What Influenced Sigmund Freud

Freud’s development of thought was profoundly shaped and influenced by several interrelated but distinct factors, which sometimes coincided with each other. However, it must be noted that despite these influences, Freud was notoriously a highly original thinker. Charcot and Breuer had a direct and unwavering impact upon Sigmund Freud, but some of the other factors, though no less imperative than these, were of a rather different nature (Thornton, n.d). First, the emotional crisis that Freud suffered after the death of his father and the series of dreams to which this gave rise, were the origins of his self-analysis and also formed the core of his masterpiece, The Interpretation of Dreams. Although he felt love and admiration for his father, his analysis disclosed that these were mixed with very contrasting feelings of shame and hate, which he called ambivalence. Freud also revealed that as a child, he fantasized that his half-brother Philip was really his father, possibly since Philip was Freud’s mother’s age – this formed the seemingly personal basis of his theory of the Oedipus complex. Convinced by other signs, Freud believed that the underlying meaning of his fantasy was that his father was his rival for his mother’s affections and therefore, he wanted his real father dead.
The predominant conception of man was fundamentally altered by Darwin’s evolutionary doctrine, where man was now seen different from non-human animals only in degree of structural complexity (Thornton, n.d). As a result, man could now be treated as an object of scientific investigation – examining human behavior and its motivation – as this was now made plausible by Darwin. Freud implicitly accepted this new world-view, fueled by his colossal esteem for