50 Fun Facts About Psychoanalysis

Which drug did the young Sigmund Freud praise in an 1884 paper and recommend as a cure for morphine addiction?

Cocaine backfired badly: the friend Freud gave it to as a cure developed a psychosis and went back to morphine.

Which fish did the student Sigmund Freud dissect by the hundred in Trieste, searching for male sex organs?

Eels defeated him: Freud spent four weeks at a zoological station in 1876 cutting open hundreds of them, and the search ended inconclusively.

Which mythical king of Thebes, who unknowingly killed his father, gave his name to Freud's most famous complex?

Oedipus reached Freud through the theatre: the tragedy Sophocles wrote about him was a huge success on the stages of Paris and Vienna in the 1880s and 1890s.

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud argued that every dream is the disguised fulfilment of what?

A wish drives every dream, Freud claimed, though the book that said so took eight years to sell its first 600 copies.

Which Swiss psychiatrist, once Freud's chosen heir, went on to popularise the terms introvert and extravert?

Carl Jung went on to found a rival school, analytical psychology, built around archetypes and the collective unconscious.

Which of Freud's psychosexual stages gave English an everyday insult, paired with 'retentive', for fussy people?

Anal is the stage Freud placed between about eighteen months and three years, and being stuck in it was said to produce frugality, obstinacy and orderliness.

The British painter Lucian Freud, famed for unflinching nude portraits, was related to Sigmund Freud in which way?

Grandson is the link: Lucian's father was Freud's architect son Ernst, who moved the family from Berlin to Britain in 1933 to escape Nazism.

Which habit did Sigmund Freud refuse to give up, even after it caused a jaw cancer that needed repeated surgery?

Smoking cigars sharpened his capacity to work, Freud believed, and he at first kept his symptoms secret rather than be told to stop.

To which city did Sigmund Freud escape from the Nazis in 1938, moving into a house that is now a museum?

London was his home for only the last fifteen months of his life, and the couch his patients lay on in Vienna is still on show in the house.

Which Renaissance artist did Sigmund Freud analyse in a 1910 essay built around a childhood memory of a bird?

Leonardo da Vinci wrote of a kite at his cradle, but Freud relied on a German translation that made it a vulture and built his theory on the wrong bird.

In Sigmund Freud's model of the mind, which part is present from birth and demands instant gratification?

The id is simply Latin for 'it': Freud wrote the plain German 'das Es', and the Latin was the choice of his English translators.

Which mythical youth who fell in love with his own reflection gave his name to a trait Freud analysed in 1914?

Narcissus, in Ovid's telling, was punished after spurning the nymph Echo, who could only repeat what others said.

Which 1945 Hitchcock thriller, set among psychoanalysts, features a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí?

Spellbound kept only about two minutes of Dalí's dream, though its star Ingrid Bergman recalled that the original sequence ran to twenty.

Which art movement, launched by André Breton's 1924 manifesto, drew on Freud's ideas about the unconscious?

Surrealism had a medical start: during the First World War its founder André Breton used Freud's methods on shell-shocked soldiers.

Which basic technique of psychoanalysis asks patients to say whatever comes to mind without censoring it?

Free association replaced hypnosis in Freud's practice, because he wanted patients to recover crucial memories while fully conscious.

Which physicist exchanged open letters with Sigmund Freud in 1932 about the causes of war and how to prevent it?

Albert Einstein wrote at the invitation of a League of Nations institute, and the letters appeared in 1933 under the title Why War?

As a specialist in which branch of medicine did Sigmund Freud open his private practice in Vienna in 1886?

Neurology gave Freud his first reputation: he wrote a book on aphasia and was an early researcher on cerebral palsy before he turned to the unconscious.

Which defence mechanism turns 'I hate them' into 'they hate me' by pinning a person's own feelings on others?

Projection first turns up in Freud's letters to his friend Wilhelm Fliess, and his daughter Anna later refined the idea.

Which defence mechanism, pushing painful memories out of awareness, did Freud call the cornerstone of psychoanalysis?

Repression was not Freud's coinage: the psychologist Johann Friedrich Herbart had used the term in 1824 for ideas competing to enter consciousness.

Which term did Sigmund Freud give to the instinctual energy of sexual desire, now an everyday word for sex drive?

Libido began as purely sexual energy in Freud's writing, but he later widened it into a universal desire that covers every kind of love.

Which nephew of Sigmund Freud used his uncle's ideas in advertising and was called the father of public relations?

Edward Bernays used his uncle's theories to help convince Americans that bacon and eggs was the true all-American breakfast.

Which biblical leader did Sigmund Freud claim, in a book published in 1939, was really an Egyptian nobleman?

Moses, in Freud's telling, followed the monotheist pharaoh Akhenaten and was later murdered by his own rebellious people.

Where did Sigmund Freud sit while a patient lay on the couch, so that his expressions could not sway what was said?

Behind them and out of sight was the rule, in a dimly lit room, and the couch itself was a gift from a patient around 1890.

Which animals terrified 'Little Hans', the five-year-old boy at the centre of Freud's 1909 case study of a phobia?

Horses became the boy's fear after a cart horse pulling a heavy load collapsed in front of him; he grew up to be the opera producer Herbert Graf.

Which breed was Jofi, the dog Sigmund Freud kept in his consulting room because she seemed to calm his patients?

Chow Chow Jofi was also said to keep time, yawning and stretching to signal that a patient's hour was up.

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in the Moravian town of Freiberg, which now lies in which modern country?

