ABSTRACT

Credit for that achievement goes to the great psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, whose thinking has provided the most widely accepted "model" of personality in which a framework is systematically related to a structural whole. Freud's was the more daring, the more revolutionary, and in a deep sense, the more poetic insight. Freud, a Viennese, was trained as a neurologist. Because one of his teachers used hypnosis to alleviate hysterical symptoms in patients, Freud became interested in hysteria and from there progressed to other psychic disorders. Freud's word "ego" corresponds to the psychologists' word "cognition"—the term that sums up the intellectual processes of perception, language, and logical thought. Freud's "id" and "superego" roughly equate with "affection"—the psychologists' word for the totality of an individual's emotions, attitudes, and values. What Freud was proposing was that man at best and man at worst is subject to a common set of explanations: good and evil grow from a common process.