

Breuer, an early mentor and colleague of Freud's, wrote that Freud was "a man given to absolute and exclusive formulations."įreud was aware of Darwin's theory. Freud himself described his sexual theory as having all the popularity of "a freshly painted wall."īut Freud stuck to his theory and would not agree to any modification of it. They thought sexual conflicts were involved in some, but not all, mental problems.įreud insisted his sexual theory applied to all mental illness. Many of Freud's early associates objected to the extreme and rather exclusive emphasis he put on sex. Which part of this theory did Freud think was most important? How did Freud's early associates react to his ideas? That may sound extreme but it is actually typical of how Freud thought.

He explained almost all unusual psychological phenomena with references to sex.įor example, Freud explained the déjà vu experience by saying it was an unconscious memory of the mother's genitals (Slochower, 1970). Déjà vu occurs when the memory turns to them and forms a scene from one recovered detail.To Freud, his sexual theory was his most important work.

Psychoanalyst theory: the subconscious activates something that the person has imagined in the past, like a dream, or something they’ve seen somewhere before, like a place in a movie.

Neurological theory: An electric shock is produced in the hippocampus or in the medial temporal lobe that causes the phenomenon to happen, which would explain why people with epilepsy have it before an attack.However, today studies have turned towards cognitive processes in the human brain and anomalies of memory to explain this phenomenon. In fact, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung contributed their own explanations of déjà vu to the discussion: the former attributed it to repressed desires, and the latter to alterations of the collective unconscious. Cambiando el pasado (Changing the Past, movie)- Why does déjà vu occur?īetween the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, psychoanalysis was one of the first psychological trends that tried to explain this mental phenomenon.
