previously dominant clitoris, the phallic properties of which made it indistinguishable in the child's early sexual life from the penis. This leaves a legacy of penis envy and emotional ambivalence for the girl which was “intimately related to the essence of femininity” and leads to “the greater proneness of women to neurosis and especially hysteria.” In his last paper on the topic Freud likewise concludes that “the development of femininity remains exposed to disturbance by the residual phenomena of the early masculine period... Some portion of what we men call the ‘enigma of women’ may perhaps be derived from this expression of bisexuality in women's lives.”


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Initiating what became the first debate within psychoanalysis on femininity, Karen Horney of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute set out to challenge Freud's account of femininity. Rejecting Freud's theories of the feminine castration complex and penis envy, Horney argued for a primary femininity and penis envy as a defensive formation rather than arising from the fact, or "injury", of biological asymmetry as Freud held. Horney had the influential support of Melanie Klein and Ernest Jones who coined the term "phallocentrism" in his critique of Freud's position.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: In defending Freud against this critique, feminist scholar Jacqueline Rose has argued that it presupposes a more normative account of female sexual development than that given by Freud. She finds that Freud moved from a description of the little girl stuck with her 'inferiority' or 'injury' in the face of the anatomy of the little boy to an account in his later work which explicitly describes the process of becoming 'feminine' as an 'injury' or 'catastrophe' for the complexity of her earlier psychic and sexual life.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Throughout his deliberations on what he described as the “dark continent” of female sexuality and the "riddle" of femininity, Freud was careful to emphasise the “average validity” and provisional nature of his findings. He did, however, in response to his critics, maintain a steadfast objection "to all of you ... to the extent that you do not distinguish more clearly between what is psychic and what is biological..."


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Freud regarded the monotheistic God as an illusion based upon the infantile emotional need for a powerful, supernatural pater familias. He maintained that religion – once necessary to restrain man's violent nature in the early stages of civilization – in modern times, can be set aside in favor of reason and science. "Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices" (1907) notes the likeness between faith (religious belief) and neurotic obsession. "Totem and Taboo" (1913) proposes that society and religion begin with the patricide and eating of the powerful paternal figure, who then becomes a revered collective memory. These arguments were further developed in "The Future of an Illusion" (1927) in which Freud argues that the function of religious belief is psychological consolation. He argues that the belief in a supernatural protector serves as a buffer against man's "fear of nature", just as the belief in an afterlife serves as a buffer against man's fear of death. The core idea of the work is that religious belief can be explained through its function in society, not through its relation to the truth. In the first part of "Civilization and Its Discontents" (1930), he considers the "oceanic feeling" of wholeness, limitlessness, and eternity (brought to his attention by his friend Romain Rolland), as a possible source for religious feelings. He notes that he has no experience of this feeling himself, and suggests that it is a regression into the state of consciousness that precedes the ego's differentiation of itself from the world of objects and others. "Moses and Monotheism" (1937) proposes that Moses was the tribal pater familias, killed by the Jews, who psychologically coped with the patricide with a reaction formation conducive to their establishing monotheistic Judaism; analogously, he described the Roman Catholic rite of Holy Communion as cultural evidence of the killing and devouring of the sacred father.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Moreover, he perceived religion, with its suppression of violence, as mediator of the societal and personal, the public and the private, conflicts between Eros and Thanatos, the forces of life and death. Later works indicate Freud's pessimism about the future of civilization, which he noted in the 1931 edition of "Civilization and its Discontents". Humphrey Skelton described Freud's worldview as one of "stoical humanism". The Humanist Heritage project summed his contributions to understanding of religion by saying:


title: Sigmund Freud

text: In a footnote of his 1909 work, "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy", Freud theorized that the universal fear of castration was provoked in the uncircumcised when they perceived circumcision and that this was "the deepest unconscious root of anti-Semitism".


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Freud's legacy, though a highly contested area of controversy, has been assessed as "one of the strongest influences on twentieth-century thought, its impact comparable only to that of Darwinism and Marxism," with its range of influence permeating "all the fields of culture ... so far as to change our way of life and concept of man."


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Though not the first methodology in the practice of individual verbal psychotherapy, Freud's psychoanalytic system came to dominate the field from early in the twentieth century, forming the basis for many later variants. While these systems have adopted different theories and techniques, all have followed Freud by attempting to achieve psychic and behavioral change through having patients talk about their difficulties. Psychoanalysis is not as influential as it once was in Europe and the United States, though in some parts of the world, notably Latin America, its influence in the later 20th century expanded substantially. Psychoanalysis also remains influential within many contemporary schools of psychotherapy and has led to innovative therapeutic work in schools and with families and groups. There is a substantial body of research which demonstrates the efficacy of the clinical methods of psychoanalysis and of related psychodynamic therapies in treating a wide range of psychological disorders.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: The neo-Freudians, a group including Alfred Adler, Otto Rank, Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm, rejected Freud's theory of instinctual drive, emphasized interpersonal relations and self-assertiveness, and made modifications to therapeutic practice that reflected these theoretical shifts. Adler originated the approach, although his influence was indirect due to his inability to systematically formulate his ideas. The neo-Freudian analysis places more emphasis on the patient's relationship with the analyst and less on the exploration of the unconscious.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Carl Jung believed that the collective unconscious, which reflects the cosmic order and the history of the human species, is the most important part of the mind. It contains archetypes, which are manifested in symbols that appear in dreams, disturbed states of mind, and various products of culture. Jungians are less interested in infantile development and psychological conflict between wishes and the forces that frustrate them than in integration between different parts of the person. The object of Jungian therapy was to mend such splits. Jung focused in particular on problems of middle and later life. His objective was to allow people to experience the split-off aspects of themselves, such as the anima (a man's suppressed female self), the animus (a woman's suppressed male self), or the shadow (an inferior self-image), and thereby attain wisdom.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Jacques Lacan approached psychoanalysis through linguistics and literature. Lacan believed that most of Freud's essential work had been done before 1905 and concerned the interpretation of dreams, neurotic symptoms, and slips, which had been based on a revolutionary way of understanding language and its relation to experience and subjectivity, and that ego psychology and object relations theory were based upon misreadings of Freud's work. For Lacan, the determinative dimension of human experience is neither the self (as in ego psychology) nor relations with others (as in object relations theory), but language. Lacan saw desire as more important than need and considered it necessarily ungratifiable.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Wilhelm Reich developed ideas that Freud had developed at the beginning of his psychoanalytic investigation but then superseded but never finally discarded. These were the concept of the Actualneurosis and a theory of anxiety based upon the idea of dammed-up libido. In Freud's original view, what really happened to a person (the "actual") determined the resulting neurotic disposition. Freud applied that idea both to infants and to adults. In the former case, seductions were sought as the causes of later neuroses and in the latter incomplete sexual release. Unlike Freud, Reich retained the idea that actual experience, especially sexual experience, was of key significance. By the 1920s, Reich had "taken Freud's original ideas about sexual release to the point of specifying the orgasm as the criteria of healthy function." Reich was also "developing his ideas about character into a form that would later take shape, first as "muscular armour", and eventually as a transducer of universal biological energy, the "orgone"."


