biographies of freud

Sigmund Freud

(1856-1939)

Who Was Sigmund Freud?

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist who developed psychoanalysis, a method through which an analyst unpacks unconscious conflicts based on the free associations, dreams and fantasies of the patient. His theories on child sexuality, libido and the ego, among other topics, were some of the most influential academic concepts of the 20th century.

Early Life, Education and Career

Freud was born in the Austrian town of Freiberg, now known as the Czech Republic, on May 6, 1856. When he was four years old, Freud’s family moved to Vienna, the town where he would live and work for most of the remainder of his life. He received his medical degree in 1881. As a medical student and young researcher, Freud’s research focused on neurobiology, exploring the biology of brains and nervous tissue of humans and animals.

After graduation, Freud promptly set up a private practice and began treating various psychological disorders. Considering himself first and foremost a scientist, rather than a doctor, he endeavored to understand the journey of human knowledge and experience.

Early in his career, Freud became greatly influenced by the work of his friend and Viennese colleague, Josef Breuer, who had discovered that when he encouraged a hysterical patient to talk uninhibitedly about the earliest occurrences of the symptoms, the symptoms sometimes gradually abated.

After much work together, Breuer ended the relationship, feeling that Freud placed too much emphasis on the sexual origins of a patient's neuroses and was completely unwilling to consider other viewpoints. Meanwhile, Freud continued to refine his own argument.

Freud's psychoanalytic theory, inspired by his colleague Josef Breuer, posited that neuroses had their origins in deeply traumatic experiences that had occurred in the patient's past. He believed that the original occurrences had been forgotten and hidden from consciousness. His treatment was to empower his patients to recall the experience and bring it to consciousness, and in doing so, confront it both intellectually and emotionally. He believed one could then discharge it and rid oneself of the neurotic symptoms. Some of Freud’s most discussed theories included:

• Id, ego and superego: These are the three essential parts of the human personality. The id is the primitive, impulsive and irrational unconscious that operates solely on the outcome of pleasure or pain and is responsible for instincts to sex and aggression. The ego is the “I” people perceive that evaluates the outside physical and social world and makes plans accordingly. And the superego is the moral voice and conscience that guides the ego; violating it results in feelings of guilt and anxiety. Freud believed the superego was mostly formed within the first five years of life based on the moral standards of a person’s parents; it continued to be influenced into adolescence by other role models.
• Psychic energy: Freud postulated that the id was the basic source of psychic energy or the force that drives all mental processes. In particular, he believed that libido, or sexual urges, was a psychic energy that drives all human actions; the libido was countered by Thanatos, the death instinct that drives destructive behavior.
• Oedipus complex: Between the ages of three and five, Freud suggested that as a normal part of the development process all kids are sexually attracted to the parent of the opposite sex and in competition with the parent of the same sex. The theory is named after the Greek legend of Oedipus, who killed his father so he could marry his mother.
• Dream analysis: In his book The Interpretation of Dreams , Freud believed that people dreamed for a reason: to cope with problems the mind is struggling with subconsciously and can’t deal with consciously. Dreams were fueled by a person’s wishes. Freud believed that by analyzing our dreams and memories, we can understand them, which can subconsciously influence our current behavior and feelings.

The great reverence that was later given to Freud's theories was not in evidence for some years. Most of his contemporaries felt that his emphasis on sexuality was either scandalous or overplayed. In 1909, he was invited to give a series of lectures in the United States; it was only after the ensuing publication of his book Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1916) that his fame grew exponentially.

Freud has published a number of important works on psychoanalysis. Some of the most influential include:

'Studies in Hysteria' (1895)

Freud and Breuer published their theories and findings in this book, which discussed their theories that by confronting trauma from a patient’s past, a psychoanalyst can help a patient rid him or herself of neuroses.

'The Interpretation of Dreams' (1900)

In 1900, after a serious period of self-analysis, Freud published what has become his most important and defining work, which posits that dream analysis can give insight into the workings of the unconscious mind. The book was and remains controversial, producing such topics as the Oedipus complex. Many psychologists say this work gave birth to modern scientific thinking about the mind and the fields of psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis.

'The Psychopathology of Everyday Life' (1901)

This book gave birth to the so-called “Freudian slip” — the psychological meaning behind the misuse of words in everyday writing and speech and the forgetting of names and words. These slips, he explained through a series of examples, revealed our inner desires, anxieties and fantasies.

'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality' (1905)

While no one person will die without sex, the whole of humanity would without it — so sex drives human instincts, Freud believed. In this work, he explores sexual development and the relationship between sex and social behavior without applying his controversial Oedipal complex.

Wife and Kids

In 1882, Freud became engaged to marry Martha Bernays. The couple had six children — the youngest of whom, Anna Freud, went on to become a distinguished psychoanalyst herself.

Freud fled Austria to escape the Nazis in 1938 and died in England on September 23, 1939, at age 83 by suicide. He had requested a lethal dose of morphine from his doctor, following a long and painful battle with oral cancer.

Watch "Sigmund Freud: Analysis of a Mind" on HISTORY Vault

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Sigmund Freud
• Birth Year: 1856
• Birth date: May 6, 1856
• Birth City: Freiberg, Moravia, Austrian Empire
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist best known for developing the theories and techniques of psychoanalysis.
• Writing and Publishing
• World War II
• Education and Academia
• Science and Medicine
• Astrological Sign: Taurus
• University of Vienna
• Nacionalities
• Interesting Facts
• Freud's book, 'The Interpretation of Dreams,' is said to have given birth to modern scientific thinking about the mind and the fields of psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis.
• Death Year: 1939
• Death date: September 23, 1939
• Death City: London
• Death Country: England

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Sigmund Freud Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/scientists/sigmund-freud
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: May 3, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
• Where id is, there shall ego be.
• Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

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Sigmund Freud's Life, Theories, and Influence

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Cara Lustik is a fact-checker and copywriter.

Keystone / Hulton Archive / Getty Images

Psychoanalysis

• Major Works
• Perspectives
• Thinkers Influenced by Freud
• Contributions

Frequently Asked Questions

Psychology's most famous figure is also one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the 20th century. Sigmund Freud, an Austrian neurologist born in 1856, is often referred to as the "father of modern psychology."

Freud revolutionized how we think about and treat mental health conditions. Freud founded psychoanalysis as a way of listening to patients and better understanding how their minds work. Psychoanalysis continues to have an enormous influence on modern psychology and psychiatry.

Sigmund Freud's theories and work helped shape current views of dreams, childhood, personality, memory, sexuality, and therapy. Freud's work also laid the foundation for many other theorists to formulate ideas, while others developed new theories in opposition to his ideas.

Sigmund Freud Biography

To understand Freud's legacy, it is important to begin with a look at his life. His experiences informed many of his theories, so learning more about his life and the times in which he lived can lead to a deeper understanding of where his theories came from.

Freud was born in 1856 in a town called Freiberg in Moravia—in what is now known as the Czech Republic. He was the oldest of eight children. His family moved to Vienna several years after he was born, and he lived most of his life there.

Freud earned a medical degree and began practicing as a doctor in Vienna. He was appointed Lecturer on Nervous Diseases at the University of Vienna in 1885.

After spending time in Paris and attending lectures given by the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, Freud became more interested in theories explaining the human mind (which would later relate to his work in psychoanalysis).

Freud eventually withdrew from academia after the Viennese medical community rejected the types of ideas he brought back from Paris (specifically on what was then called hysteria ). Freud went on to publish influential works in neurology, including "On Aphasia: A Critical Study," in which he coined the term agnosia , meaning the inability to interpret sensations.

In later years, Freud and his colleague Josef Breuer published "Preliminary Report" and "Studies on Hysteria." When their friendship ended, Freud continued to publish his own works on psychoanalysis.

Freud and his family left Vienna due to discrimination against Jewish people. He moved to England in 1938 and died in 1939.

Sigmund Freud’s Theories

Freud's theories were enormously influential but subject to considerable criticism both now and during his life. However, his ideas have become interwoven into the fabric of our culture, with terms such as " Freudian slip ," "repression," and "denial" appearing regularly in everyday language.

Freud's theories include:

• Unconscious mind : This is one of his most enduring ideas, which is that the mind is a reservoir of thoughts, memories, and emotions that lie outside the awareness of the conscious mind.
• Personality : Freud proposed that personality was made up of three key elements: the id, the ego, and the superego . The ego is the conscious state, the id is the unconscious, and the superego is the moral or ethical framework that regulates how the ego operates.
• Life and death instincts : Freud claimed that two classes of instincts, life and death, dictated human behavior. Life instincts include sexual procreation, survival and pleasure; death instincts include aggression, self-harm, and destruction.
• Psychosexual development : Freud's theory of psychosexual development posits that there are five stages of growth in which people's personalities and sexual selves evolve. These phases are the oral stage, anal stage, phallic stage, latent stage, and genital stage.
• Mechanisms of defense : Freud suggested that people use defense mechanisms to avoid anxiety. These mechanisms include displacement, repression, sublimation, and regression.

Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis

Freud's ideas had such a strong impact on psychology that an entire school of thought emerged from his work: psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis has had a lasting impact on both the study of psychology and the practice of psychotherapy.

Psychoanalysis sought to bring unconscious information into conscious awareness in order to induce catharsis . Catharsis is an emotional release that may bring about relief from psychological distress. 

Research has found that psychoanalysis can be an effective treatment for a number of mental health conditions. The self-examination that is involved in the therapy process can help people achieve long-term growth and improvement.

Sigmund Freud's Patients

Freud based his ideas on case studies of his own patients and those of his colleagues. These patients helped shape his theories and many have become well known. Some of these individuals included:

• Anna O. (aka Bertha Pappenheim)
• Little Hans (Herbert Graf)
• Dora (Ida Bauer)
• Rat Man (Ernst Lanzer)
• Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff)
• Sabina Spielrein

Anna O. was never actually a patient of Freud's. She was a patient of Freud's colleague Josef Breuer. The two men corresponded often about Anna O's symptoms, eventually publishing the book, "Studies on Hysteria" on her case. It was through their work and correspondence that the technique known as talk therapy emerged.  

Major Works by Freud

Freud's writings detail many of his major theories and ideas. His personal favorite was "The Interpretation of Dreams ." Of it, he wrote: "[It] contains...the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make. Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime."

Some of Freud's major books include:

• " The Interpretation of Dreams "
• "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life"
• "Totem and Taboo"
• "Civilization and Its Discontents"
• "The Future of an Illusion"

Freud's Perspectives

Outside of the field of psychology, Freud wrote and theorized about a broad range of subjects. He also wrote about and developed theories related to topics including sex, dreams, religion, women, and culture.

Views on Women

Both during his life and after, Freud was criticized for his views of women , femininity, and female sexuality. One of his most famous critics was the psychologist Karen Horney , who rejected his view that women suffered from "penis envy."

Penis envy, according to Freud, was a phenomenon that women experienced upon witnessing a naked male body, because they felt they themselves must be "castrated boys" and wished for their own penis.

Horney instead argued that men experience "womb envy" and are left with feelings of inferiority because they are unable to bear children.

Views on Religion

Freud was born and raised Jewish but described himself as an atheist in adulthood. "The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life," he wrote of religion.

He continued to have a keen interest in the topics of religion and spirituality and wrote a number of books focused on the subject. 

Psychologists Influenced by Freud

In addition to his grand and far-reaching theories of human psychology, Freud also left his mark on a number of individuals who went on to become some of psychology's greatest thinkers. Some of the eminent psychologists who were influenced by Sigmund Freud include:

• Alfred Adler
• Erik Erikson
• Melanie Klein
• Ernst Jones

While Freud's work is often dismissed today as non-scientific, there is no question that he had a tremendous influence not only on psychology but on the larger culture as well.

Many of Freud's ideas have become so steeped in public awareness that we oftentimes forget that they have their origins in his psychoanalytic tradition.

Freud's Contributions to Psychology

Freud's theories are highly controversial today. For instance, he has been criticized for his lack of knowledge about women and for sexist notions in his theories about sexual development, hysteria, and penis envy.

People are skeptical about the legitimacy of Freud's theories because they lack the scientific evidence that psychological theories have today.

However, it remains true that Freud had a significant and lasting influence on the field of psychology. He provided a foundation for many concepts that psychologists used and continue to use to make new discoveries.

Perhaps Freud's most important contribution to the field of psychology was the development of talk therapy as an approach to treating mental health problems.

In addition to serving as the basis for psychoanalysis, talk therapy is now part of many psychotherapeutic interventions designed to help people overcome psychological distress and behavioral problems. 

The Unconscious

Prior to the works of Freud, many people believed that behavior was inexplicable. He developed the idea of the unconscious as being the hidden motivation behind what we do. For instance, his work on dream interpretation suggested that our real feelings and desires lie underneath the surface of conscious life.

Childhood Influence

Freud believed that childhood experiences impact adulthood—specifically, traumatic experiences that we have as children can manifest as mental health issues when we're adults.

While childhood experiences aren't the only contributing factors to mental health during adulthood, Freud laid the foundation for a person's childhood to be taken into consideration during therapy and when diagnosing.

Literary Theory

Literary scholars and students alike often analyze texts through a Freudian lens. Freud's theories created an opportunity to understand fictional characters and even their authors based on what's written or what a reader can interpret from the text on topics such as dreams, sexuality, and personality.

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis. Also known as the father of modern psychology, he was born in 1856 and died in 1939.

While Freud theorized that childhood experiences shaped personality, the neo-Freudians (including Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, and Karen Horney) believed that social and cultural influences played an important role. Freud believed that sex was a primary human motivator, whereas neo-Freudians did not.

Sigmund Freud founded psychoanalysis and published many influential works such as "The Interpretation of Dreams." His theories about personality and sexuality were and continue to be extremely influential in the fields of psychology and psychiatry.

Sigmund Freud was born in a town called Freiberg in Moravia, which is now the Czech Republic.

It's likely that Freud died by natural means. However, he did have oral cancer at the time of his death and was administered a dose of morphine that some believed was a method of physician-assisted suicide.

Freud used psychoanalysis, also known as talk therapy, in order to get his patients to uncover their own unconscious thoughts and bring them into consciousness. Freud believed this would help his patients change their maladaptive behaviors.

Freud was the founder of psychoanalysis and introduced influential theories such as: his ideas of the conscious and unconscious; the id, ego, and superego; dream interpretation; and psychosexual development.

A Word From Verywell

While Freud's theories have been the subject of considerable controversy and debate, his impact on psychology, therapy, and culture is undeniable. As W.H. Auden wrote in his 1939 poem, "In Memory of Sigmund Freud":

"...if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd, to us he is no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion."

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Grubin D.  Young Dr. Freud . Public Broadcasting Service.

Gersick S. Penis envy . In: Zeigler-Hill V, Shackelford T, eds. Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences . Springer, Cham. 2017. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_616-1

Bayne E. Womb envy: The cause of misogyny and even male achievement? . Womens Stud Int Forum. 2011;34(2):151-160. doi:10.1016/j.wsif.2011.01.007

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Yeung AWK. Is the influence of Freud declining in psychology and psychiatry? A bibliometric analysis . Front Psychol. 2021;12. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.631516

Giordano G. The contribution of Freud’s theories to the literary analysis of two Victorian novels: Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre . Int J Engl Lit. 2020;11(2):29-34. doi:10.5897/IJEL2019.1312

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By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Biography Online

Sigmund Freud biography

Freud was born 6 May 1856  in Freiberg in Moravia, Austrian Empire (now Příbor, Czech Republic) to Hasidic Jewish parents.

Freud was brought up in Leipzig and Vienna, where he attended a prominent school. Freud proved an outstanding student, excelling in languages, and English literature. He developed a love for reading Shakespeare in original English, something he kept up throughout his life.

At the age of 17, Freud joined the medical facility at the University of Vienna to study a range of subjects, such as philosophy, physiology and zoology.

Freud graduated in 1881 and began working at the Vienna General Hospital. He worked in various departments, such as the psychiatric clinic and also combined medical practice with research work – such as an influential paper on aphasia (1891) and the effects of cocaine (1894). Freud was initially an advocate of using cocaine for pain relief, though he later stopped advocating its use – as its dangers became increasingly known. Freud was also an early researcher in the field of cerebral palsy.

While working in different medical fields, Freud continued his own independent reading. He was influenced by Charles Darwin’s relatively new theory of evolution. He also read extensively Friedrich Nietzsche ’s philosophy. Other influences on Freud included works on the existence of the subconscious, by writers such as Brentano and Theodor Lipps. Freud also studied the practice of hypnosis, as developed by Jean-Martin Charcot.

In 1886, Freud left his hospital post and set up his own private clinic specialising in nervous disorders. An important aspect of Freud’s approach was to encourage patients to share their innermost thoughts and feelings, which often lied buried in their subconscious. Initially, he used the process of hypnosis, but later found he could just ask people to talk about their experiences.

Freud hoped that by bringing the unconscious thoughts and feelings to the surface, patients would be able to let go of repetitive negative emotions and feelings. Another technique he pioneered was ‘transference’ where patients would project negative feelings of other people on to the psychoanalyst. Freud himself wrote about the personal cost of delving into the darker aspects of the subconscious

“No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human beast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.”

