{"id":467,"date":"2018-02-04T01:06:00","date_gmt":"2013-05-12T21:06:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/drmirkin.com\/2018\/02\/04\/freud-and-dreams\/"},"modified":"2018-02-04T01:06:00","modified_gmt":"2013-05-12T21:06:27","slug":"freud-and-dreams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/?p=467","title":{"rendered":"Freud and Dreams"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n\t<img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Sigmund Freud\" src=\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/FamousDeaths\/freud2.jpg\" style=\"width: 136px; height: 195px; float: left;\" \/>Even though many of his theories are not accepted today by most experts in the field of psychiatry, Sigmund Freud invented psychotherapy and thus was one of the most influential people of the 20th century. He believed that:<\/p>\n<div id=\"cke_pastebin\">\n\t&bull; depression and anxiety are influenced by factors that affect us in childhood,<\/div>\n<div id=\"cke_pastebin\">\n\t&bull; interpreting dreams can lead to understanding of the causes, and<\/div>\n<div id=\"cke_pastebin\">\n\t&bull; psychotherapy can make emotionally sick people healthy by getting them to understand that events in childhood may have caused their problems.<\/div>\n<div id=\"cke_pastebin\">\n\t&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div id=\"cke_pastebin\">\n\t<strong>From Hysteria to Psychoanalysis<\/strong><\/div>\n<div id=\"cke_pastebin\">\n\tFreud was graduated first in his class at the Spurling Gymnasium and went on to study medicine at the University of Vienna. With his mentor, Dr. Josef Breuer, he treated a woman named Bertha Pappenheim for a nervous cough, loss of feeling in her fingers and inability to walk. Since they could not find a physical cause for her symptoms, they looked for psychological causes and found plenty. The woman recalled several horrible experiences in her childhood. The doctors felt that all her symptoms were psychological and diagnosed her as suffering from hysteria. They then spent many hours having her talk about her frightening experiences and all her symptoms improved markedly.&nbsp; In 1895, Freud and Breuer published her case and called it Studien zur Hysterie (Studies in Hysteria).&nbsp; The patient herself called the treatment &quot;the talking cure.&quot; Using this case as a base, Freud created psychoanalysis, the treatment of emotional disease by talking to a psychiatrist.<\/div>\n<div id=\"cke_pastebin\">\n\t&bull; He developed &quot;free association&quot; in which patients report their thoughts to their therapist as they think of them.<\/div>\n<div id=\"cke_pastebin\">\n\t&bull; He recommended that patients communicate their sexual experiences and fantasies of their childhood to explain some of their feelings and thoughts.<\/div>\n<div id=\"cke_pastebin\">\n\t&bull; He felt that men suffer from an Oedipus complex in which they fall in love with their mothers and use their mothers to guide their behavior as adults.<\/div>\n<div id=\"cke_pastebin\">\n\t&bull; He felt that people are guided by their libidos, that their pleasures and a fear of death make them establish behavior patterns and feel hate and guilt.<\/div>\n<div id=\"cke_pastebin\">\n\t&nbsp;<\/div>\n<p>\n\t<iframe loading=\"lazy\" allowfullscreen=\"\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/mQaqXK7z9LM\" width=\"420\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<div id=\"cke_pastebin\">\n\t<strong>Neurotransmitters Made Freud Obsolete<\/strong><\/div>\n<div id=\"cke_pastebin\">\n\tFor more than 50 years, Freud was one of the most revered scientists on earth. Then researchers discovered neurotransmitters, chemicals that pass messages from one nerve to another. For example, they theorized that:&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div id=\"cke_pastebin\">\n\t&bull; people who hallucinate and are not able to think clearly are schizophrenic because their brains make too much dopamine or glutamate&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div id=\"cke_pastebin\">\n\t&bull; depression occurs when the brain makes too little norepinephrine or serotonin&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div id=\"cke_pastebin\">\n\t&bull; people with Parkinson&rsquo;s disease shake because their brains make too little dopamine<\/div>\n<div id=\"cke_pastebin\">\n\t&bull; people with Alzheimer&rsquo;s disease may have markedly reduced concentration of acetylcholine in parts of their brains (<em>Ugeskr Laeger<\/em>,&nbsp;1990 Jul 23;152(30):2165-8).<\/div>\n<div id=\"cke_pastebin\">\n\tNow these diseases are treated with drugs that raise or lower brain levels of neurotransmitters. Drugs such as Mirapex, Levodopa, Sinemet, levodopa or carbidopa raise dopamine levels to reduce the symptoms of Parkinson&rsquo;s disease. Drugs such as Paxil, Prozac or Zoloft raise brain levels of serotonin to treat depression. Modern psychiatrists know that you cannot treat chemical depression, schizophrenia or anxiety just with talking, so they treat mental disorders also with drugs to correct abnormal brain levels of neurotransmitters.&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div id=\"cke_pastebin\">\n\t&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div id=\"cke_pastebin\">\n\t<strong>REM Sleep<\/strong><\/div>\n<div id=\"cke_pastebin\">\n\tJust because psychiatrists now treat depression, anxiety and schizophrenia mainly with drugs does not mean that Freud was wrong. Scientific marvels such as pet scans, electroencephalograms, MRIs and MRAs have given us new understanding of dreams. When you go to sleep at night, your eyes are still. After a while, your eyes dart from side to side rapidly. This is called Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep. You dream, you cannot move, men may have erections and women have their pelvic organs fill with blood. If you wake up during REM you can report your dreams, but if you try to remember your dreams a few hours later, you usually can&rsquo;t. During REM sleep, the part of your brain that governs emotions and visual imagery is activated, while the part of your brain associated with rational thought and reasoning is turned off. Dreams may uninhibit you so you can think about things that may be too painful to think about when you are awake. Or dreams may allow you to discover things about yourself that you would never tell directly to anyone, let alone to your doctor. Dreams can provide clues to why a person feels depressed, anxious or reasons poorly.<\/div>\n<div id=\"cke_pastebin\">\n\t&nbsp;<\/div>\n<p>\n\t<iframe loading=\"lazy\" allowfullscreen=\"\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/4hmYR23b-1Q\" width=\"420\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<div id=\"cke_pastebin\">\n\t<strong>Freud&rsquo;s Lasting Contribution<\/strong><\/div>\n<div id=\"cke_pastebin\">\n\tToday, the practice of psychiatry consists of prescribing antidepressants, antipsychotics, anti-anxiety and tranquilizing drugs, plus psychotherapy &#8212; guided listening to patients trying to work out their problems.&nbsp; These treatments can often help people to function more effectively in society.&nbsp; Even though many theories proposed by Freud 100 years ago now appear to be wrong, Freud remains one of the most influential and brilliant intellectuals in modern times.<\/div>\n<div id=\"cke_pastebin\">\n\t&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div id=\"cke_pastebin\">\n\t<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Sigmund_Freud\">Sigmund Freud<\/a><\/div>\n<div id=\"cke_pastebin\">\n\tMay 6, 1856 &#8211; September 23, 1939<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For 50 years, Freud was one of the most revered scientists on earth. Then researchers discovered neurotransmitters, chemicals that pass messages from one nerve to another. They found that people who hallucinate and are not able to think clearly are schizophrenic because their brains make too much dopamine or glutamate, and that people are depressed because their brains make too little norepinephrine and serotonin;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7602,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-histories-and-mysteries"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}