Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Sigmund Freud

Episode Date: January 25, 2026

If you know anything about the field of psychology, you’ve probably heard of Sigmund Freud.  Best known as the founder of psychoanalysis, Freud fundamentally changed the field of psychology for decades to come. His impact extended far beyond psychology, and in the process, he became a notable figure in popular culture.  Learn about the life and theories of Sigmund Freud on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors Quince Go to quince.com/daily for 365-day returns, plus free shipping on your order! Mint Mobile Get your 3-month Unlimited wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com/eed Subscribe to the podcast!  https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Austin Oetken & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/  Disce aliquid novi cotidie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you know anything about the field of psychology, you've probably heard of Sigmund Freud. Best known as the founder of psychoanalysis, Freud has become the most prominent figure in the history of psychology. His impact extended far beyond psychology, however, and in the process, he became a notable figure in popular culture through his theories and the terms he coined. Learn more about the life and theories of Sigmund Freud on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Fear is the virus is trending on TikTok. vaccines are poison. Then your yoga teacher says that sex traffic children are being sacrificed by satanic liberals, but it's all okay.

The Great Awakening is every week on Conspirality Podcast. We explore the fever dreams that suck friends, family, and wellness gurus down the right-wing cult spiral in a search for salvation. This is a warning for anyone listening to the show with their children. The theories of Sigmund Freud referenced human sexuality. The topics are addressed clinically and non-gratuitously, but they will come up in the episode. Sigmund Freud was born on May 6, 1856, in what was then Freiburg, Austria, and what is today the town of Psebor Chequia.

He was the eldest of eight children born to Ascanazi Jewish parents. At Freud's birth, his family was struggling financially, and they lived in a small rented room in a locksmith's house. When Freud was four, his parents decided to move the family to Vienna, where, Freud would live for the rest of his life. In 1865, the young Freud attended the prestigious Leopold Stater Communal Real Gymnasium. At the school, teachers respected his intelligence and considered him to be outstanding, and he graduated from the program with honors.

Freud decided to attend university in 1873. He attended the University of Vienna, initially intending to study law. However, he switched paths and worked with the medical faculty. There, he collaborated with academics in philosophy, zoology, and physiology, dissecting and comparing the brains of humans and other animals. Unfortunately for Freud, he had to take a break from his studies to complete a year of military service in 1879. After fulfilling his duty, he returned to the university where he graduated with a medical degree in 1881. In 1882, Freud started his medical career at Vienna General Hospital.

During this time, he conducted research on cerebral anatomy, which he later used in his 1884 paper on the effects of cocaine. He also used his research on cerebral anatomy to publish a book on aphasia, a condition in which the brain is impaired in understanding and formulating language. During his first three years at Vienna General, Freud worked in numerous departments, including the psychiatric clinic and at the local asylum. It's believed that this work led to an increased interest in clinical psychology. In 1885, Freud's extensive research led the University of Vienna to appoint him as a lecturer. Though this position was not salaried, he was able to give lectures on neuropathology at the university. In 1886, Freud left his

role at Vienna General to start a private practice focused on nervous disorders. And that same year, he married Martha Bernays. They had a Jewish wedding, which Freud, as an atheist, didn't particularly appreciate, but the couple would go on to have six children together. Freud's greatest contribution to psychology was his theory of psychoanalysis. This theory states that the unconscious mind and early childhood experiences shape the personality and behaviors a person exhibits in their adult life. Freud began developing psychoanalysis while working in the private sector. It was then that a colleague treated a patient with physical symptoms that had no obvious cause. The experience led Freud to several important insights. His colleague found that the patient symptoms improved

when he was speaking with the patient. During their conversations, the patient uncovered traumatic experiences repressed from their conscious memory. This case inspired Freud to understand the unconscious mind and shaped his work in the development of his ideas. Freud started his research into the unconscious using the technique of hypnosis. This came from his time studying under a neurologist named Jean-Martin Charcot. Chacoe specialized in studying hysterical paralysis, which is being paralyzed or having other physical ailments without a physical cause. Hypnosis has been shown to help eliminate paralysis symptoms, allowing people to suddenly walk again. However, further investigations showed that the miraculous recoveries induced by hypnosis would not last very long.

Freud determined this to be false healing, similar to the placebo effect, leading Freud to take a psychological perspective on neurological healing. Later, in 1887 and 1888, Freud worked to be a false healing, worked in a different hospital in Vienna. During this time, his theory that neurological conditions could be solved with psychology was further proven when patients who had neurotic symptoms with no known cause were being treated in atypical ways. With this evidence, Freud became further convinced of his theory that hypnosis was ineffective and began to further delve into his theory on how effective treatment should be administered. Believing that the hypnotic methods did not adequately allow for his patient's minds to think freely, this led him to develop the idea of free association.

This method allowed and encouraged the patient to speak freely about their thoughts, feelings, and emotions without censoring them. Through this technique, Freud believed that he could uncover thoughts and memories in the person's subconscious that were causing psychological anomalies. Freud and Joseph Breuer first presented free association in their book, Studies on Hysteria, published in 1895. This work is typically viewed as the birth of psychoanalysis. It was based on Breyers and Freud's joint treatment of a patient known as Anna O.

