Tag: Sigmund Freud
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Book review: Saving Freud: The Rescuers Who Brought Him to Freedom
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “A nation that produced Goethe could not possibly go to the bad.”– Sigmund Freud, 1930 In March 1938, Austria became part of the Greater German Reich. Nazi antisemitism and the exclusion of Jews from society began at once. Dr. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the creator of psychoanalysis, could no longer deny what was…
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Alfred Adler
JMS Pearce Hull, England The understanding of mental illness was barren until Freud’s time, scarcely risen from medieval notions of madness, moral inferiority, and witchcraft. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) began his career in histology and experimental physiology during six years spent in Ernst Brucke’s laboratory. He published a book on aphasia and was director of…
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Book review: The Guru, the Bagman and the Sceptic: A story of science, sex and psychoanalysis
Robert Kaplan Sydney, Australia Sigmund Freud (lower left, seated) and his “Committee,” including Ernest Jones (far right, standing). Becker & Maass, Berlin. Library of Congress, Marsh Agency/Sigmund Freud Copyrights. Via Wikimedia. Public domain. As a cultural icon of the twentieth century, psychoanalysis has loomed large in the public imagination. What makes it unique is…
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Wilson on the couch: How Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt, an American diplomat, came to analyze the American president
James L. Franklin Chicago, Illinois, United States Thomas Woodrow Wilson. Harris & Ewing Collection, Library of Congress. Via Wikimedia. Public domain. In December 1966, Houghton Mifflin Company published Thomas Woodrow Wilson: Twenty-Eighth President of the United States, A Psychological Study by Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt. The curious fact that Sigmund Freud, the…
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“My dear neoplasm:” Sigmund Freud’s oral cancer
James L. Franklin Chicago, Illinois, United states Sigmund Freud circa 1921. Photo by Max Halberstadt. Via Wikimedia. Public domain. When the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, died in London early on the morning of September 23, 1939, he succumbed to what he wryly referred to as “my dear old cancer with which I have…
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Diagnosing Mona Lisa
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Mona Lisa looks as if she has just been sick, or is about to be.”– Noel Coward Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was a many-talented genius of the Italian Renaissance. He was a painter, anatomist, engineer, and inventor. One of his best known paintings, a portrait of a noblewoman, is called the Mona…
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Diagnosis: Neurosyphilis. Treatment: Malaria, iatrogenic
Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden Patient in Kettering hypertherm cabinet undergoing fever therapy. New Orleans, 1937. U.S. Marine Hospital. Works Progress Administration photo. New Orleans Public Library Digital Collections via Wikimedia. Public domain. “The syphilitic man was thinking hard…about how to get his legs to step off the curb and carry him across Washington Street.…
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A note on Joseph Jules Dejerine (1849–1917)
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, medicine in Paris flourished.1 Under the charismatic Charcot, it matched or excelled the contemporary advances in Germany and Britain. In the footsteps of Cruveilhier, Gratiolet, and Vicq d’Azyr came Charcot, Vulpian, Pierre Marie, Babinski, Gilles de la Tourette, and Sigmund Freud, who…
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Who is “Dr. Filth”?
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden Bob Dylan’s song “Desolation Row” (1965) is full of recognizable names, both real (Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Einstein) and fictional (Cinderella, Romeo and Juliet). There is also a “Dr. Filth,” whose identity is a subject for discussion.1 He is introduced with the lyrics: Dr. Filth, he keeps his world/inside of a leather cup/But…