Freud – Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905)

Freud also placed an important stress on getting his patients to write down their dreams and use this in the analysis. Increasingly he used the term ‘psychoanalysis’ to explain his methods.

In developing his outlook on psychoanalysis, he also made significant use of his own dreams, depression and feelings from childhood. To Freud, his relationship with his mother was of particular importance – as a child Freud felt he was competing for his mother’s affections between his siblings.

Oedipus Complex

Another key element of Freud’s work was the importance of early sexual experiences of children. He developed a theory of the Oedipus Complex that children have an unconscious and repressed desire to have sexual relations with the parent of the opposite sex. Freud felt that the successful resolution of this resolution was important for developing a mature identity and sexuality.

In 1899, he published ‘ The Interpretation of Dreams ’ in which, he criticised existing theory of dreams, placing greater emphasis on dreams as unfulfilled wish-fulfilments. He later applied his theories in a more practical setting, which generated a larger readership among the general public. Important works include The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901),  Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality , published in 1905.

Group Photo 1909. Freud centre front

From the early 1900s, Freud’s new theories became increasingly influential – attracting a range of followers, who were interested in the new theory of psychology. Other important members of this group included Wilhelm Stekel – a physician, Alfred Adler, Max Kahane, and Rudolf Reitler. All five members were Jewish . The group discussed new papers, but it was Freud who was considered the intellectual leader of the burgeoning psychoanalysis movement. By 1908, this group had become larger and was formalised as the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.

In 1909 and 1910, Freud’s ideas were increasingly being spread to the English speaking work. With Carl Jung, Freud visited New York in 1909. In an apocryphal remark – Freud is rumoured to have remarked to Jung on arriving in New York “They don’t realize that we are bringing them the plague.”

The trip was a success with Freud awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Clark University, Ma. This led to considerable media interest and the later formation of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1911.

However, as the movement grew, there were increasing philosophical splits, with key members taking different approaches. Carl Jung left the movement in 1912, preferring to pursue an ‘analytical psychology’. After the First World War, Adler and Rank both left for different reasons.

Freud 1922 (front left

However, Freud and the field of psychoanalysis continued to grow in prominence. In 1930 Freud was awarded the Goethe Prize for his contributions to German literature and psychology.

After the mid-1920s, Freud also increasingly tried to apply his theories in other fields such as his history, art, literature and anthropology. Freud is often considered to take a pessimistic view of human nature. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud declared:

“I have not the courage to rise up before my fellow-men as a prophet, and I bow to their reproach that I can offer them no consolation…”

Nazi Persecution

In 1933, the Nazi’s came to power in Germany, and Freud as a Jewish writer was put on the list of prohibited books. Freud wryly remarked:

“What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.”

The Nazi’s often burned his books in public. In 1938, Hitler secured an Anschluss of Germany and Austria which placed all Jewish people in great peril, especially intellectuals. Freud, like many in his position, hoped to ride out the growing anti-semitism and stay in Austria. However, in March 1938, Anna Freud was detained by the Gestapo and he became more aware of how dire the situation was. With the help of Ernest Jones (then president of the IPA), Freud and 17 colleagues were given work permits to emigrate to Britain. However, the process of leaving proved tortuous with the Nazi party seeking to gain ‘exit levies’. Freud needed the help of sympathetic colleagues and friends to hide bank accounts and gain the necessary funds. When leaving Austria, Freud was required to sign a document testifying that he had been well and fairly treated. He did so, with a dry wit, adding in his own hand: “ I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone. ” (1)

Freud finally managed to leave Austria on 4 June by the Orient Express, arriving London, 6 June. (As a footnote, Freud’s four elderly sisters did not manage to escape Austria, and would later die in concentration camps.)

For the remaining years of his life, Freud lived at Hampstead, England, where he continued to see patients and continue his work.

In 1923, Freud had been diagnosed with cancer (a result of his smoking habit). Surgery was partially successful, but by 1939, the cancer of his jaw got progressively worse, putting him in great pain. He died on 23 September 1939.

In 1886, he married Martha Bernays; they had six children. Martha’s sister Minna Bernays also joined the household after her fiance died.

On religion

Although of Jewish ethnicity, Freud rejected conventional monotheistic religion as being an illusion and just a necessary step in mankind’s evolution. However, in Moses and Monotheism , Freud acknowledged that religion had played a role in encouraging investigation into the unknown.

Legacy of Freud

Freud was instrumental in the growth of psychoanalysis. His theories have proved controversial, but have often served as a reference either for those who support Freud or those who take an alternative view.

But, despite the immense influence of Freud, his views are increasingly questioned by people who reject the importance he attached to childhood sexuality. Also, contentious is Freud’s idea that humans are afflicted by a destructive ‘death impulse’.

Others criticise Freud for his lack of scientific enquiry – rather trusting to his own judgement and intuition.

Freud’s worked on many female patients, and many of his case studies involve Viennese women. He famously remarked:

“The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?'”

In the 1960s and 70s, the feminist movement was highly critical of Freud’s theory. Simone de Beauvoir criticised psychoanalysis in her book “ The Second Sex ”. In the Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan considered Freud to have a ‘Victorian view’ of women.

However, despite the great controversy surrounding Freud’s theories, many believe him to be one of the most original and influential thinkers, who spawned a range of different approaches to issues of the subconscious, personal relationships and dreams.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “Biography Sigmund Freud”, Oxford, www.biographyonline.net ,  23 March 2015. Last updated 15 February 2018.

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Sigmund Freud: Life, Work & Theories

Though his ideas were controversial, Sigmund Freud was one of the most influential scientists in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. It has been over 100 years since Freud published his theories, yet he still influences what we think about personality and the mind.  

Freud was born to a wool merchant and his second wife, Jakob and Amalie, in Freiberg, Moravia, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on May 6, 1856. This town is now known as Příbor and is located in the Czech Republic. 

For most of his life, he was raised in Vienna, and he was married there in 1886 to Martha Bernays. They had six children. His daughter, Anna Freud, also became a distinguished psychoanalyst.

In 1909, Freud came to the United States and made a presentation of his theories at Clark University in Massachusetts. This was his first presentation outside of Vienna. By this point, he was very famous, even with laymen. 

In 1923, at age 67, Freud was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw after many years of smoking cigars. His treatment included 30 operations over the next 16 years, according to the PBS program, " A Science Odyssey ."

Freud lived his adult life in Vienna until it was occupied by Germany in 1938. Though Jewish, Freud's fame saved him, for the most part. The Nazi party burned his books throughout Germany, but they let him leave Austria after briefly confiscating his passport. He and his wife fled to England, where he died in September 1939.

In 1873, Freud entered the University of Vienna medical school. In 1882, he became a clinical assistant at the General Hospital in Vienna and trained with psychiatrist Theodor Meynert and Hermann Nothnagel, a professor of internal medicine. By 1885, Freud had completed important research on the brain's medulla and was appointed lecturer in neuropathology, according to the  Encyclopedia Britannica .  

Freud's friend, Josef Breuer, a physician and physiologist, had a large impact on the course of Freud's career. Breuer told his friend about using hypnosis to cure a patient, Bertha Pappenheim (referred to as Anna O.), of what was then called hysteria. Breuer would hypnotize her, and she was able to talk about things she could not remember in a conscious state. Her symptoms were relieved afterwards. This became known as the "talking cure." Freud then traveled to Paris to study further under Jean-Martin Charcot, a neurologist famous for using hypnosis to treat hysteria.

After this new line of study, Freud returned to his hometown in 1886 and opened a practice that specialized in nervous and brain disorders. He found that hypnosis didn't work as well as he had hoped. He instead developed a new way to get people to talk freely. He would have patients lie back on a couch so that they were comfortable and then he would tell them to talk about whatever popped into their head. Freud would write down whatever the person would say, and analyze what they had said. This method of treatment is called free association. He published his findings with Breuer in 1895, in a paper called  Studien über Hysterie (Studies in Hysteria) .

In 1896, Freud coined the term psychoanalysis. This is the treatment of mental disorders, emphasizing on the unconscious mental processes. It is also called "depth psychology."

Freud also developed what he thought of as the three agencies of the human personality, called the id, ego and superego. The id is the primitive instincts, such as sex and aggression. The ego is the "self" part of the personality that interacts with the world in which the person lives. The superego is the part of the personality that is ethical and creates the moral standards for the ego.

In 1900, Freud broke ground in psychology by publishing his book " The Interpretation of Dreams ." In his book, Freud named the mind's energy libido and said that the libido needed to be discharged to ensure pleasure and prevent pain. If it wasn't released physically, the mind's energy would be discharged through dreams.