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Fritz Perls, who helped to develop Gestalt therapy, was influenced by Reich, Jung, and Freud. The key idea of gestalt therapy is that Freud overlooked the structure of awareness, "an active process that moves toward the construction of organized meaningful wholes... between an organism and its environment." These wholes, called "gestalts", are "patterns involving all the layers of organismic function – thought, feeling, and activity." Neurosis is seen as splitting in the formation of gestalts, and anxiety as the organism sensing "the struggle towards its creative unification." Gestalt therapy attempts to cure patients by placing them in contact with "immediate organismic needs." Perls rejected the verbal approach of classical psychoanalysis; talking in gestalt therapy serves the purpose of self-expression rather than gaining self-knowledge. Gestalt therapy usually takes place in groups, and in concentrated "workshops" rather than being spread out over a long period of time; it has been extended into new forms of communal living.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Arthur Janov's primal therapy, which has been influential post-Freudian psychotherapy, resembles psychoanalytic therapy in its emphasis on early childhood experience but has also differences with it. While Janov's theory is akin to Freud's early idea of Actualneurosis, he does not have a dynamic psychology but a nature psychology like that of Reich or Perls, in which need is primary while wish is derivative and dispensable when need is met. Despite its surface similarity to Freud's ideas, Janov's theory lacks a strictly psychological account of the unconscious and belief in infantile sexuality. While for Freud there was a hierarchy of dangerous situations, for Janov the key event in the child's life is an awareness that the parents do not love it. Janov writes in "The Primal Scream" (1970) that primal therapy has in some ways returned to Freud's early ideas and techniques.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, co-authors of "The Courage to Heal" (1988), are described as "champions of survivorship" by Frederick Crews, who considers Freud the key influence upon them, although in his view they are indebted not to classic psychoanalysis but to "the pre-psychoanalytic Freud... who supposedly took pity on his hysterical patients, found that they were all harboring memories of early abuse... and cured them by unknotting their repression." Crews sees Freud as having anticipated the recovered memory movement by emphasizing "mechanical cause-and-effect relations between symptomatology and the premature stimulation of one body zone or another", and with pioneering its "technique of thematically matching a patient's symptom with a sexually symmetrical 'memory.'" Crews believes that Freud's confidence in accurate recall of early memories anticipates the theories of recovered memory therapists such as Lenore Terr, which in his view have led to people being wrongfully imprisoned or involved in litigation.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Research projects designed to test Freud's theories empirically have led to a vast literature on the topic. American psychologists began to attempt to study repression in the experimental laboratory around 1930. In 1934, when the psychologist Saul Rosenzweig sent Freud reprints of his attempts to study repression, Freud responded with a dismissive letter stating that "the wealth of reliable observations" on which psychoanalytic assertions were based made them "independent of experimental verification." Seymour Fisher and Roger P. Greenberg concluded in 1977 that some of Freud's concepts were supported by empirical evidence. Their analysis of research literature supported Freud's concepts of oral and anal personality constellations, his account of the role of Oedipal factors in certain aspects of male personality functioning, his formulations about the relatively greater concern about the loss of love in women's as compared to men's personality economy, and his views about the instigating effects of homosexual anxieties on the formation of paranoid delusions. They also found limited and equivocal support for Freud's theories about the development of homosexuality. They found that several of Freud's other theories, including his portrayal of dreams as primarily containers of secret, unconscious wishes, as well as some of his views about the psychodynamics of women, were either not supported or contradicted by research. Reviewing the issues again in 1996, they concluded that much experimental data relevant to Freud's work exists, and supports some of his major ideas and theories.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Other viewpoints include those of Hans Eysenck, who writes in "Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire" (1985) that Freud set back the study of psychology and psychiatry "by something like fifty years or more", and Malcolm Macmillan, who concludes in "Freud Evaluated" (1991) that "Freud's method is not capable of yielding objective data about mental processes". Morris Eagle states that it has been "demonstrated quite conclusively that because of the epistemologically contaminated status of clinical data derived from the clinical situation, such data have questionable probative value in the testing of psychoanalytic hypotheses". Richard Webster, in "Why Freud Was Wrong" (1995), described psychoanalysis as perhaps the most complex and successful pseudoscience in history. Crews believes that psychoanalysis has no scientific or therapeutic merit. University of Chicago research associate Kurt Jacobsen takes these critics to task for their own supposedly dogmatic and historically naive views both about psychoanalysis and the nature of science.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: I.B. Cohen regards Freud's "Interpretation of Dreams" as a revolutionary work of science, the last such work to be published in book form.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: In contrast Allan Hobson believes that Freud, by rhetorically discrediting 19th century investigators of dreams such as Alfred Maury and the Marquis de Hervey de Saint-Denis at a time when study of the physiology of the brain was only beginning, interrupted the development of scientific dream theory for half a century. The dream researcher G. William Domhoff has disputed claims of Freudian dream theory being validated.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: The philosopher Karl Popper, who argued that all proper scientific theories must be potentially falsifiable, claimed that Freud's Psychoanalytic Theories were presented in unfalsifiable form, meaning that no experiment could ever disprove them. The philosopher Adolf Grünbaum argues in "The Foundations of Psychoanalysis" (1984) that Popper was mistaken and that many of Freud's theories are empirically testable, a position with which others such as Eysenck agree. The philosopher Roger Scruton, writing in "Sexual Desire" (1986), also rejected Popper's arguments, pointing to the theory of repression as an example of a Freudian theory that does have testable consequences. Scruton nevertheless concluded that psychoanalysis is not genuinely scientific, because it involves an unacceptable dependence on metaphor. The philosopher Donald Levy agrees with Grünbaum that Freud's theories are falsifiable but disputes Grünbaum's contention that therapeutic success is only the empirical basis on which they stand or fall, arguing that a much wider range of empirical evidence can be adduced if clinical case material is taken into consideration.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: In a study of psychoanalysis in the United States, Nathan Hale reported on the "decline of psychoanalysis in psychiatry" during the years 1965–1985. The continuation of this trend was noted by Alan Stone: "As academic psychology becomes more 'scientific' and psychiatry more biological, psychoanalysis is being brushed aside." Paul Stepansky, while noting that psychoanalysis remains influential in the humanities, records the "vanishingly small number of psychiatric residents who choose to pursue psychoanalytic training" and the "nonanalytic backgrounds of psychiatric chairpersons at major universities" among the evidence he cites for his conclusion that "Such historical trends attest to the marginalisation of psychoanalysis within American psychiatry." Nonetheless, Freud was ranked as the third most cited psychologist of the 20th century, according to a "Review of General Psychology" survey of American psychologists and psychology texts, published in 2002. It is also claimed that in moving beyond the "orthodoxy of the not so distant past... new ideas and new research has led to an intense reawakening of interest in psychoanalysis from neighbouring disciplines ranging from the humanities to neuroscience and including the non-analytic therapies".


