Discuss How Freud Described Mental Health Problems and Explain How Freud Thought They Could Be Resolved

Sigmand Freud, also known as ‘’golden siggie’ by his mother was, in his time, a strong cocaine user, but he was also an incredible medical doctor, he was extremely interested in mental health problem that the people were aware of. His aim was always to create a psychological theory that applied to everybody. Nowadays Freud is known in psychology as the father of psychoanalysis. Freud’s psychodynamic theory focuses on both development and the unconscious mind which is where mental health problems are supposedly formed. Although this theory doesn’t apply to everyone, Freud followed it strongly when concerning his various case studies.
In Freud’s theory he stated that there were three levels of consciousness, the conscious which includes everything that is inside of our awareness. Preconscious which contains our memories which generally remains outside of our thoughts and our unconscious which we are unaware of and therefore contains thoughts, feelings and urges which are outside of our awareness entirely. Freud believed that within our unconscious mind lay traumatic and unpleasant thoughts or feelings which are in our unconscious mind so that they do not affect the conscious mind, which would find these feelings distressing. According to the psychodynamic theory repressed memories in the unconscious mind can still affect people’s behaviour; this could lead to further issues and even mental illnesses. Freud believed in order to stop this unwanted behaviour one must bring the memory into the conscious so that it can be dealt with.
Anna O was a case study in which Freud analysed. She had many physical symptoms such as a severe cough; paralysis of the extremities on the right side of her body as well as disturbances of vision, hearing and speech, yet these all appeared to have no physical cause. As well as this she also displayed a phobia of drinking from glasses. When Freud looked into her case he conducted psychoanalysis (a method of accessing the unconscious) and... [continues]

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