Some historical and cultural influences on Freud’s theories/page 1 of 5

Some influences on Freud’s work1: An

introduction to historical and Cultural
Background of the Psychodynamic
Perspective
It’s important to see ideas in connection with their historical
and cultural background if you want to understand for
example some of the influences on Freud’s thinking besides
readings of literature, ancient philosophers and myths, and
here is a sample of some of the most important ones.

Philippe Pinel2
A primary figure in the movement for humanitarian treatment of those in asylums was
Philippe Pinel (1745— 1826). In 1793, while the French Revolution raged, he was put in
charge of a large asylum in Paris known as La Bicétre.
Pinel was reluctantly allowed to remove the chains of the people imprisoned in La Bicétre and
to treat them as sick human beings rather than as beasts. Many who had been excited and
completely unmanageable became calm and much
easier to handle. Formerly considered dangerous,
they strolled through the hospital and grounds with
no inclination to create disturbances or to harm
anyone. Light and airy rooms replaced their
dungeons. Some who had been incarcerated for years
were soon restored to health and were eventually
discharged from the hospital.
Freeing the patients of their restraints was not the
only humanitarian reform advocated by Pinel3.
Consistent with the egalitarianism of the new French
Republic, he believed that the mental patients in his care were essentially normal people who
should be approached with compassion and understanding and treated as individual human
beings with dignity. Their reason supposedly having left them because of severe personal and
social problems, it might be restored to them through comforting counsel and purposeful
activity. Freud was inspired by the work of Pinel in the sense that he would not accept that
people suffering from psychological problems such as hysteria were faking
their symptoms. Instead he tried to find the causes of the symptoms in the
dynamics of the unconscious.

Friedrich Nietzsche4
Nietzsche (1844-1900), the great German philosopher, claimed that behind all
human activity a strong will to power could be found. This conception was an
expression for a reaction towards the idea of rationality that had characterised
Enlightenment. Freud's view that humans are driven by irrational and
1
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/freud/freudobj.html many interesting documents and pictures, among them a paper
with Freud’s translation of Charcot’s lectures in Paris (from an exhibition on Freud).
2
http://elvers.stjoe.udayton.edu/history/history.asp?RURL=http://elvers.stjoe.udayton.edu/history/people/Pinel.h
tml
3
http://www.ch-charcot56.fr/histoire/biograph/pinel.htm a biography of Pinel in French. The picture is showing
how Pinel liberated the patients.
4
http://www.historyguide.org/europe/lecture3.html more on Nietzsche and Freud in this lecture
Some historical and cultural influences on Freud’s theories/page 2 of 5

unconscious drives, instincts, is related to the reaction against the idea of a completely
rational man5.
Like the philosophers of the 18th century Enlightenment, SIGMUND FREUD (1856-1939)
identified civilization with Human Reason and regarded science as the sure path to
knowledge. Freud was a child of the Enlightenment. But, unlike the philosophers of Reason,
Freud concentrated on the power and influence of non-rational drives and impulses in human
thought and behaviour. Freud believed that our conscious thoughts are determined by our
unconscious impulses.
Nietzsche glorified the irrational as only a poet could. Freud, on the other hand, recognized
the irrational as a potential danger. He wanted to understand it scientifically. He also wanted
to regulate irrationality in the interest of human civilization as a whole. As he told one of his
friends, irrationality was a "comprehensible object of science." Freud was convinced that man
is not a rational being. Man's behaviour, guided as it was by inner forces, was sometimes
irrational. Within the mind there is mental activity that is independent of consciousness. This
is the unconscious mind. For Freud, the implications of such a discovery were profound: it
meant that man's actions are not always rational. And such an idea flew in the face of the
ideals of the Enlightenment in no less a way than had Nietzsche's notion that "God is dead."
Freud did not discover the unconscious mind. The European Romantics of the late 18th and
early 19th centuries had already utilized the unconscious mind as the focus of their artistic
energies. So too had the ancient Greek tragedians, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche.
Freud paid tribute to these thinkers and went on to describe Nietzsche as "a philosopher
whose guesses and intuitions often agree in the most astonishing way with the laborious
findings of psychoanalysis." But unlike Nietzsche, Freud was a man of scientific temper. His
object of study and his entire life's work was destined to be the exploration of man's
unconscious mind, which he meant to discover through his clinical work.