The treatment was dubbed the talking cure. In the book, Freud posits that Anna was suffering from hysteria due to experiencing distress due to her unconscious issues with sexuality due to Anna's free associations around young women. At the same time, Freud began to come up with a term to describe his psychological cure for physiological problems. He decided to call it psychoanalysis. This term was introduced to the world in a published essay in 1896 entitled Inheritance and Etyology of Neurosies. The idea of free association and talking about psychological problems proved to be popular among psychologists at the time. Freud's theory of psychoanalysis revolutionized therapeutic techniques,

many of which are still used today. Over time, Freud, Freud, further developed his theory. One of the most notable developments was through the study of dream interpretation. Releasing a book titled The Interpretation of Dreams in 1890 on the subject, Freud proposed that dreams are windows into the unconscious. Freud argues that dreams give insights into a person's hidden emotions and desires as well as into conflicts and struggles the unconscious mind faces. He believed dreams fall into two fields, manifest content, what you recall from the day, and latent content, the secret underlying meaning. Freud argued the mind uses dreams to mask unacceptable desires, weaving them into symbolic

narratives. Freud viewed dream analysis as one of the most important aspects of his work, and used the theory as a foundation for some of his other theories, the most notable of which was his topographical model, which was Freud's view of what some might call the human soul. The topographical model described the conscious, unconscious, and pre-conscious mind. This model served as the earliest foundation of his ideas that would eventually become the id, the ego, and the super-ego. In the topographical model, Freud sorted unconscious needs as being sexually based. If these thoughts can't be expressed, then the conscious mind keeps them at bay.

In the pre-conscious mind, ideas of moral education are stored. This region warns the body of possible punishment or consequences. That, in turn, influences the conscious that behave in a socially acceptable way. The pre-conscious and the unconscious work together to shape conscious behavior. And this was later expanded into the id ego and super ego. This is a method that Freud used to show how a person's psyche is formed. The id is pleasure-seeking, instinct-driven, and part of a person's mind. This is the desire to receive immediate gratification, where the brain basically goes,

I want that thing, and then acts on impulse to get it. Another term for the id is the pleasure principle. This is the instinctive desire to seek immediate gratification and avoid pain by satisfying immediate needs. The super ego acts as the antithesis of the id. In many ways, the super ego is the angel to the id's devil. The super ego acts as a person's conscience. It represents the moral ideas that society, friends, and family have given you.

It works to keep the person acting in an ideal way. And finally, there's the ego. The ego acts as a moderator between the id and super ego, balancing the impulses the id wants to act on with what is socially acceptable. This dynamic was important because it's central to the development of personality and behavior. His work on dreams also laid the foundation for one of Freud's most controversial theories the Oedipus complex.

The theory was named after the Greek myth of Oedipus, who was cursed to murder his father and marry his mother. There's a lot more to the story than that, but that's the general idea. DeFroid, the Oedipus Complex helped explain psychoanalytical and psychosexual development. In this theory, a young boy admires his father for his mental and physical superiority over the boy and wants to groan to his father's image. However, the son is jealous of the father because of an unconsorough. conscious desire for the mother. This relationship dynamic can be used to explain in an adult's

development with how they perceive sexuality and relationships. Freud had quite a few theories on personality and how sexuality helped form it. The next most notable of Freud's theories was his psychosexual theory of development. This theory explains how personality develops. In this theory, he argues that personality develops through five childhood stages, each associated with distinct erogenous zones in the body. These zones are part of the body that become sensitive to arousal during childhood. If one of these stages is interrupted through an unresolved conflict, then Freud believes that personality issues in adulthood could arise, specifically with a fixation where you'd be stuck at one of the erogenous zones. This is where the phrase, anal retentive comes from,

to describe someone who is overtly neat and orderly. Freud's view of the world was that life was built on two principles, tension and pleasure. By viewing human development in a psychosexual way, he attempted to express that adult personalities developed through an argument between the ego and super ego as they battle for control and the desire for gratification. The final Freudian theory I'll cover is the concept of defense mechanisms. This idea was first described in Freud's work, but was actually developed by Freud's daughter Anna, who created the list of 10 different defense mechanisms. Defense mechanisms were another theory developed by Freud to explain the unconscious strategies the mind uses to manage stress and anxiety around different types of conflict by transferring

unacceptable impulses into an acceptable form. Freud's theories led to him becoming a notable figure in psychology and his ideas proved to compel and inspire psychologists for over a century. One of Freud's most notable contributions to the field was his founding of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1902. Through its founding, Freud's theories began to spread rapidly across the Western world as he instructed other mental health professionals. Many contemporaries believe that the founding of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society enabled Freud's theories to spread as quickly as they did and to become accepted worldwide.

Despite the popularity of his theories, Freud's ideas have faced their fair share of controversies from the very beginning. One of the main critiques was that, psychoanalysis, and Freud as a whole, focused way too much on sexuality. In Freud's mind, sex and sexual desire are the foundations of his theories. Many psychologists argue that Freud's theories over-sexualized normal childhood development. The other very controversial theory is, of course, the Oedipus complex. For obvious reasons, the taboo claim of being attracted to a parent makes people uncomfortable.

However, there's a general lack of empirical evidence, cultural support, and self-bias in Freud's research that make this theory questionable. Another argument against Freud is his general lack of empirical evidence. Many of his claims about the human mind are based on a limited number of case studies rather than controlled experiments. Individual cases are prone to human error and personal bias, making it impossible to prove unconscious bias. While case studies are important, they can't be repeated and therefore can't really be

generalized to the entire human population. Despite all the controversy, Freud's contributions to psychology can't be denied. His theories are still the subject of research and debate almost a century later. His theories have shaped how Western culture views psychology, laying the groundwork for many of the popular theories that we still see today. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Opkin and Cameron Kiefer. Research and writing for this episode was provided by Olivia Ash.

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