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Research in the emerging field of neuropsychoanalysis, founded by neuroscientist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms, has proved controversial with some psychoanalysts criticising the very concept itself. Solms and his colleagues have argued for neuro-scientific findings being "broadly consistent" with Freudian theories pointing out brain structures relating to Freudian concepts such as libido, drives, the unconscious, and repression. Neuroscientists who have endorsed Freud's work include David Eagleman who believes that Freud "transformed psychiatry" by providing "the first exploration of the way in which hidden states of the brain participate in driving thought and behavior" and Nobel laureate Eric Kandel who argues that "psychoanalysis still represents the most coherent and intellectually satisfying view of the mind."


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Psychoanalysis has been interpreted as both radical and conservative. By the 1940s, it had come to be seen as conservative by the European and American intellectual community. Critics outside the psychoanalytic movement, whether on the political left or right, saw Freud as a conservative. Fromm had argued that several aspects of psychoanalytic theory served the interests of political reaction in his "The Fear of Freedom" (1942), an assessment confirmed by sympathetic writers on the right. In "" (1959), Philip Rieff portrayed Freud as a man who urged men to make the best of an inevitably unhappy fate, and admirable for that reason. In the 1950s, Herbert Marcuse challenged the then prevailing interpretation of Freud as a conservative in "Eros and Civilization" (1955), as did Lionel Trilling in "Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture" and Norman O. Brown in "Life Against Death" (1959). "Eros and Civilization" helped make the idea that Freud and Karl Marx were addressing similar questions from different perspectives credible to the left. Marcuse criticized neo-Freudian revisionism for discarding seemingly pessimistic theories such as the death instinct, arguing that they could be turned in a utopian direction. Freud's theories also influenced the Frankfurt School and critical theory as a whole.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Freud has been compared to Marx by Reich, who saw Freud's importance for psychiatry as parallel to that of Marx for economics, and by Paul Robinson, who sees Freud as a revolutionary whose contributions to twentieth-century thought are comparable in importance to Marx's contributions to the nineteenth-century thought. Fromm calls Freud, Marx, and Einstein the "architects of the modern age", but rejects the idea that Marx and Freud were equally significant, arguing that Marx was both far more historically important and a finer thinker. Fromm nevertheless credits Freud with permanently changing the way human nature is understood. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari write in "Anti-Oedipus" (1972) that psychoanalysis resembles the Russian Revolution in that it became corrupted almost from the beginning. They believe this began with Freud's development of the theory of the Oedipus complex, which they see as idealist.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Jean-Paul Sartre critiques Freud's theory of the unconscious in "Being and Nothingness" (1943), claiming that consciousness is essentially self-conscious. Sartre also attempts to adapt some of Freud's ideas to his own account of human life, and thereby develop an "existential psychoanalysis" in which causal categories are replaced by teleological categories. Maurice Merleau-Ponty considers Freud to be one of the anticipators of phenomenology, while Theodor W. Adorno considers Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, to be Freud's philosophical opposite, writing that Husserl's polemic against psychologism could have been directed against psychoanalysis. Paul Ricœur sees Freud as one of the three "masters of suspicion", alongside Marx and Nietzsche, for their unmasking 'the lies and illusions of consciousness'. Ricœur and Jürgen Habermas have helped create a "hermeneutic version of Freud", one which "claimed him as the most significant progenitor of the shift from an objectifying, empiricist understanding of the human realm to one stressing subjectivity and interpretation." Louis Althusser drew on Freud's concept of overdetermination for his reinterpretation of Marx's "Capital". Jean-François Lyotard developed a theory of the unconscious that reverses Freud's account of the dream-work: for Lyotard, the unconscious is a force whose intensity is manifest via disfiguration rather than condensation. Jacques Derrida finds Freud to be both a late figure in the history of western metaphysics and, with Nietzsche and Heidegger, a precursor of his own brand of radicalism.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Several scholars see Freud as parallel to Plato, writing that they hold nearly the same theory of dreams and have similar theories of the tripartite structure of the human soul or personality, even if the hierarchy between the parts of the soul is almost reversed. Ernest Gellner argues that Freud's theories are an inversion of Plato's. Whereas Plato saw a hierarchy inherent in the nature of reality and relied upon it to validate norms, Freud was a naturalist who could not follow such an approach. Both men's theories drew a parallel between the structure of the human mind and that of society, but while Plato wanted to strengthen the super-ego, which corresponded to the aristocracy, Freud wanted to strengthen the ego, which corresponded to the middle class. Paul Vitz compares Freudian psychoanalysis to Thomism, noting St. Thomas's belief in the existence of an "unconscious consciousness" and his "frequent use of the word and concept 'libido' – sometimes in a more specific sense than Freud, but always in a manner in agreement with the Freudian use." Vitz suggests that Freud may have been unaware his theory of the unconscious was reminiscent of Aquinas.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: The poem "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" was published by British poet W. H. Auden in his 1940 collection "Another Time". Auden describes Freud as having created "a whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our different lives."


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Literary critic Harold Bloom has been influenced by Freud. Camille Paglia has also been influenced by Freud, whom she calls "Nietzsche's heir" and one of the greatest sexual psychologists in literature, but has rejected the scientific status of his work in her "Sexual Personae" (1990), writing, "Freud has no rivals among his successors because they think he wrote science, when in fact he wrote art."