Charcot6
In 1885 Freud won a six-month fellowship to study
with Jean Charcot, a leading French doctor who
was interested in hysteria and hypnosis. Freud used
hypnosis in the beginning but eventually found that
‘free associations’ would have the same effect. It
was Charcot who introduced Freud to the problems
of physiological symptoms caused by the psyche,
and the picture here is representing Charcot doing a
lecture on hysteria.7

Josef Breuer8
Freud's friend, a physician named Josef Breuer (1842—1925), treated a young woman who
had become bedridden with a number of hysterical symptoms. Her legs and right arm and side
were paralyzed, her sight and hearing were impaired, and she often had difficulty speaking.
She also sometimes went into a dreamlike state or “absence,” during which she mumbled to
5
http://www.pitt.edu/~wbcurry/nietzsche.html Nietzsche’s idea of man
6
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bhchar.html
7
http://www.freud.org.uk/wwork.htm
8
http://www.freudfile.org/breuer.html
Some historical and cultural influences on Freud’s theories/page 3 of 5

herself, seemingly preoccupied with troubling thoughts. During one treatment session Breuer
hypnotized Anna 0. and repeated some of her mumbled words. He succeeded in getting her to
talk more freely and ultimately with considerable emotion about some very disquieting past
events. Upon awakening from these hypnotic sessions, she would frequently feel much better.
With Anna 0. and other hysterical patients Breuer found that the relief and cure of their
symptoms seemed to last longer if, under hypnosis, they were able to recall the original
precipitating event for the symptom and if, furthermore, their original emotion was expressed.
This reliving of an earlier emotional catastrophe and the release of the emotional tension
produced by previously forgotten thoughts about the event were called abreaction or catharsis.
Breuer’s method became known as the cathartic method. In 1895 one of his colleagues,
Sigmund Freud, joined him in the publication of Studies in Hysteria, a book considered to be
a milestone in abnormal psychology.

Darwin9
Darwin’s work on evolution had recently been published (The Descent of Man, 1871), when
Freud began his work. The notion of biological continuity across
species convinced Freud that human motivation is based on biologically
based, innate drives. (Note that, writing in German, Freud used the
word Trieb, which in his usage is best translated as ‘drive’; however,
early translations into English used the word ‘instinct’.) It was the
inspiration from Darwin that made Freud create his first theory of
drives, and he argued that the pressure for survival made sexuality a
powerful motivation. He found that the pleasure principle was essential
(hedonism) in behaviour, and that sexuality was a powerful drive. His
later version of the motivation model (1920) claimed that there were
two basic drives: sexuality and aggression. This was described in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle (1920). He was inspired to this by WW1, which showed that man was not rational.
This stage in Freud’s thinking is considered the most important for most Freudians. In a
revision of his motivation theory Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930) Freud was even more
pessimistic about the future of mankind. Freud proposed Eros (life-affirming source of
motivation) and Thanathos (destructive source of motivation). Both forces were seeking
satisfaction and also they were conflicting. This development is sometimes seen as a direct
consequence of his personal experiences (ww1, cancer etc.) and according to Zangwill (1987)
this is of great interest in the understanding of Freud as a thinker but the empirical
foundations of these ideas are weaker.

Herman Helmholtz 10(1821-1894) had a great impact on scientific

psychology and on the theories of Sigmund Freud, especially his
notion of conservation of energy. Helmholtz was specifically
interested in physics but his family was too poor to let him study so
he accepted medical training within a program instituted by the
Prussian government in order to give talented poor and gifted students
an opportunity to have a medical education in exchange for eight
years of service as army surgeons after graduation. He studied
physiology under Johannes Mueller who propounded the law of
specific nerve energies, and he was also in contact with students like

9
http://www2.lucidcafe.com/lucidcafe/library/96feb/darwin.html
10
http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Helmholtz.html
http://www.thoemmes.com/science/helm.htm
Some historical and cultural influences on Freud’s theories/page 4 of 5

Émile du Bois-Reymond11 (1819-1892) who would later establish the electrochemical nature
of the nervous impulse and Ernst Brücke (1819-1893) who would become the favourite
teacher of Sigmund Freud.
Helmholtz and his friends believed that gains could be made from using physical principles in
physiology, and they adopted the doctrine of mechanism, which adopted the view that all
physiological processes were potentially understandable in terms of ordinary physical and
chemical principles. The processes might be highly complex and beyond present
comprehension, but they believed that eventually they must be subject to the same universal
physical laws as inanimate processes and eventually mechanism became the important way to
approach research within physiology. Helmholtz finished a paper on the microscopic nerve
structure of invertebrates, received his medical degree and conducted experiments within the
mechanistic framework demonstrating that the amount of muscular energy and heat generated
by a frog was consistent with the amount of energy released by the oxidation of the food it
consumed. That is, he showed that ordinary chemical reactions were capable of producing
(though not necessarily that they did produce) all of the physical activity and heat generated
by a living organism. Helmholz started doing research on the conservation of energy on the
basis of his previous experiments, and according to his notion, all the different kinds of forces
in the universe (heat, light, gravity, magnetism etc.) were potentially interchangeable forms of
a single huge but quantitatively fixed reservoir of energy. Energy could be transformed from
one state to another, but never created or destroyed by any physical process. Thus the total
amount of energy in the universe was constantly conserved. Several different scientists had
hypothesised the conservation of energy in the early 1840s, but Helmholtz approached the
topic in a unique and particularly influential manner in his paper “The conservation of
Force”(1847). Here he argued that the physical world was governed by the principle of
conservation of energy and that this was also true for organic processes.