Czechia now calls the town Příbor, a name that happens to mean 'cutlery' in modern Czech, and the house where Freud was born opened to the public in 2006.

Which eerie quality, the subject of a 1919 Freud essay, now names the 'valley' where almost-human robots unsettle us?

The uncanny, for Freud, lay in the strangeness of the ordinary: his German word unheimlich is the opposite of heimlich, meaning homely.

Which Viennese doctor, an early ally who broke with Freud in 1911, introduced the idea of the 'inferiority complex'?

Alfred Adler had been president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society; he was the first of the great dissenters and named his own school individual psychology.

Which Viennese physician's treatment of the patient known as Anna O. led Freud towards the 'talking cure'?

Josef Breuer did not invent the phrase talking cure: it came from the patient herself, who also joked that the sessions were chimney sweeping.

Which diagnosis, named from the Greek word for uterus, was the subject of an 1895 book that Sigmund Freud co-wrote?

Hysteria owes its name to the ancient belief that a woman's uterus could wander about her body and disturb her behaviour.

Which French doctor, famous for staging hypnosis at the Salpêtrière hospital, did the young Freud study under in 1885?

Jean-Martin Charcot changed Freud's career: he later recalled the three-month fellowship in Paris as the turning point that led him from research to treating patients.

Which Vienna-born pioneer of the 'play technique' clashed with Anna Freud over how to analyse children?

Melanie Klein's side argued with the Viennese school so fiercely, in meetings from 1942 to 1944, that the British society split its training into three groups.

Which German psychoanalyst countered Freud's idea of penis envy by proposing that men suffer from womb envy?

Karen Horney argued that men feel their envy more powerfully than women feel theirs, and she is credited with founding feminist psychology.

Which French thinker called his work a 'return to Freud' and described a mirror stage in infant development?

Jacques Lacan first set out the mirror stage at a congress in Marienbad in 1936, placing it between six and eighteen months of age.

Which German-born analyst, trained in Vienna by Anna Freud, coined the phrase 'identity crisis'?

Erik Erikson had an identity story of his own: born Erik Salomonsen, he later swapped his stepfather's surname for one he invented.

Which British psychoanalyst developed attachment theory, the idea that infants need a secure bond with a caregiver?

John Bowlby knew distant parenting at first hand: he was raised by a nanny in a separate nursery, as was the fashion for a family of his class.

Which term describes a patient redirecting feelings about a parent or other key figure onto the therapist?

Transference at first looked to Freud like plain resistance, because he met it when a patient refused to take part in a session.

Which defence mechanism, seen by Freud as a sign of maturity, channels forbidden urges into art or science?

Sublimation came to Freud from a story told by the poet Heinrich Heine, about a boy who cut the tails off dogs and grew up to be a surgeon.

Which defence mechanism is at work when a person scolded by the boss goes home and shouts at the family instead?

Displacement began in Freud's work as a trick of dreams, which shift the emphasis from important elements onto unimportant ones.

In Freud's dream theory, which term names a dream's hidden meaning, as opposed to the storyline remembered on waking?

Latent content is what the analyst digs for, while the dream as remembered is its disguised or distorted stand-in.

Which Greek personification of death gives his name to the drive that Freudians set against Eros, the life drive?

Thanatos was not Freud's own label for the drive: it was coined by his follower Wilhelm Stekel, borrowing the mythical brother of Hypnos, or Sleep.

Which Vienna-born philosopher called psychoanalysis a pseudoscience because no experiment could ever prove it false?

Karl Popper knew the world he attacked: his parents were close friends of Freud's sister Rosa, and as a young man he volunteered in a psychoanalyst's clinic for children.

Which German literary award, given by the city of Frankfurt, did Sigmund Freud win in 1930 for his writing?

The Goethe Prize recognised Freud as a writer as well as a scientist: it was given for his contributions to psychology and to German literary culture.

Which Massachusetts university hosted Sigmund Freud's only lectures in the United States, on a visit in 1909?

Clark University awarded Freud an honorary doctorate during the visit, which marked the first public recognition of his work.

Which pseudonym did Freud give Ida Bauer, the teenage patient who walked out on him after eleven weeks in 1900?

Dora ended the treatment so abruptly that Freud bitterly reported the case as a therapeutic failure; her brother Otto Bauer became a leading Austrian Marxist.

Which wealthy French follower and former patient put up the money that let Sigmund Freud leave Nazi-ruled Vienna?

Marie Bonaparte, a great-grandniece of Napoleon who had married a prince of Greece and Denmark, also welcomed the Freuds as guests at her home on their journey into exile.

Which Austrian psychoanalyst died in an American prison after defying a ban on shipping his 'orgone accumulator' boxes?

Wilhelm Reich said the boxes concentrated a life energy; the FDA called them a fraud of the first magnitude, and a court had over six tons of his publications burned.

Which English paediatrician and analyst is known for the 'good enough' parent and the child's transitional object?

Donald Winnicott spent 40 years at Paddington Green Children's Hospital and advised Britain's wartime programme for evacuating children.

What Greek-derived term did Freud's English translator choose for a slip of the tongue that betrays a hidden thought?

Parapraxis replaced Freud's plainer German word Fehlleistungen, meaning faulty actions, and most people now simply call it a Freudian slip.

What did Sigmund Freud present to each member of his 'Secret Committee' of loyal followers when it first met?

A gold ring set with an engraved Greek gem went to each of the five, whose committee had been formed to protect Freud's legacy after earlier allies walked away.