Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud was born Sigismund Schlomo Freud on 6 May 1856 in Freiberg in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Příbor, Czech Republic) to Jakob and Amalia Freud; he was the eldest of eight children in a Jewish family and grew up largely in Vienna after the family moved there when he was a child. He enrolled at the University of Vienna in 1873 and trained in medicine, receiving his medical degree in 1881 and initially working in neurology and neuropathology before turning his attention to the psychological aspects of nervous disorders. In the mid-1880s Freud studied under Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris and later collaborated with Josef Breuer; these experiences shaped his move from neurological to psychological explanations of phenomena like “hysteria” and helped lead him to develop techniques such as free association and therapeutic talk therapy. Freud’s 1900 publication The Interpretation of Dreams laid out his account of the unconscious, dream symbolism, and the Oedipus complex and marked a turning point in his career as the founder of psychoanalysis. Across the first decades of the 20th century Freud continued to elaborate theory and practice: he published works including The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), and The Ego and the Id (1923), and he trained followers who helped establish psychoanalytic societies and spread the method internationally despite controversy and split-offs from figures such as Carl Jung and Alfred Adler. With the rise of Nazism and the annexation of Austria, Freud—who was Jewish—faced increasing danger; he left Vienna in 1938 and went to London, where he spent his final months and died on 23 September 1939. His daughter Anna Freud became a prominent psychoanalyst in her own right, and Freud’s writings continued to exert wide influence across psychology, psychiatry, literature, and popular culture throughout the 20th century and beyond.