After the War, in the 1920s, the US saw a period of rapid economic expansion, as did parts of Europe, although this expansion was predicated not on stable economic gains but a series of financial “bubbles,” often deriving from unstable and quickly-inflating currencies. In a sense, the War was an anachronism from the beginning, and the only thing “modern” about it was the senseless loss of life it occasioned. The First World War involved 20th-century weaponry-destroying on a previously unimaginable scale-but unfolded according to 19th-century tactics, wherein soldiers rode on horseback or walked on foot, and fired weapons that required some minutes to reload. For a great many, including artists and intellectuals across Europe, the “Great War” was an indication of the bloodshed and savagery of which “modern man” was capable. The First World War, from 1914 to 1918, produced an immense loss of life in the supposedly “civilized” European countries of France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. Many of his students, including Carl Jung, also went on to influential careers in psychology, though many of their ideas diverged from their former teacher’s over time and they developed their own schools of thought. His ideas remain important in psychology and many other fields, such as literary studies. Freud fled Austria in 1938 to escape the Nazis, and died a year later in England. Freud’s ideas proved to be enormously influential, including his notions of repression and the unconscious, and his concepts of “the Oedipus complex” (describing a son’s desire to kill his father and wed his mother) “anal retentiveness” (regarding obsessive organization in early childhood) and the “ego,” “id,” and “superego”-which Freud described as the three components of the mind. Meanwhile, Freud’s career flourished, in both private practice and as a professor. There were rumors as well that, after 1896, Freud had an ongoing affair with Martha’s sister, Minna Bernays. Freud married Martha Bernays in 1886 and with her had six children. Freud studied the brain, including cerebral palsy and aphasia, before developing methods of treating psychological ailments through what he called “the talking cure,” which consisted of a combination of “dream analysis,” “free association,” and intensive questioning into the patient’s familial relations. Born in Austria to Galician Jewish parents in 1856, Freud trained to be a doctor at the University of Vienna, graduating in 1881. Sigmund Freud was the creator of psychoanalytic theory, and one of the twentieth-century’s most influential thinkers in the fields of psychology and sociology.

Freud civilisation and its discontents