He studied neurology and physiology at the University of Vienna, and worked closely with Josef Breuer, who used a technique called the "talking cure" to treat his hysterical patients. Although Freud is credited with something called "free association," the famed "couch session" finds its roots in Breuer's talking cure. Freud assumed that repressed conflicts within his patients were buried away deep within the unconscious mind, like some unseen splinter that causes the flesh around it to become sore or infected, and consequently, these symptoms of hysteria would manifest themselves. Freud got his patients to relax into a position where they were deprived of any strong sensory stimulation, one where even the sight of the analyst was not readily present, and so the famous use of the couch came into being. (And many bad, bad psychological witticisms spawned therein.) Then, he encouraged his patients to speak freely and uninhibitedly without any sort of forethought, believing that he, as the analyst, could discern the active unconscious forces that were behind the patients' behaviors.
The crux of Freudian theory lies in the recognition of something he coined as the "unconscious," a term which is easily familiar to the modern world today. Although others, like Aristotle, Shakespeare, Plato, Nietzsche and Charcot may have hypothesized its existence decades before Freud announced its discovery, it was Freud who was the first to develop a scientifically systematic way to scrutinize this "unconscious" and glean information that pertained to the individual who was the subject and master of its manifestations. Freud believed that the unconscious was the part of humanity that exists within each individual and is made up of sub-mental processes which regulates or alters an individual's behavior based on societal institutions and latent desires. He argued against making a medical degree necessary for psychoanalytic training, as the core of the analysts' training would come from personal analysis. Freud believed that this unconscious would always remain incompletely understood, agreeing in part with some of his critics on this one point: the study and acknowledgement of a so-called innately hidden or repressed part of consciousness is hypocritical and even a bit of an oxymoron. Freud himself said in Civilization and Its Discontents, "Just as a cautious businessman avoids tying up all his capital in one concern, so, perhaps, worldly wisdom will advise us not to look for the whole of our satisfaction from a single aspiration."
"Freud is the only living human outside the Baptist church who continues to take man seriously."
- Zelda Fitzgerald, 1932
Like the rest of scientific process occurring during the nineteenth century, Freud's work was highly "deterministic," and originally brought (normal and abnormal) human behavior into a broad spectrum which unearthed explicable reasons for its expression by discovering the repressed, or latent, mental processes/ states. Specifically neurotic behavior, which had been casually disregarded as inexplicable for the past centuries, suddenly found a scientist who treated it as a set of meaningful symptoms, which were functional in seeking out a viable explanation by searching for causes that determined the mental state of the neurotic individual. Freud tested methods that were both new and archaic, like the borrowed-upon practice of free-association, the practice of hypnosis (which he later disregarded as he considered it to be repressive), the interpretation and analysis of dreams, and most importantly, the recollection of feelings and emotions that were present during the early stages of life.
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