Brücke12
Freud studied physiology with Ernst Brücke, whom he later described
as the most influential person in his life. Brücke favoured a mechanistic
view of both physiology and behaviour, which probably influenced
Freud’s own later thinking on determinism.
Freud wanted to do research in Brücke’s lab, but practical
considerations (including marriage) led him to finish his medical
studies, which offered greater economic rewards and recognition

Vienna
Until the end of World War I Vienna was the capital of the Austrian-Hungarian empire. It was
one of the most important cities in the world. The environment was very creative with many
famous artist, painters, authors, composers and architects who produced remarkable works in
Vienna at the time. But the city was also characterised by conflicts. The fact that the empire
was inhabited by many different nationalities may have contributed to both creativity and

11
Du Bois Reymond (1818-1922) and Guillaume Duchenne (1806-1875) pioneered electromyography
commencing after Reymond contrived an improved technique for measuring currents in 1841. He applied this
technique in recording the path that electricity took in a contracting muscle’s fibres
http://www.bae.ncsu.edu/bae/research/blanchard/www/465/textbook/otherprojects/1999/Bioelectricity/group4/pr
oject/history.html
12
http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/people/data/per58.html
Some historical and cultural influences on Freud’s theories/page 5 of 5

conflict. There was a distinct anti-Slav movement and Vienna was

also an environment with strong anti-Semitic ideas. The fact that the
Emperor's court was situated in Vienna and the Victorian age
contributed to a high degree of hypocrisy, and there were high moral
standards and hypocrisy in terms of sexuality. The society at the
time of Freud was patriarchical and women did not have the
possibility to develop their intellectual capacities but had to rely on
marriage and child birth, a fact that may have influenced
psychological disorders, i.e. neurosis in many of Freud’s female
patients. Freud was Jewish and anti-Semitism was part of the social and political life of
Vienna. In fact Hitler learned quite a lot of his views on Jews in this environment where anti-
Semitism was accepted although there was no official segregation. The Jews held an
important social, cultural and economic position in Vienna and that may have given rise to
anti-Semitism but it was also a tradition.13

World War I, rise of Nazism in Germany, and Cancer

Freud smoked several cigars everyday during his life.
He eventually developed a cancer of the jaw and this
influenced the rest of his life in that he had several
operations and suffered a lot of pain. The growing anti-
Semitism in Austria, the impact of WW1, the rise of
Hitler and Freud’s emigration to Britain confirmed his
beliefs about a very negative and aggressive nature of
humans. Already after WW114, Freud developed his
contested theory of Thanatos, the death instincts, and
he saw the carnage of WW1 as a confirmation of his
theory of the inherently evil and aggressive nature of
mankind, and in Freud’s view, the experiences in the
last year of his life did in no way contradict his theory. He lost one of his sisters in a
concentration camp.

Epilogue
Freud's thinking15 emerged in the wake of Marx and Darwin, both of whom emphasized
struggle as the engine of change. Freud's thought developed in a century in which violent
conflicts reached unheard of dimensions. The conflicts that Freud stressed were within the
psyche: people at war with themselves and sometimes with the cultural authorities they had
internalised. But he thought that the way we managed (or failed to manage) those conflicts
had everything to do with the explosions of violence that marked the modern world. Although
much has changed since Freud first formulated his theories, today's concern with the
disruptive power of sexuality and aggression has only intensified. Freud did not propose
solutions to how one might escape this violence. Instead, his writings on the connection of
culture and conflict identified fundamental problems for the twentieth century -- problems
that show no sign of disappearing as we move into the twenty-first century.

13
http://www.porges.net/porges/JewsInVienna/4SpecterJewishWorldRules.html see more on the historical
context of antisemitism in Vienna
14
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/freud/freud03a.html read more here on war and death
15
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/freud/freud03a.html quotation from the epilogue on Freud