Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud was born Sigismund Schlomo Freud on 6 May 1856 in Freiberg, in the Austrian Empire, now Příbor in the Czech Republic. He was the first of eight children born to Ashkenazi Jewish parents, Jakob Freud and Amalia Nathansohn. His father was a wool merchant from a Hasidic Jewish family, though he had moved away from that tradition, and his mother saw Freud’s birth with a caul as a good omen. The family left Freiberg in 1859, moved first to Leipzig, and then settled in Vienna in 1860, the city with which Freud’s life and work would be closely associated until he left in 1938.

Freud was an outstanding student at the Leopoldstädter Kommunal-Realgymnasium, where he entered at age nine and graduated with honors in 1873. He loved literature and became proficient in German, French, Italian, Spanish, English, Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. At seventeen he entered the University of Vienna, initially intending to study law, but he joined the medical faculty instead. His studies ranged widely: philosophy under Franz Brentano, physiology under Ernst Brücke, and zoology under the Darwinist professor Carl Claus. He also worked in Claus’s zoological research station in Trieste and later spent six years in Brücke’s physiology laboratory, comparing the brains of humans and other animals.

After receiving his MD in March 1881, Freud began his medical career at Vienna General Hospital in 1882. His research in cerebral anatomy led to an 1884 paper on the palliative effects of cocaine, and his work on aphasia formed the basis of his first book, On Aphasia: A Critical Study, published in 1891. His time in Theodor Meynert’s psychiatric clinic and as a locum in a local asylum increased his interest in clinical work. In 1885, his published research earned him appointment as a university lecturer in neuropathology at the University of Vienna.

In 1886, Freud resigned his hospital post and entered private practice, specializing in “nervous disorders.” That same year he married Martha Bernays, granddaughter of Isaac Bernays, a chief rabbi in Hamburg. Freud was an atheist, but Austrian requirements led to both a civil ceremony and a Jewish religious ceremony. The couple had six children: Mathilde, Jean-Martin, Oliver, Ernst, Sophie, and Anna. From 1891 until their departure from Vienna in 1938, the Freud family lived at Berggasse 19, near Innere Stadt. In 1897, Freud was initiated into the German Jewish cultural association B’nai B’rith, with which he remained linked all his life.

Freud is best known as the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method based on dialogue between patient and psychoanalyst, and as the thinker who built a distinctive theory of mind from that practice. He introduced methods such as free association, dream interpretation, and the analysis of transference in the clinical setting. His work on dreams as wish fulfillments helped him develop ideas about symptom formation, repression, and the unconscious. He also formulated the Oedipus complex, proposed libido as sexualised psychic energy, and later developed a model of the psyche made up of id, ego, and superego. In later work he extended his thinking into religion and culture.

Psychoanalysis is less common now as a diagnostic and clinical practice, but Freud’s work remains influential in psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, and the humanities. It continues to provoke debate about therapeutic efficacy, scientific status, and its relation to feminism. Even so, his concepts have entered Western thought and popular culture to an unusual degree. W. H. Auden’s 1940 tribute described Freud as having created “a whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our different lives.” That is why Freud’s language still feels familiar: it gave many people a way to speak about hidden motives, conflict, memory, desire, and the divided self.