title: Sigmund Freud

text: The decline in Freud's reputation has been attributed partly to the revival of feminism. Simone de Beauvoir criticizes psychoanalysis from an existentialist standpoint in "The Second Sex" (1949), arguing that Freud saw an "original superiority" in the male that is in reality socially induced. Betty Friedan criticizes Freud and what she considered his Victorian view of women in "The Feminine Mystique" (1963). Freud's concept of penis envy was attacked by Kate Millett, who in "Sexual Politics" (1970) accused him of confusion and oversights. In 1968, the US-American feminist Anne Koedt wrote in her essay "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm:" "It was Freud's feelings about women's secondary and inferior relationship to men that formed the basis for his theories on female sexuality. Once having laid down the law about the nature of our sexuality, Freud not so strangely discovered a tremendous problem of frigidity in women. His recommended cure for a frigid woman was psychiatric care. She was suffering from failure to mentally adjust to her 'natural' role as a woman." Naomi Weisstein writes that Freud and his followers erroneously thought his "years of intensive clinical experience" added up to scientific rigor.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Freud is also criticized by Shulamith Firestone and Eva Figes. In "The Dialectic of Sex" (1970), Firestone argues that Freud was a "poet" who produced metaphors rather than literal truths; in her view, Freud, like feminists, recognized that sexuality was the crucial problem of modern life, but ignored the social context and failed to question society itself. Firestone interprets Freud's "metaphors" in terms of the facts of power within the family. Figes tries in "Patriarchal Attitudes" (1970) to place Freud within a "history of ideas". Juliet Mitchell defends Freud against his feminist critics in "Psychoanalysis and Feminism" (1974), accusing them of misreading him and misunderstanding the implications of psychoanalytic theory for feminism. Mitchell helped introduce English-speaking feminists to Lacan. Mitchell is criticized by Jane Gallop in "The Daughter's Seduction" (1982). Gallop compliments Mitchell for her criticism of feminist discussions of Freud but finds her treatment of Lacanian theory lacking.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Some French feminists, among them Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, have been influenced by Freud as interpreted by Lacan. Irigaray has produced a theoretical challenge to Freud and Lacan, using their theories against them to put forward a "psychoanalytic explanation for theoretical bias". Irigaray, who claims that "the cultural unconscious only recognizes the male sex", describes how this affects "accounts of the psychology of women".


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Psychologist Carol Gilligan writes that "The penchant of developmental theorists to project a masculine image, and one that appears frightening to women, goes back at least to Freud." She sees Freud's criticism of women's sense of justice reappearing in the work of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg. Gilligan notes that Nancy Chodorow, in contrast to Freud, attributes sexual difference not to anatomy but to the fact that male and female children have different early social environments. Chodorow, writing against the masculine bias of psychoanalysis, "replaces Freud's negative and derivative description of female psychology with a positive and direct account of her own."


title: Sigmund Freud

text: In her analysis of Freud's work on religion in relation to gender, Judith Van Herik noted that Freud paired femininity and the concept of weakness with Christianity and wish fulfillment while associating masculinity and renunciation with Judaism.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Toril Moi has developed a feminist perspective on psychoanalysis proposing that it is a discourse that "attempts to understand the psychic consequences of three universal traumas: the fact that there are others, the fact of sexual difference, and the fact of death". She replaces Freud's term of castration with Stanley Cavell's concept of "victimization" which is a more universal term that applies equally to both sexes. Moi regards this concept of human finitude as a suitable replacement for both castration and sexual difference as the traumatic "discovery of our separate, sexed, mortal existence" and how both men and women come to terms with it.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Sigmund Freud is the subject of three major films or TV series, the first of which was 1962's" " starring Montgomery Clift as Freud, directed by John Huston from a revision of a script by an uncredited Jean-Paul Sartre. The film is focused on Freud's early life from 1885 to 1890 and combines multiple case studies of Freud into single ones, and multiple friends of his into single characters.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: In 1984, the BBC produced the six-episode mini-series "Freud: the Life of a Dream" starring David Suchet in the lead role.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: The stage play "The Talking Cure" and subsequent film "A Dangerous Method" focus on the conflict between Freud and Carl Jung. Both are written by Christopher Hampton and are partly based on the nonfiction book "A Most Dangerous Method" by John Kerr. Viggo Mortensen plays Freud and Michael Fassbender plays Jung. The play is a reworking of an earlier unfilmed screenplay.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: More fanciful employments of Freud in fiction are "The Seven-Per-Cent Solution" by Nicholas Meyer, which centers on an encounter between Freud and the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, with a main part of the plot seeing Freud helping Holmes overcome his cocaine addiction. Similarly, the 2020 Austrian-German series "Freud" involves a young Freud solving murder mysteries. The series has been criticized for having Freud be helped by a medium with real paranormal powers, when in reality Freud was quite skeptical of the paranormal. Freud also helps to solve a murder case in the 2006 novel The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld. In this novel he is accompanied by Carl Jung and Abraham Brill amongst others.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Mark St. Germain's 2009 play "Freud's Last Session" imagines a meeting between C. S. Lewis, aged 40, and Freud, aged 83, at Freud's house in Hampstead, London, in 1939, as the Second World War is about to break out. The play is focused on the two men discussing religion and whether it should be seen as a sign of neurosis. The play is inspired by the 2003 nonfiction book "The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life" by Armand Nicholi which also inspired a four-part nonfiction PBS series. (Although, no such meeting took place, June Flewett, who as a teenager stayed with C. S. Lewis and his brother during the wartime London air raids, later married Freud's grandson Clement Freud.)


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Freud is employed to more comic effect in the 1983 film "Lovesick" in which Alec Guinness plays Freud's ghost who gives love advice to a modern psychiatrist played by Dudley Moore. Freud is also presented in a comedic light in the 1989 film, "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure". Portrayed by Rod Loomis, Freud is one of several historical figures recruited by the film's time traveling lead characters to assist them in passing their high school history class presentation.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: Canadian author Kim Morrissey's stage play about the Dora case, "Dora: A Case of Hysteria", attempts to thoroughly debunk Freud's approach to the case. French playwright Hélène Cixous' 1976 "Portrait of Dora" is also critical of Freud's approach, though less acerbically.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: The narrator of Bob Dylan's darkly humorous 2020 song "My Own Version of You" calls "Mr. Freud with his dreams" one of the "best-known enemies of mankind" and refers to him as burning in hell.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: A limited series dramatizing (and mythologizing) Freud's early career and breakthroughs as (very nearly) a form of vampire hunting or exorcistic experimentation was released by Netflix in 2020.


title: Sigmund Freud

text: "The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud". Translated from the German under the general editorship of James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey, Alan Tyson, and Angela Richards. 24 volumes, London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953–1974.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: Richard Wayne Van Dyke (born December 13, 1925) is an American actor, entertainer and comedian. His award-winning career has spanned seven decades in film, television, and stage.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: Van Dyke began his career as an entertainer on radio and television, in nightclubs, and on the Broadway stage. In 1961, he starred in the original production of "Bye Bye Birdie" alongside Chita Rivera, a role which earned him the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical. Carl Reiner then cast him as Rob Petrie on the CBS television sitcom "The Dick Van Dyke Show" (1961–1966), which made him a household name. He went on to star in the motion picture musicals "Bye Bye Birdie" (1963), "Mary Poppins" (1964), and "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" (1968), and in the comedy-drama "The Comic" (1969). He made guest appearances on television programs "Columbo" (1974) and "The Carol Burnett Show" (1977), and starred in "The New Dick Van Dyke Show" (1971–74), "" (1993–2001), and "Murder 101" (2006–08). Van Dyke has also made appearances in the motion pictures "Dick Tracy" (1990), "Curious George" (2006), "Night at the Museum" (2006), "" (2014), and "Mary Poppins Returns" (2018).