The book explained Freud's belief that dreams were simply wish fulfillment and that the analysis of dreams could lead to treatment for neurosis. He concluded that there were two parts to a dream. The "manifest content" was the obvious sight and sounds in the dream and the "latent content" was the dream's hidden meaning. 

"The Interpretation of Dreams" took two years to write. He only made $209 from the book, and it took eight years to sell 600 copies, according to  PBS .

In 1901, he published " The Psychopathology of Everyday Life ," which gave life to the saying "Freudian slip." Freud theorized that forgetfulness or slips of the tongue are not accidental. They are caused by the "dynamic unconscious" and reveal something meaningful about the person. 

In 1902, Freud became a professor at the University of Vienna. Soon, he gained followers and formed what was called the Psychoanalytic Society. Groups like this one formed in other cities, as well. Other famous psychologists, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Jung, were early followers of Freud. 

In 1905, one of Feud's most controversial theories, those about sexual drive, was published as " Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie  (Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory)." He theorized that sexual drive is a large factor in determining a person's psychology, even in infants, an idea he had touched upon in earlier works. He also developed the theory of the "Oedipus complex." This theory states that boys have sexual attractions toward their mothers that can create jealousy toward the father. 

Another of Freud's controversial sexual theories was talked about in his 1933 lecture titled "Femininity." The theory, which he called " penis envy ," stated that females become envious of penises as children, and this envy manifests as a daughter's love for her father and the desire to give birth to a son, because those are as close as she would ever get to having a penis of her own. 

Freud is often joked about for his propensity to assign everything with sexual meaning. A likely apocryphal story is that, when someone suggested that the cigars he smoked were phallic symbols, Freud reportedly said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." Some have called this " Freud’s ultimate anti-Freudian joke ." However, there is no written record that this quote actually came from Freud, according to Alan C. Elms in a paper published in 2001 in the Annual of Psychoanalysis.

There has been much arguing in psychology and psychiatry circles about Freud's theories during his life and since his death, which may just prove his ideas, according to some. "Freud discovered and taught about the unconscious mind and psychological defenses, including denial and repression," said Dr. Carole Lieberman, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist who studied under Anna Freud at her London clinic and practices Freudian psychoanalytic therapy. "So, in fact, in trying to deny Freud's insights, people are actually affirming them."

Additional resources

• Encyclopedia Britannica: Ego
• Encyclopedia Britannica: Id
• Discovery Magazine: The Second Coming of Sigmund Freud
• Bio: Sigmund Freud Biography Video

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Article contents

Freud, sigmund.

• Susan Austin
• https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/55514
• Published in print: 23 September 2004
• Published online: 23 September 2004
• This version: 06 January 2011
• Previous version

Sigmund Freud ( 1856–1939 )

by Max Halberstadt , 1921

Freud, Sigmund ( 1856–1939 ), founder of psychoanalysis , was born on 6 May 1856 at Freiberg, Moravia, in the Austro-Hungarian empire (later Príbor, Czech republic), the first of the seven surviving children of Jacob Freud (1815–1896) , wool trader, and his second wife, Amalie (1835–1931) , daughter of Jacob Nathansohn and his wife, Sara . His parents were both Jewish and Freud himself went to London as a refugee in 1938.

Childhood and adolescence

The Freud family occupied one large room on the first floor of a house owned by a blacksmith. His father, at one point registered as a wool merchant, made what must have been a somewhat precarious living through trade of various kinds. His mother was an attractive and strong-minded woman and by all accounts her love for Sigmund , the first-born of her eight children, was boundless. There followed two more boys, one of whom died at six months, and five girls, whose arrival stirred up intense jealousy in Freud . Freud's position in the family was unusual in that he also had two grown-up half-brothers from his father's first marriage, one of whom had a young son, so that Freud was born an uncle. This nephew, John , was Freud's closest child companion and rival. Freud remarked, in The Interpretation of Dreams , that his characteristic warm friendships as well as his enmities with contemporaries went back to this early relationship ( Freud , Interpretation , 483 ). The two half-brothers and the young boy emigrated to Manchester at the end of Freud's third year, stimulating in him early thoughts of moving to England himself, which he was eventually to do some eighty years later.

Meanwhile, in 1860, when Freud was four, in common with many other Jews of the Austro-Hungarian empire at that time the family moved to Vienna in the wake of a recent liberalization of policy which gave Jews equal political rights and abolished ghettos. Although the family were largely non-observing Jews, ready to assimilate into Viennese society, and all his life Freud was himself an atheist, Jewishness in its religious, cultural, and political aspects was a lifelong preoccupation of his and very much a part of his identity.

The family settled in Leopoldstadt, a mainly Jewish part of the city, where they lived in straitened conditions. Little is known of these first years in Vienna and Freud's early schooling. Although it is unclear quite how Jacob Freud earned a living once there, the family seems to have been able to make ends meet. Freud's education at the excellent local Gymnasium , which he entered in 1865, proceeded without interruption and he received a classical education. He was consistently head of the class. He and his schoolfriend Eduard Silberstein , who remained a lifelong friend, formed their own ‘Spanish Academy’ with an exclusive membership of two, which involved corresponding in self-taught Spanish through which they divulged to each other their thoughts, fantasies, and preoccupations and developed a sort of private mythology. Their correspondence continued from Freud's mid-teens to his mid-twenties, stopping about the time that he met his future wife.

Freud's early biography is of fundamental significance to the history of psychoanalysis, as, through his own rigorous self-analysis—which he was to conduct from the mid-1890s—he effectively made himself the subject of the first psychoanalytic case-history. Freud makes thinly disguised references to his personal experience throughout his psychoanalytical writings, most notably in Die Traumdeutung (1900), published in English as The Interpretation of Dreams . A less intimately personal account is his Selbstdarstellung ( 'Autobiographical study' , 1925), which was commissioned as part of a series of self-portraits by men of science, and focuses on his professional development. In a postscript of 1935 he writes: ' The story of my life and the history of psychoanalysis … are intimately interwoven … no personal experiences of mine are of any interest in comparison to my relations with that science ' ( p. 71 ). In fact Freud's most personal experience was inevitably bound up with psychoanalysis, while it is true that outwardly his private life, typical of a bourgeois doctor, appears unremarkable.

Studies in medicine, neurology, and psychiatry

In spite of the family's financial situation Freud was left by his father to make his own choice of career. He began his medical studies at Vienna University in 1873, availing himself of the considerable degree of academic freedom afforded by the curriculum to explore a variety of areas. His interest gravitated towards scientific research at the outset. He chose to supplement his studies with research in the laboratories of faculty members, undertaking such research for Ernst Brücke , a congenial teacher of physiology and histology, and he remained at Brücke's laboratory for six years. Beginning with studies of nerve cell structure in the Petromyzon , a primitive species of fish, and progressing to human anatomy and a minute study of the medulla oblongata, he established a solid reputation as a specialist in brain anatomy and pathology. In addition to Brücke himself, who was for Freud something of a father figure, Brücke's laboratory brought the young Freud into contact with distinguished colleagues. It was at Brücke's that Freud made the acquaintance of Dr Josef Breuer , another father figure whose personal support and professional collaboration he later acknowledged as crucial to the foundation of psychoanalysis.

It was during this period that Freud made his first long-awaited journey to England in 1875 to visit his half-brothers in Manchester, and which he acknowledged, seven years later, in a letter to his fiancée, as a decisive influence. He had dreamed of England since boyhood and had acquired an insatiable appetite for English literature, especially Shakespeare and Dickens . The trip stimulated renewed yearnings to settle there himself. Jacob Freud had hoped this stay with cousins more successful in business than himself would stimulate in Freud some enthusiasm in that line, but Freud was nurturing fantasies of pursuing a scientific career in England, for all its ' fog and rain, drunkenness and conservatism ' ( Letters to … Silberstein , 127 ). As a result of the excursion and his encounter with the consistent empiricism in the English scientific writings of the likes of John Tyndall , Thomas Huxley , Charles Lyell , and Charles Darwin , his own interests became more sharply focused. Correspondingly he declared himself increasingly wary of metaphysics and philosophy ( ibid., 128 ).

Freud's studies were interrupted by military service in 1879–80, during which he translated four essays by John Stuart Mill for the German edition of the collected works. After receiving his medical qualification in 1881 he pursued his research at Brücke's laboratory, having been given a temporary post. In 1882 Freud suddenly left Brücke's laboratory and began to set himself up to pursue a clinical career, which afforded the eventual prospect of financial security by going into private practice. Significantly, the change of direction coincided with Freud's falling in love with Martha Bernays ( b . 1861) , his future wife, the daughter of an observing Jewish family well known in Hamburg. There followed a four-year engagement, during which he wrote his fiancée 900 letters while struggling to establish himself financially in keeping with conventional expectation.

