Who Influenced Sigmund Freud to do Psychology?
Are you wondering who influenced Sigmund Freud to do psychology? If so, you may find the answer to this question quite bizarre.
Who influenced Sigmund Freud to do psychology? Well, no one, really. It was really a “who” that turned Freud’s mind away from his intended course of study (law) to medicine. Some would say that it was an obsession that caused him to chase the medical dream, others might say that it had something to do with a slimy little creature. As it turned out, once the young student had his mind set on something, it was impossible to convince him otherwise.
Attending the University of Vienna in order to study law, Freud began his apprenticeship with a Darwinist professor named Karl Claus. Claus happened to mention to Freud that the sexual organs of the eel were still unknown (something that greatly frustrated Claus and many of his contemporaries), so Freud set out to discover the thing that no other doctor during his time could figure out. With high hopes that his discovery of eel genetalia would make him famous, Freud set to work dissecting hundreds of the slithering creatures.
Upon completing his research, young Sigmund published “Mitteilungen der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften” or “The Testicles of Eels.” What was the result of his many dissections and lab tests? He was unable to find the sexual organs of eels. Still, this bit of medical study fascinated him, and he immediately switched from law to medicine. Thus, it was not who influenced Sigmund Freud to do psychology, but what influenced him – yes, psychology as we now know it was thanks, in part, to the hundreds of eels that gave their lives for an ambitious young boy.
Now that you know how Freud came to study medicine, you may find a lot of correlations between his early eel work and his later sexuality work. Many biographers often draw lines between his early eel aggression and his theories regarding the sexual workings of man.
From a law student to a medical student to a brilliant neurologist, Freud is one of the greatest minds of all time. Who influenced Sigmund Freud to do psychology? Other than the eels, he largely pushed himself into the field that he was meant to study. Thankfully, he never did find those reproductive organs – otherwise, we may not know as much as we do about the human mind today.