By: Noor Khan Mallach , Year 11
Nowadays, therapy is extremely normalized and even encouraged in order to properly process difficult situations or emotions, but it wasn’t always like this. The modern therapy of opening up with a certified specialist in order to let go of any trauma and try to heal wasn’t a thing. The information available on how the brain functioned was extremely limited before the mid-twentieth century due to no proper visualization, unlike today with the invention of MRI’s, CT, and more. But who is Sigmund Freud you may ask? Well, he is essentially the founding father of therapy. He discovered the “Talking cure” and what we call modern therapy with a few tweaks. Let’s see how therapy was in the past, exactly how Freud came around and what he achieved , as well as how it impacted the field of mental health in the 21st Century.
First, let me take you back in the past, pre-freud, to the Hippocratic period (460–375 BC), where trephination occurred. An old method used as a therapeutic practice back in the day consisted of removing part of the skull in order to “[allow] the causative spirit to escape”1. This, however, was not effective for dealing with this particular field of medicine. Trephination is now used to relieve pressure in bruised nails as well as dealing with physical head trauma, quite a stretch away from dealing with depression or any other mental illness that gets better with actual therapy. Another example is the Phlebotomy, also known as balancing the ‘humors’. Back in the hippocratic period all the way to the 19th century, physicians believed there were 4 essential elements in the body called the humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. When a person was unwell either mentally or physically, it was said that their humors were imbalanced. Therefore, the practice consisted of restoring the blood balance by some quite interesting techniques, including cutting a vein (venesection) or applying leeches. Scientific discoveries have led us to realize that this in fact did not help patients seeking help for their mental struggles, and was useful in other areas. Simply put, the majority of treatments to do with mental issues were extremely ineffective or even dangerous mainly due to the stigma attached. People with mental issues were referred to as the crazies of society and treated quite badly, with some even saying that they were devil spawn. Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, for example, in his The Myth of Mental Illness (1960) argued that “mental issues” was simply a term for people who did not conform with society, similar to the use of “demonic possession” by religious authorities. Hence, the common stigma of mental health, which heavily influenced treatments before Freud.
Now that we know the starting point, let’s check out how Freud came around and what he achieved. For some context, born in the Czech Republic 1856 and died in London 1939, Sigmund Freud was a pioneer in the medical field for his time period, but not without his faults. While some of his theories were quite out there and not very realistic, his works in both Hysteria and Psychoanalysis have changed the scientific community undoubtedly. Psychoanalysis, which is one of the specific terms in the umbrella term of Therapy, is a type of long-term psychotherapy that tries to bring up the thoughts, feelings, and memories that are repressed in the unconscious mind. It often focuses on childhood as the theory speculates that most trauma and unconscious thought were developed due to some sort of incident as a child, particularly sexual. Psychoanalysts listen to the patient go on about everything in their dreams and life to find an emotional pattern and “cure” them. Sigmund Freud called in the “talking cure” and it was revolutionary for the time. Freud’s work on hysteria was also very important as he changed it from being a disease associated mainly with women to a psychological issue due to a repressed childhood. He discovered that it was mainly linked to repressed sexual conflicts in childhood because of his work with a woman called Anna O. who went through hallucinations and paralysis after her fathers death. He realized that her physical issues were linked deeply to her psychological ones, something that was completely new as they were considered mutually exclusive at the time. Hence, both these examples show that Sigmund Freud was ahead of his time.
His impact on the field of psychology and mental health with his theories are unimaginable and the foundation of treatments today. Although some of his theories have now been disproven or found outdated, his ideas influenced therapy greatly, starting from the very fact of the openness he encouraged with his patients. For example, while his analysis of dreams was completely off and scientifically unproven, his technique of getting people to talk openly about everything with no judgement on his part has led to the therapy known nowadays and allowed an explosion in mental health research due to how he reduced the stigma surrounding it. The same with hysteria, which he managed to change the narrative from crazy woman to psychological non-gender biased disease/disorder, allowing better treatment options. In summary, his theories evolved into modern day effective treatments.
In conclusion, while Sigmund Freud had some very unusual theories, like the oedipus and electra complex theory, his psychoanalysis and hysteria discoveries were revolutionary and allowed us to arrive at where we are now. It provided a stable base for modern scientists in neurosciences to know where to start researching with the modern technology.
Albert B. Lowenfels, “Trials and ‘Trephination’ of the Past,” Medscape, last modified September 28, 2016, accessed April 30, 2026, https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/868706?form=fpf.
