Well, it’s the best I could come up with on short notice 
I don’t think it is fair to say that Freud developed his theories solely due to his experiences treating Anna. Although the Anna case was, no doubt, important to him, his theories developed over a period of many years.
I do not know if hysterical paralysis was ever exactly “common,” but it was certainly a widely recognized syndrome in that era, and not just in Vienna (although it was seen almost exclusively amongst wealthy women, I believe). For example, Charcot, the French neurologist (with whom Freud had studied) discusses it. There is no doubt, also, that the symptoms had a psychological rather than a straightforwardly physiological cause. Doctors like Freud (whose original training was in neurology) and Charcot were well aware of how paralysis could be caused by nerve or brain damage, but the symptoms of Anna and women like her could not be explained that way. The combinations of muscles that appeared to be paralyzed did not match up with the known anatomy of the nervous system.
You are right, however, to suspect that the syndrome of hysterical paralysis has become almost completely extinct since that era. On the other hand, other, previously unknown or extremely rare psychological syndromes, such as “multiple personality disorder” (or whatever they are calling it now) have arisen in its place. The way psychological problems manifest themselves behaviorally is strongly affected by social factors, including (but not limited to) the facts about what sorts of symptoms both patients and therapists have heard about. (One should not infer from that, however, that the underlying psychological not real and truly pathological, only that they can manifest in different ways according to social context.)
The problem is even today I have (non-psych) college teachers / professors who didn’t get the memo and still think there’s some validity to Freud’s ideas. They then pass those ideas on to their students not as historical curiosities but as facts, and perpetuate this misleading notion that Freud was a scientist.
And then those students get into my (psych) classes, and I have to beat those notions out of them with a hammer.
Well, Freud had an enormous cultural influence, and we are still very much feeling its effects. Even if he was 100% wrong from a scientific perspective (and I think that is a considerable exaggeration) it would still be relevant to teach about him in literature classes, for instance, or classes on the development of sexual attitudes. Come to that, he had a huge influence on the development of psychology. Even psychologists who do think he was 100% wrong would not be in the same place as they are today without him.
So, do humans really have an “Id”, “Ego”, and “Subconcious”?
Has anything emerged to support this theory of personality?
I always thought that the subconscious was a pretty dicey concept-I mean , we have this alternate brain that makes us do bad stuff? How different is that, from the theory of demonic posession?
We do by all appearances to have an unconscious portion of the mind. But it involves no supernatural elements, and does not appear to be conscious, as the name implies. Nor does it necessarily or even usually make us do bad stuff; it’s unconscious, not evil. That’s different than demons.
The evidence is that most of what goes on in our heads is unconscious, actually. However, the idea of an unconscious mind didn’t originate with Freud. I recall a line I once heard about him; that where he was right, he wasn’t original, and where he was original, he wasn’t right.
Yes. I was astounded at how many English professors love Freud and his ideas and believe them deeply. Of course, a lot of Freud wrote on was actually literature (Œdipus complex, anyone?). The trouble is, no one I’ve ever encountered bothers to separate his work as a therapist from his musings on literature and dreams and what have you.
Isn’t that redundant?
Mildly, perhaps. The first clause by itself doesn’t imply that any original thinking took place at all; the entire phrase definitely conveys the sense that some of this contributions were original (but wrong).
Most of the academic intellectuals no longer accept Freud either. There was a series of articles by Frederick Crews in The New York Review of Books (which is about as close as there is to an official newsletter of moderately liberal American intelligentsia) in the 1990’s in which Crews, formerly a fan of Freud, ripped his works to threads:
So I think that it’s not correct to say that most English professors still take Freud seriously. Some American academics in various humanities fields still take Freud seriously, but most don’t anymore.
Ach, even those who view Freud with disdain accept his ideas mostly; they’ve just renamed them.
Do we have basic drives that we are not consciously aware of? Id, check.
Do we have learned social mores and moral codes that we have a desire to conform to? Superego, check.
Do we have a means by which we balance impulsively satiating our drives and our desire to confirm to moral codes in service of our long term plans and that is sometimes perceived as our conscious self? Ego, check.
Is the sexual self something that develops over the course of a lifetime from infancy onwards? Most accept that too. And accept that children initially are all about meeting needs and have huge oral drives and that they learn to control behaviors and to delay actions in order to get approval, such as during toilet training. Sure many of the details are changed and the names are different, but heck more has changed in physics since then and no one mocks Niels Bohr because his theories were found to be not exactly right as time went on.
The taking of Freud as revealed truth is mockworthy, but the basics of his ideas are still underpinning most of how many think, even if they do not recognize it.
Did you say one thing but mean your mother?
The realistic claim would be that the original heart of Freudianism turned on a relatively small number of patients. These are the famous cases (Anna, the Wolf Man, etc.), which he originally wrote up.
This small sample is reason enough to be suspicious. The snag is that his fame spread and he dealt with plenty of other patients over the years. Since his ideas developed in parallel, it’s hardly obvious that, say, the “superego” later derives from those original patients.
I’m personally highly dubious about Freud, but the details are fascinating.
I always felt that Freud gets regarded today simply as being a pioneer. Yeah, he got most if not all of the details wrong, and he got them wrong because he took a few observations and basically ran with them! But it was always my understanding that he still took the study of ‘the mind’ out of the dark ages. That before him there was little to no science in regards to mental issues. That it was still strictly a religious issue because the mind & soul were one in the same. If this was the case he does deserve a great deal of credit for at least making that rather great leap!
Someone mentioned Aristotle. Remember that Aristotle was very very wrong too. For centuries he had cemented the idea that the Sun went round the Earth, and that objects fell at a rate proportional to their weight. But today he isn’t remembered so much for what he got wrong.
And Freud was very much a man of his time. He was very Victorian. What we know today to be the truth regarding the science of the mind would have been laughed at, or worse persecuted, back then.