In the meantime Freud somewhat belatedly began a three-year residency at the Viennese General Hospital, an internationally renowned teaching centre where the heads of department were almost invariably pre-eminent in their fields. Although Freud's career was full of promise during this period, the prospect of becoming materially secure remained remote and he was searching for new discoveries so as to make his name. One such project was concerned with the applications of cocaine, then new and relatively unknown. In 1884 Freud published an enthusiastic paper based on his experiments on himself and others. Unfortunately it was left to a contemporary, Koller , whose attention Freud had drawn to cocaine's anaesthetic qualities, to complete an investigation into such use in eye surgery and so to claim the considerable credit for the discovery.

In July 1885, a month after being appointed to the academic post of privat-docent , Freud left for Paris on a travelling scholarship to study at the Salpêtrière Hospital under the celebrated neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot . In contrast to the Viennese psychiatric approach Freud had so far encountered, which was concerned with physical symptoms and family pathology with little attempt to identify causes, Charcot was developing bold concepts for understanding neurosis through observing patients, in particular hysterics, with a view to characterizing disorders and establishing their aetiology. The trip to Paris was of fundamental significance to Freud's intellectual and professional development. Having arrived there primarily preoccupied with his anatomical researches, by the time of his return to Vienna his interest had turned, through Charcot's influence, to psychopathology and the applications of hypnosis.

In the wake of his formative experience in Paris, Freud gave addresses to the Vienna Medical Society championing Charcot's views on hysteria and hypnosis. These presentations met with cool receptions, to Freud's great disappointment. There was widespread scepticism concerning hypnosis and it is quite possible that Freud's youthful idealization of his French master may have rankled with his senior colleagues, reinforcing Freud's consistently held view of himself as an outsider embattled with the medical establishment.

Marriage and early career

Soon after his return from Paris, Freud set himself up in private practice as a consultant in nervous diseases, of which hysteria was one of the most important. Referrals came in particular from his older friend and benefactor Breuer , with whom he was later to collaborate. After years of relative poverty, Freud had generated enough income to marry Martha Bernays on 13 September 1886 at Wandsbeck, just outside Hamburg. The couple settled down to a domestic regime typical of a Viennese doctor's family and Martha had six children, three boys and three girls, within eight years. The household also included Martha's unmarried sister, Minna , who was able to provide Freud with intellectual companionship through the initial years of relative isolation.

During the first years of married life in addition to his private practice Freud was director of neurology at the Institute for Children's Diseases, where he continued his work on brain neurology in addition to clinical duties with neurological patients, enabling him to support his young family while he pursued his greater interest in clinical psychopathology through his private practice of neurotic patients. Of the neurological papers he published as a result of the neurological post one in particular foreshadows his later work. 'Zur Auffassung der Aphasien: eine kritische Studie' ( 'On aphasia' , 1891) reviewed the existing literature, criticizing its mechanical approach and reliance on brain mythology, which attributed mental functioning to particular parts of the brain, proposing instead a subtle relationship between anatomy and psychology.

The ' talking cure '

Freud's treatment of patients by hypnosis continued for a decade after his visit to Paris, although he became increasingly aware of its limitations. A fundamental shift in his thinking evolved following his re-encounter with a case history which his older friend Breuer had related to him as early as 1882. Breuer had been treating an intelligent and lively minded young woman, known as Anna O. , whose severely debilitating symptoms included paralysis, loss of speech, and a nervous cough. Taking his lead from the patient Breuer developed a cathartic method, which the patient herself called a ' talking cure '. Freud managed to persuade Breuer to revive the method, by which the doctor–patient relationship had effectively been transformed from one of passivity on the part of the hypnotized patient receiving suggestions from the doctor aimed at ridding the patient of the symptom, to that of a patient actively talking in a self-induced trance to a doctor who received information while the patient simultaneously relieved herself of the symptom, which emerged as the product of some early trauma which had not been resolved.

Implicit in the cathartic method which Freud adopted to treat his own patients were several concepts which were to be at the heart of psychoanalytic thinking: namely, that patients were suffering from ' reminiscences '—there was a causal link between hysterical symptoms and psychological trauma; that the traumatic experience had been rendered unconscious through repression, yet continued to make its presence felt; and that the unconscious experience could be made conscious, bringing relief to the patient.

An account of the case of Anna O. was eventually published by Freud and Breuer in Studien über Hysterie ( 'Studies on hysteria' , 1895). Breuer had been consistently reticent about the Anna O. case, which contained elements which he found personally embarrassing, and it was left to the intrepid younger man to explore the implications of the new method which had presented itself as a viable alternative to hypnosis. It was not until 1896 that Freud used the term ‘psychoanalysis’.

Freud widened the scope of the treatment by taking an interest in anything a patient might have to say, rather than inviting an account of the symptoms. Freud named this process free association and its encouragement was the object of the enduring fundamental rule of psychoanalysis, whereby a patient is asked to say whatever comes to mind. With the advent of free association came the demise of the last vestige of the hypnotic method, as Freud now refrained from applying gentle pressure to the patient's head during treatment. The setting for psychoanalysis later recommended by Freud , where the patient reclines comfortably while the analyst sits out of sight, was designed to facilitate free association. The request to patients to associate freely threw into relief resistance, a term which Freud used interchangeably with defence at that time. Listening to patients' accounts Freud became convinced that the traumas which lay behind hysterical symptoms had their origins in infancy and he was struck by their sexual content.

Family, friends, and colleagues

Freud's last daughter, Anna Freud , was born in 1895, the year of the publication with Breuer of Studien über Hysterie . His father died in the following year. Although he found pleasure in fatherhood and in the family home created by Martha Freud , there was no real intellectual outlet for Freud as he struggled to develop a theoretical framework for psychoanalysis and subjected himself to the emotional strain of a lengthy self-analysis. Freud's friendship with Breuer had been faltering since the late 1880s and eventually broke down, largely because Breuer was unwilling to concur with Freud's firm conviction about the sexual aetiology of hysteria. It was Wilhelm Fliess , a talented but ultimately discredited Berlin general practitioner, who fulfilled Freud's need for a friend, confidant, and critic. Fliess was closer in age to Freud and unlike Breuer could not be shocked by Freud's more audacious speculations. The relationship quickly developed a great intensity and the two kept up an intimate correspondence for fifteen years from 1887 to 1902 which sheds light on the otherwise obscure evolution of Freud's thinking at that time and on his concurrent self-analysis. It was in a long letter to Fliess written in 1895 that Freud set out his portentous 'Project for a scientific psychology' with a view to integrating mental and physical phenomena within a single theoretical schema. Freud began work on the 'Project' in the late summer of 1895 in a rush of creativity following one of his ' congresses ' with Fliess . His ambition was to set out a psychology firmly grounded in neurology and biology, which he referred to as his 'Psychology for neurologists' . Freud likened the task to an exhausting but exhilarating mountain climb, during which more peaks to be conquered kept appearing. Exhilaration soon gave way to frustration and dejection however, and by November he wrote to Fliess that he could ' no longer understand the mental state in which I hatched the Psychology ' ( Freud , Project for a scientific psychology, 1895, 152 ). The undeniably abstruse draft survives only among Fliess's papers, and Freud makes no mention of this momentous effort in his autobiographical accounts. It was published posthumously in English in 1954, four years after publication in German, having been rescued from Fliess's papers by Marie Bonaparte following his death in 1931, and edited by James Strachey ( Standard Edition , vol. 1 ). As Strachey points out in his editor's introduction Freud clearly regarded this ostensibly neurological work as a failure. Although it cannot be said to constitute the foundation of psychoanalytic theory as such, it contained the seeds of many ideas elaborated in his later psychological writings, for example drive theory, repression, and an economy of mind based on mental conflict.

Freud's friendship with Fliess was destined to collapse amid recriminations, with Fliess alleging that Freud had appropriated his ideas on inherent bisexuality without acknowledgement. Ten years later Freud's friendship with Jung was also to end acrimoniously, with Jung's questioning of the sexual origins of neurosis at the centre of the dispute. Long before the split with Jung , and in the period preceding his violent quarrel with Fliess in 1900, Freud reflected on the nature of his relationships to contemporaries, which he linked to his intensely ambivalent attachment to his nephew John , who had moved to England when Freud was three.