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: Van Dyke is the recipient of five Primetime Emmys, a Golden Globe, a Tony, and a Grammy Award, and was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1995. He received the Screen Actors Guild's highest honor, the SAG Life Achievement Award, in 2013. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 7021 Hollywood Boulevard and has also been recognized as a Disney Legend. In 2021, Van Dyke was honored with the Kennedy Center Honors.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: Van Dyke was born on December 13, 1925, in West Plains, Missouri, to Hazel Victoria (née McCord; 1896–1992), a stenographer, and Loren Wayne "Cookie" Van Dyke (1898–1976), a salesman. He grew up in Danville, Illinois. He is the older brother of actor Jerry Van Dyke (1931–2018), who appeared as his brother in "The Dick Van Dyke Show". Van Dyke is a Dutch surname, although he has English, Irish, and Scottish ancestry. His family line traces back to "Mayflower" passenger John Alden.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: In his youth, Van Dyke considered a career in the ministry, although a drama class in high school convinced him to become a professional entertainer. Throughout his acting career he continued to teach Sunday school in the Presbyterian Church where he was an elder, and he continued to read such theologians as Martin Buber, Paul Tillich, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: In 1944, Van Dyke left high school in his senior year to join the United States Army Air Forces for pilot training during World War II. Denied enlistment several times for being underweight, he was eventually accepted for service as a radio announcer before transferring to the Special Services and entertaining troops in the continental United States. He received his high school diploma in 2004.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: During the late 1940s, Van Dyke was a radio DJ on WDAN in Danville, Illinois. In 1947, Van Dyke was persuaded by pantomime performer Phil Erickson to form a comedy duo called "Eric and Van—the Merry Mutes." The team toured the West Coast nightclub circuit, performing a mime act and lip synching to 78 records. They moved to Atlanta, Georgia, in the early 1950s and performed a local television show featuring original skits and music called "The Merry Mutes".


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: In November 1959, Van Dyke made his Broadway debut in "The Girls Against the Boys". He played the lead role of Albert Peterson in "Bye Bye Birdie", which ran from April 14, 1960, to October 7, 1961. The musical won four Tony awards including Van Dyke's Best Featured Actor Tony, in 1961. In 1980, Van Dyke appeared in the title role in the first Broadway revival of "The Music Man".


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: Van Dyke's start in television was with WDSU-TV New Orleans Channel 6 (NBC), first as a single comedian and later as emcee of a comedy program. Van Dyke's first network TV appearance was with Dennis James on James' "Chance of a Lifetime" in 1954. He later appeared in two episodes of "The Phil Silvers Show" during its 1957–58 season. He also appeared early in his career on ABC's "The Pat Boone Chevy Showroom" and NBC's "The Polly Bergen Show". During this time a friend from the Army was working as an executive for CBS television and recommended Van Dyke to that network. Out of this came a seven-year contract with the network. During an interview on NPR's "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!" program, Van Dyke said he was the anchorman for the CBS Morning Show during this period with Walter Cronkite as his newsman.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: From 1961 to 1966, Van Dyke starred in the CBS sitcom "The Dick Van Dyke Show", in which he portrayed a comedy writer named Rob Petrie. Carl Reiner conceived the program and cast himself as the lead in the pilot, but CBS insisted on recasting, and Reiner chose Van Dyke to replace him in the role. Complementing Van Dyke was a veteran cast of comic actors including Rose Marie, Morey Amsterdam, Jerry Paris, Ann Morgan Guilbert, Richard Deacon, and Carl Reiner (as Alan Brady), as well as 23-year-old Mary Tyler Moore, who played Rob's wife Laura Petrie. Van Dyke won three Emmy Awards as Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series, and the series received four Emmy Awards as Outstanding Comedy Series.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: From 1971 to 1974, Van Dyke starred in an unrelated sitcom called "The New Dick Van Dyke Show" in which he portrayed a local television talk show host. Although the series was developed by Carl Reiner and starred Hope Lange as his wife, and he received a Golden Globe nomination for his performance, the show was less successful than its predecessor, and Van Dyke pulled the plug on the show after just three seasons. In 1973, Van Dyke voiced his animated likeness for the October 27, 1973, installment of Hanna-Barbera's "The New Scooby-Doo Movies", "Scooby-Doo Meets Dick Van Dyke," the series' final first-run episode. The following year, he received an Emmy Award nomination for his role as an alcoholic businessman in the television movie "The Morning After" (1974). Van Dyke revealed after its release that he had recently overcome a real-life drinking problem. He admits he was an alcoholic for 25 years. That same year he guest-starred as a murderous photographer on an episode of "Columbo", "Negative Reaction". Van Dyke returned to comedy in 1976 with the sketch comedy show "Van Dyke and Company," on which Andy Kaufman made his prime time debut. Despite being canceled after three months, the show won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy-Variety Series. After a few guest appearances on the long-running comedy-variety series "The Carol Burnett Show", Van Dyke became a regular on the show, in the fall of 1977. However, he appeared in only half of the episodes of the final season. For the next decade he appeared mostly in TV movies. One atypical role was as a murdering judge on the second episode of the TV series "Matlock" in 1986 starring Andy Griffith. In 1987, he guest-starred in an episode of "Airwolf", with his son Barry Van Dyke, who was the lead star of the show's fourth and final season on USA Network. In 1989, he guest-starred on the NBC comedy series "The Golden Girls" portraying a lover of Beatrice Arthur's character. This role earned him his first Emmy Award nomination since 1977.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: Van Dyke's film work affected his TV career: the reviews he received for his role as D.A. Fletcher in "Dick Tracy" led him to star as the character first in an episode of "Jake and the Fatman", then in a series of TV movies on CBS that became the foundation for his popular television drama "." The series ran from 1993 to 2001 with son Barry Van Dyke co-starring in the role of Dr. Sloan's son Lieutenant Detective Steve Sloan. Also starring on the same show was daytime soap actress Victoria Rowell as Dr. Sloan's pathologist/medical partner, Dr. Amanda Bentley, and Charlie Schlatter in the role of Dr. Sloan's student, Dr. Jesse Travis. Van Dyke continued to find television work after the show ended, including a dramatically and critically successful performance of "The Gin Game", produced for television in 2003 that reunited him with Mary Tyler Moore. In 2003, he portrayed a doctor on "Scrubs". A 2004 special of "The Dick Van Dyke Show" titled "The Dick Van Dyke Show Revisited" was heavily promoted as the first new episode of the classic series to be shown in 38 years. Van Dyke and his surviving cast members recreated their roles; although nominated for a Primetime Emmy, the program was roundly panned by critics. In 2006 he guest-starred as college professor Dr. Jonathan Maxwell for a series of "Murder 101" mystery films on the Hallmark Channel.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: For the Marvel Cinematic Universe television series, "WandaVision", Van Dyke was consulted by the producers on how to emulate "The Dick Van Dyke Show".


