Freud was not a psychologist in his early years, and he entered the University of Vienna at the age of 17 to study medicine and zoology.
Sigmund freud
At that time, in the academic community, the gender of eels was still a mystery, and it was generally believed that eels were hermaphrodite.
In fact, as early as the ancient Greek period, Aristotle dissected eels, he found neither testicles nor ovaries, so he firmly believed that eels had no sex, believing that all eels were "made out of nothing" from the mud.
Female eels were discovered in 1777, but not a single male eel was found until nearly a hundred years later.
And this responsibility fell on Freud.
It was the spring of 1876, and the 19-year-old Freud was far from home, ambitious to solve the mystery of eels and leave a name for the history of science, to a humble laboratory in Trieste on the Mediterranean coast.
It was the young Freud's first real scientific task.
He worked 9 hours a day, dissecting the eels day in and day out, searching for testicles in their icy bodies.
He loved the laboratory because under the microscope, what he saw was always real, and all the answers would be revealed, which was the promise of science.
But the more Freud dissected, the more frustrated he became.
The work was monotonous and fruitless, and he dissected more than 400 eels, all of them female.
In a letter to a friend, he said:
My hands were stained with the white and red blood of marine animals, and everything I saw inside was the shiny tissue after the animal died, and they always entered my dreams.
Mindcatcher
Freud had a firm belief in the natural sciences, but the eel betrayed him, and the eel hid his sexuality.
In his letter, Freud drew an eel that seemed to mock him, and he breathlessly called the eel a beast, which was what he called the local woman when he first came to the city.
This may have led him to leave the natural sciences in favor of more complex and unquantifiable psychoanalysis.
Many years later, when Freud, as a psychologist, approached the field of sex again, he was most interested in the hidden and repressed sex.
What Freud did not know was that the sexual organs of eels would only be revealed when they were to be used. It took 20 years for a sexually mature male silver eel to be found in Sicily.
Finally, the mystery of the eel's gender has opened up a corner of the truth.
So, why is the sex of the eel so difficult to determine, and what interesting mysteries are there to be solved?
Today, I recommend this book "Eel's Journey" to explore the eel, one of nature's strangest creatures, a mysterious and unique journey of life.
Author: [Swedish] Patrick Svensson
Subtitle: A Quest for Purpose and Meaning
Original name: Ålevangeliet
Publication year: 2020-10
Douban score: 8.7
It's a strange book that's as difficult to define as an eel, about eels, and even more about life itself: from the eel's clumsy and romantic journey to the profound and touching mystery of life.
Swedish phenomenon bestseller, with a print run of 70,000 copies in the 3 months of publication, now exceeds 130,000 copies! For his debut, he won the August Prize, Sweden's prestigious literary award, and was named the best non-fiction book.
Tell the mystery of eels in the history of science, embark on a literary, artistic and religious eel expedition, and explore life, death, and everything in between reminiscing about your father's precious eel hunting. The language is beautiful and moving, and the emotions are sincere and moving: the restrained text flows with a rare affection between father and son.
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was an Austrian psychiatrist and founder of psychoanalysis.
He entered the University of Vienna in 1873 and received his doctorate in medicine in 1881.
From 1885 to 1886 he studied at J.M. Schalcoe, and then went to Nancy to observe A. Liber and H. Bernheim hypnotherapy, and was convinced that neuropathy could be effective through psychotherapy.
Around 1892, he discovered that the efficacy of hypnosis was not sustainable, so he switched to his special psychoanalytic therapy to dig out forgotten ideas or desires.
In 1897, the Oedipus complex was proposed, that is, the emotion of hating fathers and mothers.
In 1930 he was awarded the Goethe Prize.
On his birthday in 1936, he was made a Corresponding Member of the Royal Society.
Self and Self contains three mature works by Freud in his later period: "The Principle of Transcendence", "Collective Psychology and the Analysis of the Self", and "The Self and the Self", which concisely express the theoretical points and the essence of psychoanalysis.
Published in 1923, Self and Self was Freud's last major work, it is recognized as a novel and revolutionary description of the human psyche and its activity.
Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams is an important sign of the formation of psychoanalytic theoretical systems.
Like a torch, it illuminates the deep holes of human psychological life, reveals many mysteries buried in the depths of human psychology, lays a solid foundation for the theory of the human subconscious, sets a new milestone in human understanding of itself, and guides human civilization throughout the 20th century.
Through the scientific exploration and analysis of dreams, Freud discovered the other side of human nature: the "subconscious mind" and unveiled the mysteries of the human mind. It has an important influence on related branches of psychology such as educational psychology.
Freud's theoretical ideas can be said to have had an impact in every field of psychology and psychiatric analysis, and anthropology, as a discipline that studies culture as the main body, certainly feels a lot from Freud's theory.
Psychoanalysis is a method of treating neuropathy, but also a technique for studying psychological function, and later formed a theory of psychology, which became an important school of modern psychology, and had different degrees of influence on psychology, medicine, anthropology and even history, literature and art, and philosophy.
This book is the most important classic of the psychoanalytic school. The methods of the basic concepts of psychoanalytic theory are well expressed in this work.
"Three Treatises on Sexology" is the pioneering work of psychology grandmaster Freud in sexology. In this work, he applied psychoanalysis to sexual research for the first time, by combing through the budding and growth of ordinary male and female sexual impulses from early childhood to adolescence, and discovering and exploring the key psychological factors in each person's sexual confusion.
This rarely straightforward and easy-to-read work of Freud's work, first published in 1905, was attacked as a "great rebellion" as soon as it came out.
But as a sincere scientific work that benefits people, its greatness will not be dimmed! In the more than twenty years since then, the "Three Treatises on Sexology" has been republished four times, directly enlightening the entire modern Western society's views and cognition of "sex", and still providing reference and help for people all over the world.