My emotional life has always insisted that I should have an intimate friend and a hated enemy. I have always been able to provide myself afresh with both, and it has not infrequently happened that the ideal situation of childhood has been so completely reproduced that friend and enemy have come together in a single individual—though not, of course, both at once or with constant oscillations, as may have been the case in my early childhood. Freud, Interpretation , 483

Fortunately for Freud this easily discernible pattern of turbulent relationships prone to eventual breakdown was restricted to close male colleagues. His family relationships and other friendships were contrastingly consistent and loyal. It was no coincidence that the professional disagreements which caused these intimate friendships to break down were concerned with Freud's insistence on the centrality of sexuality. Sexuality represented to Freud the direct and essential instinctual link between psychology and biology, without which he would find himself caught up in the dichotomy of mind and body which he was desperate to avoid.

Establishment of psychoanalysis

Later in his career Freud recalled the 1890s as years in an intellectual wilderness. His papers on hysteria had not won the respect of the medical establishment and he was aware of his Jewishness in that largely Catholic milieu. In addition Freud had confessed his own surprise that ' the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science ' ( Standard Edition , 2.160 ).

Until the late 1890s Freud's observations of the infantile and sexual origins of hysteria had led him to believe, through listening to his patients' accounts, that his patients had fallen ill as a result of childhood sexual abuse by adults. In 1897 he modified this theory of actual childhood seduction and proposed instead that these accounts were often derived from infantile sexual fantasies and therefore belonged in the realm of the patient's own psychic reality and were not, as he had previously thought, necessarily objective facts. To Freud children were no longer assumed to be innocents in a world of adult sexuality: they possessed sexual feelings and wishes of their own which were liable to repression, elaboration, and distortion during development. This shift in Freud's thinking has proved enduringly controversial. Critics have argued that patients' experiences have been denied through their reassignment by Freud to subjective reality and that he changed tack in this way only because he shied away from alienating bourgeois Vienna by reporting widespread sexual abuse in its families. In fact, Freud never denied the reality of child sexual abuse, and it was his attribution of sexual feelings to children which most shocked his contemporaries. Freud was not to be deterred from his line of enquiry. Indeed the cynicism of his medical contemporaries and outrage from members of the wider public seem to have acted as a spur to new vistas opening up. In addition to setting the scene for the detailed exposition of human development, for example in the later Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie ( 'Three essays on the theory of sexuality' , 1905), the recasting of the aetiology of hysteria in the light of childhood sexuality paved the way to a more general understanding of the role of impulse and desire in the human mind, rendered unconscious through repression.

With the publication of Die Traumdeutung in 1900 Freud decisively challenged the accepted limits of scientific psychology, by bringing mental phenomena generally considered beyond the pale, such as dreams, imagination, and fantasy, into the fold. The leitmotif which runs throughout the book is that dreams represent the disguised fulfilment of repressed infantile wishes and that as such ' the interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind ' ( Freud , Interpretation , 608 ).

Freud stated at the outset that his theory of dreams was generally applicable and not restricted to neurotic patients. Indeed, his curiosity about the nature of dreams had been aroused during his self-analysis and the bulk of the illustrative material was trawled from his own dreams and autobiographical material, along with dreams of friends and children. It was in The Interpretation of Dreams that Freud , drawing characteristically on his classical schooling, introduced the Oedipus complex, which asserts the universal desire of a child for the parent of the opposite sex and consequent hatred of the parent of the same sex, which must be resolved through repression in order for normal development to proceed. Although sales were slow and a second edition was not needed until 1909, Freud's explorations of normal psychological functioning did stimulate interest in a wider public.

At the time of writing his dream book Freud was planning other studies of normal psychological processes which would none the less plumb the depths of the psyche, namely Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens ( 'The psychopathology of everyday life' , 1901), which explored the unconscious meaning of everyday slips of the tongue and bungled actions, and Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten ( 'Jokes and their relation to the unconscious' , 1905) for which he drew on his repertoire of ' profound Jewish stories '.

The early years of the century also saw the publication of the first of five substantial case histories which read rather like novellas, the case of Dora , under the title Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905 [1901]). The most important insight from the analysis of Dora , which broke down when the young woman left, came to Freud with hindsight. In a postscript, Freud reviews the analysis in the light of transference. The phenomenon of transference, whereby any individual's experience of early relationships is the blueprint for later relationships, had already been discussed in the Studies on Hysteria (1895) in terms of an unconscious false connection on the part of the patient between the physician and some earlier figure. Now, reflecting on Dora's inability to continue with her analysis, Freud became aware of the implications of the understanding of transference as a key factor in the therapeutic process of psychoanalysis: ' Transference, which seems ordained to be the greatest obstacle to psychoanalysis, becomes its most powerful ally, if its presence can be detected each time and explained to the patient ' ( Standard Edition , 7.117 ).

During this period Freud's home life remained settled. As his financial situation improved he was able to indulge his two great interests: Mediterranean travel and collecting antiquities, another natural consequence of a youth steeped in the classics. He also found time to follow the exciting archaeological discoveries being made at the time, and often cited archaeological excavation as a metaphor for psychoanalytic work, with its interest in painstakingly uncovering hidden layers and origins. In 1907 Freud made the first trip to England since his inspirational visit aged nineteen. He spent a fortnight visiting Manchester relatives who showed him Blackpool and Southport before he departed for London. He returned full of praise for the architecture and people, having seen the Egyptian antiquities at the British Museum. It was not until the hasty move to London in 1938 that Freud once again found himself in his childhood dreamland.

Freud's interests beyond the consulting room and the application of psychoanalytic theory to new areas became increasingly apparent in his writings in the years preceding the First World War. Greek literature had already yielded the Oedipus story and there followed other forays into literature and art history, with Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensen's ‘Gradiva’ ( 'Delusions and dreams in Jensen's “Gradiva”' , 1907) and Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci ( 'Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood' , 1910). In Totem und Tabu ( 'Totem and taboo' , 1913), Freud applied psychoanalysis to anthropological material for the first time.

The psychoanalytic movement

As a privat-docent and from 1902 a professor extraordinarius Freud was entitled to lecture at Vienna University. These lectures attracted a small group of followers composed of both laymen and doctors. From 1902 onwards they met as the Wednesday Psychological Society , which evolved into the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society in 1908. In the meantime, to his great satisfaction, Freud's reputation began to spread beyond Vienna and he began to attract interest from foreigners, among them the well-known psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler and his young assistant Carl Jung . Others included Karl Abraham and Max Eitington , also from the Burghölzli Clinic in Switzerland, who unlike Jung were to remain loyal disciples, the Hungarian Sándor Ferenczi , and the Welshman (Alfred) Ernest Jones , Freud's future biographer and the founder of the British Psycho-Analytical Society .

The year after the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society was founded Freud made his only trip to the United States to give a series of well-received lectures ( Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis , in Standard Edition , vol. 11 ) at the invitation of Clark University, Massachusetts, accompanied by Jung , Ferenczi , and Jones . The spread of psychoanalysis gained momentum and new societies were formed on the model of the Viennese. An international association was established in 1908, uniting the various groups and promising a structure which Freud hoped would facilitate the perpetuation of psychoanalysis through training. Inevitably psychoanalytic politics were in the air and Freud found himself at the centre of rivalries, jealousies, and dissenting views between individuals and groupings, notably his original Viennese colleagues and the Zürich analysts, whom he was felt to favour. Disagreements led to defection by some members, most significantly by Alfred Adler and Jung , whom Freud had thought of as his successor. In an attempt to protect the essence of psychoanalysis from distortion a ‘secret committee’ was formed, at the suggestion of Ernest Jones , which was intended to provide a secure setting within which theory and technique could be discussed among an inner circle of loyal colleagues which consisted of Ernest Jones , Sándor Ferenczi , Karl Abraham , Hanns Sachs , Otto Rank , and, later, Max Eitington . Although the committee met into the 1920s, its conspiratorial air set an unfortunate tone for the future functioning and reputation of the profession.

Further developments

Inevitably the First World War interrupted Freud's well-established working routine. His three sons, Martin , Ernst (father of the writer and broadcaster Clement Freud and the painter Lucian Freud ), and Oliver were all in active service and the real possibility of losses within the family had to be faced. Patients stopped coming, and the international psychoanalytical movement's activities came to a halt. Freud was left more time for private study, which proved very productive. There were papers which resulted from reflections on the war itself, for example 'Zeitgemässes über Krieg und Tod' ( 'Thought for the times on war and death' ). The Vienna University lectures delivered during the war were published as the Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse ( 'Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis' , 1916–17); of particular significance were his Papers on Metapsychology ( Standard Edition , vol. 14), of which only five of an original twelve have survived. Dealing with five fundamental themes of psychoanalysis they are 'On narcissism' , 'Instincts and their vicissitudes' , 'Repression' (all 1915), 'The unconscious' , and 'Mourning and melancholia' (both 1917). Freud went far beyond summing up his theories as they stood in these highly technical papers. In addition to containing new ideas they also hint at numerous revisions which would preoccupy him during the last phase of his career.