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: Van Dyke began his film career by playing the role of Albert J. Peterson in the film version of "Bye Bye Birdie" (1963). Despite his unhappiness with the adaptation—its focus differed from the stage version in that the story now centered on a previously supporting character—the film was a success. That same year, Van Dyke was cast in two roles: as Bert, a man who goes through multiple odd jobs, ultimately and memorably becoming a chimney sweep; and as bank chairman Mr. Dawes Senior, in Walt Disney's "Mary Poppins" (1964). For his scenes as the chairman, he was heavily costumed to look much older and was credited in that role as "Navckid Keyd" (at the end of the credits, the letters unscramble into "Dick Van Dyke," which was repeated in "Mary Poppins Returns"). Van Dyke's attempt at a cockney accent has been lambasted as one of the worst accents in film history, cited by actors since as an example of how not to sound. In a 2003 poll by "Empire" magazine of the worst-ever accents in film, he came in second (to Sean Connery in "The Untouchables", despite Connery winning an Academy Award for that performance). According to Van Dyke, his accent coach was Irish, who "didn't do an accent any better than I did", and that no one alerted him to how bad it was during the production. Still, "Mary Poppins" was successful on release and its appeal has endured. "Chim Chim Cher-ee", one of the songs that Van Dyke performed in "Mary Poppins", won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for the Sherman Brothers, the film's songwriting duo.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: Many of the comedy films Van Dyke starred in throughout the 1960s were relatively unsuccessful at the box office, including "What a Way to Go!" with Shirley MacLaine, "Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N.", "Fitzwilly", "The Art of Love" with James Garner and Elke Sommer, "Some Kind of a Nut", "Never a Dull Moment" with Edward G. Robinson, and "Divorce American Style" with Debbie Reynolds and Jean Simmons. But he also starred as Caractacus Potts (with his native accent, at his own insistence, despite the English setting) in the successful musical version of Ian Fleming's "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" (1968), which co-starred Sally Ann Howes and featured the same songwriters (The Sherman Brothers) and choreographers (Marc Breaux and Dee Dee Wood) as "Mary Poppins".


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: In 1969, Van Dyke appeared in the comedy-drama "The Comic", written and directed by Carl Reiner. Van Dyke portrayed a self-destructive silent film era comedian who struggles with alcoholism, depression, and his own rampant ego. Reiner wrote the film especially for Van Dyke, who often spoke of his admiration for silent film era comedians such as Charlie Chaplin and his hero Stan Laurel. Also in 1969, Van Dyke played Rev. Clayton Brooks, a small-town minister who leads his Iowa town to quit smoking for 30 days to win $25 million (equal to $ today) from a tobacco company in "Cold Turkey", although that film was not released until 1971.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: On "Larry King Live", Van Dyke mentioned that he turned down the lead role in "The Omen" which was played by Gregory Peck. He also mentioned that his dream role would have been the Scarecrow in "The Wizard of Oz". Twenty-one years later in 1990, Van Dyke, whose usual role had been the amiable hero, took a small but villainous turn as crooked DA Fletcher in Warren Beatty's film "Dick Tracy". Van Dyke returned to motion pictures in 2006 with "Curious George" as Mr. Bloomsberry and as villain Cecil Fredericks in the Ben Stiller film "Night at the Museum". He reprised the role in a cameo for the sequel, "" (2009), but it was cut from the film. It can be found in the special features on the DVD release. He also played the character again in the third film, "" (2014).


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: In 2018, Van Dyke portrayed Mr. Dawes Jr. in "Mary Poppins Returns". He had previously portrayed both Bert and Mr. Dawes, Sr. (Mr. Dawes, Jr.'s late father), in the original film.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: Van Dyke received a Grammy Award in 1964, along with Julie Andrews, for his performance on the soundtrack to "Mary Poppins". In 1970, he published "Faith, Hope and Hilarity: A Child's Eye View of Religion" a book of humorous anecdotes based largely on his experiences as a Sunday School teacher. Van Dyke was principal in "KXIV Inc." and owned 1400 AM KXIV in Phoenix from 1965 to 1982.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: As an a cappella enthusiast, Van Dyke has sung in a group called "Dick Van Dyke and The Vantastix" since September 2000. The quartet has performed several times in Los Angeles as well as on "Larry King Live", The First Annual TV Land Awards, and sang the national anthem at three Los Angeles Lakers games including a nationally televised NBA Finals performance on NBC. Van Dyke was made an honorary member of the Barbershop Harmony Society in 1999.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: Van Dyke became a computer animation enthusiast after purchasing a Commodore Amiga in 1991. He is credited with the creation of 3D-rendered effects used on "Diagnosis: Murder" and "The Dick Van Dyke Show Revisited". Van Dyke has displayed his computer-generated imagery work at SIGGRAPH, and continues to work with LightWave 3D.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: In 2010, Van Dyke appeared on a children's album titled "Rhythm Train," with Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith and singer Leslie Bixler. Van Dyke raps on one of the album's tracks.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: In 2017, Van Dyke released his first solo album since 1963's "Songs I Like". The album, "Step (Back) In Time", was produced by Bill Bixler (who also played sax), with arrangements by Dave Enos (who also played bass) and features noted musicians John Ferraro (drums), Tony Guerrero (trumpet & vocal duet), Mark LeBrun (piano), Charley Pollard (trombone) and Leslie Bixler (vocals). "Step (Back) In Time" was released by BixMix Records and showcases Van Dyke in a jazz and big band setting on classic songs from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: Van Dyke recorded a duet single for Christmas 2017 with actress Jane Lynch. The song, "We're Going Caroling," was written and produced by Tony Guerrero for Lynch's KitschTone Records label as a digital-only release.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: Van Dyke has often cited Stan Laurel, Buster Keaton, and Carl Reiner as his comedy influences and idols. Van Dyke stated on "Conan" that he called Laurel and admitted to him that he had stolen from him over the years, and Laurel replied, "Yes, I know". Entertainers who have cited Van Dyke as an influence include Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, Conan O'Brien, Jim Carrey, and Bryan Cranston.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: On February 12, 1948, while appearing at the Chapman Park Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, he and the former Margerie Willett were married on the radio show "Bride and Groom". They had four children: Christian, Barry, Stacy and Carrie Beth. They divorced in 1984 after a long separation.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: In 1976, Van Dyke began his relationship with longtime companion Michelle Triola Marvin. They lived together for more than 30 years, until her death in 2009.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: On February 29, 2012, at the age of 86, Van Dyke married 40-year-old make-up artist Arlene Silver. They had met six years earlier at the SAG awards.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: Van Dyke incorporated his children and grandchildren into his TV endeavors. Son Barry Van Dyke, grandsons Shane Van Dyke and Carey Van Dyke along with other Van Dyke grandchildren and relatives appeared in various episodes of the long-running series "". Although Stacy Van Dyke was not well known in show business, she made an appearance in the "Diagnosis: Murder" Christmas episode "Murder in the Family" (season 4) as Carol Sloan Hilton, the estranged daughter of Dr. Mark Sloan.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: All of Van Dyke's children are married, and he has seven grandchildren. His son Chris was district attorney for Marion County, Oregon, in the 1980s. In 1987, Van Dyke's granddaughter Jessica Van Dyke died from Reye syndrome, which led him to do a series of commercials to raise public awareness of the danger of aspirin to children.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: Van Dyke is sober after struggling with alcoholism for years, and he checked in to a hospital for three weeks in 1972 to be treated for his addiction.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: Van Dyke was a heavy smoker for most of his adult life. In a January 2013 interview with the London "Daily Telegraph," he said he had been using Nicorette gum for the past decade.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: In April 2013, Van Dyke revealed that for seven years he had been experiencing symptoms of a neurological disorder, in which he felt a pounding in his head whenever he lay down, but despite his undergoing tests, no diagnosis had been made. He had to cancel scheduled appearances owing to fatigue from lack of sleep because of the medical condition. In May 2013, he tweeted that it seemed his titanium dental implants may be responsible.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: On August 19, 2013, it was reported that the 87-year-old Van Dyke was rescued from his Jaguar by a passerby after the car had caught fire on the US 101 freeway in Calabasas, Los Angeles County. He was not injured in the fire, although the car burned down to its frame.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: Van Dyke endorsed Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primaries. In July 2016, while campaigning for Sanders, Van Dyke said of Donald Trump, "I haven't been this scared since the Cuban Missile Crisis. I think the human race is hanging in a delicate balance right now, and I'm just so afraid he will put us in a war. He scares me."


