Freud's Impact on Marriage and the Family

To grasp the scope of Freud's work it is crucial to understand the psychology of the family in the Victorian era in the second half of the nineteenth century. Medical science before the 1800s was primitive, and most doctors believed that a person's health was determined by shifts in the balance of bodily fluids called humors. Some even thought that illness, physical or mental, meant that people who were ill were haunted by spirits or cursed by God.

For a brief time Freud experimented with hypnosis to try to understand that the workings of the mind might cause physical symptoms. Then he developed his own simple but ingenious technique, which he called free association. He found that if his patients talked randomly about whatever came to mind that certain ideas evolved that would reveal thoughts, feelings, and conflicts of which the patients were unaware. Freud began to apply some of this technique to himself. He discovered that dreams were similar to symptoms and free associations and that they too revealed, in symbolic form, hidden meanings that resided outside of consciousness. His close attention to the unconscious ideas and feelings in himself and in his patients led to a theory that many repressed childhood memories had sexual meaning. Most people assumed that a person's sexual life began at puberty when the body became sexually mature. Freud challenged this assumption and proposed that sexuality was a critical part of a child's development before the onset of puberty.

Many of Freud's patients claimed to have memories of being sexually seduced in their childhood by an adult of the opposite sex. From these observations Freud developed a theory that neurotic disorders were caused by these sexual experiences. As he examined more patients, however, he came to believe that such stories were usually only fantasies. Like dreams they were the fulfillment of unconscious wishes. Through self-analysis he had discovered his own sexual desires, and that suggested that he went