By the end of the First World War, Vienna—no longer at the centre of an empire—had become merely the capital of a small, impoverished country. After resuming his private practice Freud took on several British and American patients who proved a useful source of hard currency as a safeguard against soaring inflation. The most serious British interest in Freud came from the members of the Bloomsbury group , in keeping with their characteristic receptiveness to progressive European ideas. Frances Partridge , who lodged with the Stracheys in Gordon Square during their early years as practising analysts, recalled how psychoanalysis was very much part of the Bloomsbury scene, and that she would often recognize patients as they arrived at the house for their sessions. Among the British were the Bloomsbury couple, James Strachey and Alix Strachey [ see under Strachey, James ]. Introductions, through Ernest Jones , were eased by the fact that Freud admired the work of James's older brother, Lytton Strachey . Freud took James Strachey into analysis on condition that he begin translating his writings into English. Translating Freud , culminating with the publication of the complete works in twenty-four volumes by Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press , was to occupy Strachey for the rest of his life, and remains the standard text for the extensive scholarship on Freud in English, and for psychoanalysts without German. The Strachey translation has been criticized for its recourse to dry scientific neologisms where Freud made use of plain German. For example, Strachey's term ' cathexis ', now well established as a psychoanalytic term, takes the place of Freud's ' Besetzung ', a common German word with rich nuances of meaning.

The first international congress following the war was held at The Hague in 1920, which Freud attended in the company of his youngest daughter, Anna , the only one of his children to take an active interest in psychoanalysis, who was now training as an analyst herself and in analysis with her own father. Freud's three sons had survived the war, and the two elder girls, Mathilde and Sophie , were by now married. Disaster struck, though, in 1920, when Sophie , Freud's ' Sunday Child ', died suddenly leaving a husband and two small boys. Three years later one of Sophie's children died of tuberculosis in the family's care in Vienna, aged four. Freud took the loss very hard—perhaps, as he reflected in a letter to his writer friend Romain Rolland , because it came soon after the shock of discovering that he was suffering from cancer of the jaw, from which he died some sixteen years later. The cancer, brought about by years of heavy cigar smoking, necessitated thirty-three operations and constant nursing attention from his daughter Anna in an attempt to contain it, and the fitting of an awkward oral prosthesis. Freud was not deterred from smoking cigars, however, and indeed remained convinced of their therapeutic qualities: ' I believe I owe to the cigar a great intensification of my capacity to work and a facilitation of my self control ' ( Ward , 14 ). The great majority of photographs of Freud show him holding a cigar. Always the perfect bourgeois, impeccably groomed throughout his life, his once well-filled features lost their softness in later years, probably as much from the illness as ageing. This has no doubt contributed to the popular image of Freud as a stern and distant figure. Less formal photographs and home movies taken on family occasions and holidays, however, convey a more relaxed and accessible family man, although his smile was rarely captured on camera.

During the 1920s Freud expanded his metapsychological theories. Two key strands can be identified in his thinking from this period onwards: a systematic study of the ego and a preoccupation with cultural and social issues in response to the crisis of humanity during the recent war. At its more speculative, psychoanalytic theory now resembled the philosophical enquiry Freud had eschewed early in his career in favour of scientific methods.

In Jenseits des Lustprinzips ( 'Beyond the pleasure principle' , 1920), Freud revised his theory of the instincts by positing a death instinct. Psychic conflict could now be construed in terms of the opposing forces of love and death, as could human behaviour and interaction at large. Broadly speaking the emphasis in his thinking had shifted from the unconscious itself to the phenomenon of resistance, which he understood to exert constant pressure to keep unacceptable desires from surfacing. Freud's interest turned to the ego, the agent of this defensive activity, and to the classification of the defences at the ego's disposal. It no longer made sense to think purely in terms of conscious and unconscious, because in any case the mechanisms of defence employed by the ego were themselves unconscious. This new phase of work on the ego was initiated in Massenpsychologie und Ich-analyse ( 'Group psychology and the analysis of the ego' , 1921). Freud then set out an extensively revised tripartite model of the structure and functions of the mind, in Das Ich und das Es ( 'The ego and the id' , 1923). The third agency, which he termed the super-ego, was conceived to take into account the crucial internalization of parental authority and prohibition which came about with the dissolution of the Oedipus complex.

Once again new avenues had opened up to Freud as the result of an innovation, for example the possibility of classifying mental illness in terms of its origins in a conflict between parts of the personality. In a brief paper entitled 'Neurosis and psychosis' (1923), Freud offered new clarity with the following formulation: ' Transference neuroses correspond to a conflict between the ego and the id; narcissistic neuroses, to a conflict between the ego and the superego; and psychoses, to a conflict between the ego and the external world ' ( Standard Edition , 19.152 ). Other rewards reaped by Freud from the new structural theory were the linking of particular defences to specific mental illnesses and new insights into the nature of anxiety ( Hemmung, Symptom und Angst ( 'Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety' ), 1926).

Freud continued working in great pain after an initial operation for the cancer in 1923. The international psychoanalytic movement had re-established itself, with important centres elsewhere, for example in Berlin, which was presided over by Freud's disciple, Abraham . Ernest Jones had founded the London Psycho-Analytical Society in 1913, which became the British Psycho-Analytical Society in 1919. The London Institute of Psycho-Analysis was formally founded by Jones in late 1924. An international structure for training was now in place, with a training analysis as its cornerstone, conducted by Freud and a growing number of senior analysts. Among the patients to consult Freud in the mid-1920s was Princess Marie Bonaparte , wife of Prince George of Greece , a woman endowed with a lively intelligence, tremendous energy, and great material wealth. She soon began training as an analyst and went on to become a leading figure in the international movement, a patron of psychoanalysis, and a close friend of the Freud family, who secured their safe passage from Vienna in 1938.

Another woman important to Freud was his youngest child, Anna , who was by now making her name as an analyst and who increasingly acted internationally as her father's ambassador as his illness rendered him more immobile. She represented her father at the 1929 International Congress in Oxford, in difficult circumstances following a dispute with the New York analysts about whether non-medical individuals should be allowed to become analysts. Freud was exasperated, and his deep-seated antagonism to all things American was fuelled. Freud stood firm: he had already tackled this problem in 1926 in response to allegations of quackery made to a lay colleague, arguing that psychoanalysis was more than a mere offshoot of medicine and that its practice should therefore not be restricted in this way ( Die Frage der Laienanalyse ; 'The question of lay analysis' , 1926; in Freud , Standard Edition , vol. 20).

From the publication of Die Zukunft einer Illusion ( 'The future of an illusion' , 1927), which dissected religious belief, Freud's other great bête noire , the majority of Freud's writing dealt with cultural and wider social issues. In 1930 came Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ( 'Civilisation and its discontents' ), in which he subjected civilization itself to scrutiny, asking, in the light of his experience with neurotics in clinical practice, whether instincts were unduly repressed by society. For Freud these works represented a return to his intellectual beginnings: ' My interest, after making a lifelong détour through the natural sciences, medicine and psychotherapy, returned to cultural problems which had fascinated me long before when I was a youth scarcely old enough for thinking ' ( Standard Edition , 20.72 ).

In the coming years Freud's consistent refusal to adopt an irrationally optimistic outlook on humanity was justified by the rise to power of Hitler in 1933. Freud's works were among thousands of books ritually burnt in Berlin that year. Freud's terse entry for 12 March 1938 in his Brief Chronicle , a diary of events he kept for the final decade of his life, reads: ' Finis Austriae ' ( Gay , 229 ). Despite Chancellor von Schuschnigg's attempt to stave off Hitler through much of the 1930s Austria had been absorbed into the German Reich which in any case was congenial to popular Austrian opinion. Freud , in his eighties and too unwell even to make trips to a summer house in the Vienna suburbs, was now trapped and in fact remained adamant about not leaving. It was only when Anna Freud was briefly arrested by the Gestapo and interrogated that he agreed that the time had come for the family to flee. In a flurry of crisis diplomacy Freud's well-connected friends, Princess Marie Bonaparte , Ernest Jones , and William Bullitt , the American ambassador to Paris, began diplomatic negotiations on his behalf. Three months later bureaucratic obstacles were finally overcome and Freud was able to leave Vienna in the company of Martha , Anna , the housekeeper, a young physician, and his pet chow. Thanks to the princess an extortionate tax raised by the Nazis on Jews' possessions leaving the country could be paid, and all the apartment's contents followed on, including Freud's library and collection of antiquities, which now numbered more than two thousand objects.