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: Van Dyke again endorsed and campaigned for Sanders in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries.


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: Van Dyke has received various awards, including a Grammy Award, four Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Tony Award. In 1961 he won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical for his performance in "Bye Bye Birdie". In 1964 he won a Grammy Award for Best Children's Album for "Mary Poppins". Nominated for 10 Primetime Emmy Awards, Van Dyke received four awards for his work on "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and "Van Dyke and Company".


title: Dick Van Dyke

text: In 2013, he received the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award. In 2021, he was honored with the Kennedy Center Honors, where he was given tribute by Julie Andrews, Steve Martin, Chita Rivera, Bryan Cranston and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Laura Osnes sang "Jolly Holiday", and Derek Hough performed "Step in Time" both from "Mary Poppins" (1964). Together Hough and Osnes performed "Put on a Happy Face" from "Bye Bye Birdie". Aaron Tveit sang "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" with Pentatonix.


title: United States dollar

text: The United States dollar (symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the official currency of the United States and several other countries. The Coinage Act of 1792 introduced the U.S. dollar at par with the Spanish silver dollar, divided it into 100 cents, and authorized the minting of coins denominated in dollars and cents. U.S. banknotes are issued in the form of Federal Reserve Notes, popularly called greenbacks due to their predominantly green color.


title: United States dollar

text: The monetary policy of the United States is conducted by the Federal Reserve System, which acts as the nation's central bank.


title: United States dollar

text: The U.S. dollar was originally defined under a bimetallic standard of (0.7735 troy ounces) fine silver or, from 1837, fine gold, or $20.67 per troy ounce. The Gold Standard Act of 1900 linked the dollar solely to gold. From 1934, its equivalence to gold was revised to $35 per troy ounce. Since 1971, all links to gold have been repealed.


title: United States dollar

text: The U.S. dollar became an important international reserve currency after the First World War, and displaced the pound sterling as the world's primary reserve currency by the Bretton Woods Agreement towards the end of the Second World War. The dollar is the in international transactions, and a free-floating currency. It is also the official currency in several countries and the "de facto" currency in many others, with Federal Reserve Notes (and, in a few cases, U.S. coins) used in circulation.


title: United States dollar

text: As of February 10, 2021, currency in circulation amounted to , of which is in Federal Reserve Notes (the remaining is in the form of coins and older-style United States Notes).


title: United States dollar

text: Article I, of the U.S. Constitution provides that Congress has the power "[t]o coin money." Laws implementing this power are currently codified in Title 31 of the U.S. Code, under Section 5112, which prescribes the forms in which the United States dollars should be issued. These coins are both designated in the section as "legal tender" in payment of debts. The Sacagawea dollar is one example of the copper alloy dollar, in contrast to the American Silver Eagle which is pure silver. Section 5112 also provides for the minting and issuance of other coins, which have values ranging from one cent (U.S. Penny) to 100 dollars. These other coins are more fully described in Coins of the United States dollar.


title: United States dollar

text: In 1792, the U.S. Congress passed the Coinage Act, of which Section 9 authorized the production of various coins, including:Section 20 of the Act designates the United States dollar as the unit of currency of the United States:


title: United States dollar

text: Unlike the Spanish milled dollar, the Continental Congress and the Coinage Act prescribed a decimal system of units to go with the unit dollar, as follows: the mill, or one-thousandth of a dollar; the cent, or one-hundredth of a dollar; the dime, or one-tenth of a dollar; and the eagle, or ten dollars. The current relevance of these units:


title: United States dollar

text: The Spanish peso or dollar was historically divided into eight reales (colloquially, "bits") – hence "pieces of eight". Americans also learned counting in non-decimal "bits" of cents before 1857 when Mexican "bits" were more frequently encountered than American cents; in fact this practice survived in New York Stock Exchange quotations until 2001.


title: United States dollar

text: In 1854, Secretary of the Treasury James Guthrie proposed creating $100, $50, and $25 gold coins, to be referred to as a "union", "half union", and "quarter union", respectively, thus implying a denomination of 1 Union = $100. However, no such coins were ever struck, and only patterns for the $50 half union exist.


title: United States dollar

text: When currently issued in circulating form, denominations less than or equal to a dollar are emitted as U.S. coins, while denominations greater than or equal to a dollar are emitted as Federal Reserve Notes, disregarding these special cases:


title: United States dollar

text: In the 16th century, Count Hieronymus Schlick of Bohemia began minting coins known as "joachimstalers", named for Joachimstal, the valley in which the silver was mined. In turn, the valley's name is titled after Saint Joachim, whereby "thal" or "tal", a cognate of the English word , is German for 'valley.' The "joachimstaler" was later shortened to the German "taler", a word that eventually found its way into many languages, including:


title: United States dollar

text: Though the Dutch pioneered in modern-day New York in the 17th century the use and the counting of money in silver dollars in the form of German-Dutch "reichsthalers" and native Dutch "leeuwendaalders" ('lion dollars'), it was the ubiquitous Spanish American eight-real coin which became exclusively known as the "dollar" since the 18th century.


title: United States dollar

text: The colloquialism "" (much like the British "quid" for the pound sterling) is often used to refer to dollars of various nations, including the U.S. dollar. This term, dating to the 18th century, may have originated with the colonial leather trade, or it may also have originated from a poker term.


title: United States dollar

text: Greenback is another nickname, originally applied specifically to the 19th-century Demand Note dollars, which were printed black and green on the backside, created by Abraham Lincoln to finance the North for the Civil War. It is still used to refer to the U.S. dollar (but not to the dollars of other countries). The term "greenback" is also used by the financial press in other countries, such as


title: United States dollar

text: Other well-known names of the dollar as a whole in denominations include greenmail, green, and dead presidents, the latter of which referring to the deceased presidents pictured on most bills. Dollars in general have also been known as bones (e.g. "twenty bones" = $20). The newer designs, with portraits displayed in the main body of the obverse (rather than in cameo insets), upon paper color-coded by denomination, are sometimes referred to as bigface notes or Monopoly money.


title: United States dollar

text: Piastre was the original French word for the U.S. dollar, used for example in the French text of the Louisiana Purchase. Though the U.S. dollar is called "dollar" in Modern French, the term "piastre" is still used among the speakers of Cajun French and New England French, as well as speakers in Haiti and other French-speaking Caribbean islands.


title: United States dollar

text: The symbol , usually written before the numerical amount, is used for the U.S. dollar (as well as for many other currencies). The sign was the result of a late 18th-century evolution of the scribal abbreviation p for the peso, the common name for the Spanish dollars that were in wide circulation in the New World from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The p and the s eventually came to be written over each other giving rise to $.


title: United States dollar

text: Another popular explanation is that it is derived from the Pillars of Hercules on the Spanish Coat of arms of the Spanish dollar. These Pillars of Hercules on the silver Spanish dollar coins take the form of two vertical bars (||) and a swinging cloth band in the shape of an S.


title: United States dollar

text: Yet another explanation suggests that the dollar sign was formed from the capital letters U and S written or printed one on top of the other. This theory, popularized by novelist Ayn Rand in "Atlas Shrugged", does not consider the fact that the symbol was already in use before the formation of the United States.


title: United States dollar

text: The U.S. dollar was introduced at par with the Spanish-American silver dollar (or "Spanish peso", "Spanish milled dollar", "eight-real coin", "piece-of-eight"). The latter was produced from the rich silver mine output of Spanish America; minted in Mexico City, Potosí (Bolivia), Lima (Peru) and elsewhere; and was in wide circulation throughout the Americas, Asia and Europe from the 16th to 19th centuries. The minting of machine-milled Spanish dollars since 1732 boosted its worldwide reputation as a trade coin and positioned it to be model for the new currency of the United States.


title: United States dollar

text: Even after the United States Mint commenced issuing coins in 1792, locally minted "dollars" and "cents" were less abundant in circulation than Spanish American "pesos" and "reales"; hence Spanish, Mexican and American dollars all remained legal tender in the United States until the Coinage Act of 1857. In particular, Colonists' familiarity with the Spanish two-"real quarter peso" was the reason for issuing a quasi-decimal 25-cent quarter dollar coin rather than a 20-cent coin.


title: United States dollar

text: For the relationship between the Spanish dollar and the individual state colonial currencies, see Connecticut pound, Delaware pound, Georgia pound, Maryland pound, Massachusetts pound, New Hampshire pound, New Jersey pound, New York pound, North Carolina pound, Pennsylvania pound, Rhode Island pound, South Carolina pound, and Virginia pound.


title: United States dollar

text: On July 6, 1785, the Continental Congress resolved that the money unit of the United States, the dollar, would contain 375.64 grains of fine silver; on August 8, 1786, the Continental Congress continued that definition and further resolved that the money of account, corresponding with the division of coins, would proceed in a decimal ratio, with the sub-units being mills at 0.001 of a dollar, cents at 0.010 of a dollar, and dimes at 0.100 of a dollar.


title: United States dollar

text: After the adoption of the United States Constitution, the U.S. dollar was defined by the Coinage Act of 1792. It specified a "dollar" based on the Spanish milled dollar to contain grains of fine silver, or of "standard silver" of fineness 371.25/416 = 89.24%; as well as an "eagle" to contain grains of fine gold, or of 22 karat or 91.67% fine gold. Alexander Hamilton arrived at these numbers based on a treasury assay of the average fine silver content of a selection of worn Spanish dollars, which came out to be 371 grains. Combined with the prevailing gold-silver ratio of 15, the standard for gold was calculated at 371/15 = 24.73 grains fine gold or 26.98 grains 22K gold. Rounding the latter to 27.0 grains finalized the dollar's standard to 24.75 grains of fine gold or 24.75*15 = 371.25 grains = 24.0566 grams = 0.7735 troy ounces of fine silver.


title: United States dollar

text: The same coinage act also set the value of an eagle at 10 dollars, and the dollar at eagle. It called for silver coins in denominations of 1, , , , and dollar, as well as gold coins in denominations of 1, and eagle. The value of gold or silver contained in the dollar was then converted into relative value in the economy for the buying and selling of goods. This allowed the value of things to remain fairly constant over time, except for the influx and outflux of gold and silver in the nation's economy.


title: United States dollar

text: Though a Spanish dollar freshly minted after 1772 theoretically contained 417.7 grains of silver of fineness 130/144 (or 377.1 grains fine silver), reliable assays of the period in fact confirmed a fine silver content of for the average Spanish dollar in circulation.


title: United States dollar

text: The new U.S. silver dollar of therefore compared favorably and was received at par with the Spanish dollar for foreign payments, and after 1803 the United States Mint had to suspend making this coin out of its limited resources since it failed to stay in domestic circulation. It was only after Mexican independence in 1821 when their peso's fine silver content of 377.1 grains was firmly upheld, which the U.S. later had to compete with using a heavier Trade dollar coin.


title: United States dollar

text: The early currency of the United States did not exhibit faces of presidents, as is the custom now; although today, by law, only the portrait of a deceased individual may appear on United States currency. In fact, the newly formed government was against having portraits of leaders on the currency, a practice compared to the policies of European monarchs. The currency as we know it today did not get the faces they currently have until after the early 20th century; before that "heads" side of coinage used profile faces and striding, seated, and standing figures from Greek and Roman mythology and composite Native Americans. The last coins to be converted to profiles of historic Americans were the dime (1946) and the Dollar (1971).


title: United States dollar

text: After the American Revolution, the thirteen colonies became independent. Freed from British monetary regulations, they each issued £sd paper money to pay for military expenses. The Continental Congress also began issuing "Continental Currency" denominated in Spanish dollars. For its value relative to states' currencies, see Early American currency.