Freud in England

Freud arrived in London by train on 6 June 1938. His reputation had preceded him to the extent that the train had to be re-routed to another platform at Victoria, so as to avoid the enthusiastic attentions of the press. Freud was greatly heartened by the cordial welcome he received, although he wrote to friends of his sense of alienation resulting from the move and his concern over the worsening state of affairs in Europe. He was particularly anxious about four of his elderly sisters who remained in Vienna, for whom visas were being sought without success. Freud did not live long enough to know that they all perished in the camps.

Although Freud was separated from his sisters the move to London occasioned family reunions. He was now living in the same neighbourhood as his youngest son, Ernst , already well-established in London as an architect, having left Berlin in the early thirties. Sam Freud , his Manchester nephew, was among the first visitors. Before moving to 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead (later the Freud Museum), the family lived temporarily nearby at 39 Elsworthy Road, backing on to the north side of Primrose Hill. In addition to being deluged with letters from friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers simply wishing to express their support, Freud received a stream of visitors at both addresses, regulated by his wife and daughter, Anna , with his declining health in mind. Although England had brought him respite from external persecution, the cancer was unrelenting and no longer operable by early 1939. Freud was gradually forced to withdraw from his work routine, although he continued to see a small number of patients, and to write.

Many visitors were listed by Freud in a small notebook, others in his Brief Chronicle . They reflect all aspects of his personal and professional life and interests as well as his preoccupations of that time, and testify to the wide variety of individuals prominent in their own fields whose work had felt the impact of psychoanalysis. In addition to visits from psychoanalysts who had been colleagues and loyal friends in Vienna, numerous members of the British Psycho-Analytical Society came, among them Melanie Klein , whose views on child analysis were at odds with the work of Anna Freud . ( Melanie Klein had arrived in Britain in 1927 and had received enthusiastic support from James and Alix Strachey in particular.) A visit which gave particular pleasure was that of the president and two officials of the Royal Society , which had honoured him with membership by correspondence in 1936. Breaking with tradition the charter book was brought to Freud for signing, a privilege previously reserved for the king.

Several visitors outside the immediate psychoanalytic circles were writers, for example Stefan Zweig , who brought along Salvador Dalí , who sketched his hero, and H. G. Wells , one of the few British writers Freud had met personally in Vienna. Wells had proposed having immediate British citizenship conferred on Freud by act of parliament . Freud was interested in the idea and wrote to Wells in July 1939, with only three months to live:

You cannot have known that since I first came over to England as a boy of eighteen years, it became an intense wish phantasy of mine to settle in this country and become an Englishman. Two of my half brothers had done so fifteen years before. But an infantile fantasy needs a bit of examination before it can be admitted to reality. Letters of Sigmund Freud , 459

Given their shared interest in cultural matters it is likely that they would also have discussed Freud's Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion ( 'Moses and monotheism' , 1939), Freud's phylogenetic attempt to link the phenomenon of antisemitism to ancient inconsistencies around the identity of Moses , which was begun in 1934 soon after the rise of Hitler , and completed in London in 1938. The forthcoming publication brought Freud a number of visitors, including several from Jews urging him not to publish a work they felt would undermine the faith in their hour of need, but Freud was undeterred and pressed on with publication.

There were meetings at Maresfield Gardens with several publishers, including Leonard and Virginia Woolf . Leonard Woolf commented in his autobiography that it was

not an easy interview. He was extraordinarily courteous in a formal, old-fashioned way—for instance, almost ceremoniously he presented Virginia with a flower. There was something about him as of a half-extinct volcano, something sombre, repressed, reserved. He gave me the feeling … of great gentleness, but behind that, great strength. Gay, 640

A final paper was in hand during Freud's time in London: 'Abriss der Psychoanalyse' ( 'An outline of psychoanalysis' , c .1940), an ambitious overview of his work, which he did not complete. Clinical work also continued in London for four hours a day, until Freud finally closed his practice seven weeks before the end of his life and some fifty-seven years since setting up in private practice.

Freud held Max Schur , his personal physician of many years, to a promise he had managed to extract years previously, that he should not let him go on living when there was no longer any point. Schur duly administered a lethal injection of morphine on 23 September 1939 in Freud's study at 20 Maresfield Gardens. Freud was cremated three days later with a fittingly simple memorial service at which Ernest Jones and Stefan Zweig gave addresses, at Golders Green crematorium, Middlesex. His remains are there, inside one of a favourite pair of Greek urns from his collection.

The Freudian legacy

In an obituary poem for Freud , W. H. Auden wrote: ' Freud is no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion ' ( Auden , 153 ). It is easy to identify Freud's language and ideas in everyday talk: human feelings and behaviour might be deemed repressed, narcissistic, or denied, whether or not an individual has read any Freud or even has any regard for his theories. Furthermore there is chronic confusion, usually unacknowledged, over what really comes from Freud . Given that people seldom react with bland indifference to his name, presumably because they feel in some way implicated by the findings of psychoanalysis, it is hardly surprising that Freud is more often than not misrepresented and misunderstood. It cannot be said that the British have responded to Freud with the same enthusiasm, regard, and affection which Freud maintained for Britain throughout his life. Psychoanalysis has never captured the imagination of the British to the extent that it did the North Americans in the post-war years, or the South Americans much later: the highest percentage of a population receiving psychoanalysis is in Argentina. British psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy remain largely based in London, and north London at that, although the British Psycho-Analytical Society has consistently retained its position as an innovative and influential body within the international psychoanalytic community. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis continues to be published in London.

Freud's impact also continues to be felt in the academic and cultural spheres, with a proliferation of postgraduate non-clinical courses in psychoanalytic studies and the widespread but often superficial application of aspects of psychoanalytic theory to academic fields such as literary and film criticism, gender studies, and politics. The death knell is regularly sounded for psychoanalysis. A frequent criticism of Freud is that he was a man of his time and psychoanalysis is therefore no longer relevant. His views on women are often cited in this connection. Indeed there are aspects of his thinking which few psychoanalysts would espouse nowadays, for example some of his ideas on female sexuality. Theoretical innovations have taken the place of those which have not stood the test of time. There has also been a deepened understanding of aspects of human experience which Freud did not fully explore—for example the complexity of the very early mother–infant relationship and its fundamental part in personality development. Yet while psychoanalysis has continued to evolve, the basic principles elaborated by Freud , such as the concept of mind going beyond mere conscious experience, the highly dynamic nature of mental processes, and the possibility of finding psychological meaning underlying apparently meaningless symptoms or states of mind, have held good, and indeed have underpinned subsequent developments.

• The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud , ed. J. Strachey, A. Freud, and others, 24 vols. (1953–74)
• Letters of Sigmund Freud , ed. E. L. Freud (1975)
• E. Jones, Sigmund Freud : life and work , 3 vols. (1953–7)
• R. Wollheim, Freud (1991)
• P. Gay, Freud : a life for our time (1988) [incl. bibliographical essay]
• H. J. Ellenberger, The discovery of the unconscious : history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry (1970)
• P. Gay, A Freud reader (1989)
• The diary of Sigmund Freud, 1929–39 : a record of the final decade , ed. and trans. M. Molnar (1992) [known as the Brief chronicle ]
• I. Ward, Freud in England (1992)
• The complete letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904 , ed. J. Masson (1985)
• The letters of Sigmund Freud to Eduard Silberstein, 1871–1881 , ed. W. Boehlich (1990)
• H. Lange, Freud family tree, Freud Museum, 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, London [unpublished document, unpaginated]
• W. H. Auden, ‘Sigmund Freud’, Horizon (1940), 151–4
• S. Freud, Die Traumdeutung (Vienna, 1900)
• Freud Museum, London, family and personal corresp. and papers
• Sigmund Freud Gesellschaft, Vienna
• JRL , corresp., mostly with his nephew, Sam Freud
• BFINA , documentary footage
• Freud Museum, London, home footage
• BL Sound and Moving Image Catalogue , recorded talk; performance recording
• photographs, 1860–1939, Freud Museum, London
• M. Pollock, drypoint etching, 1914, Freud Museum, London
• M. Halberstadt, photograph, 1921, Mary Evans Picture Library [see illus.]
• F. Schmutzer, chalk and mixed media, 1926, Freud Museum, London
• L. Willinger, photograph, 1930–39, Wellcome L.
• O. Nemon, bronze statue, 1931, corner of Fitzjohn's Avenue and Belsize Lane, London; maquette at Freud Museum, London
• S. Dalí, pen-and-ink drawing on blotting paper, 1938, Freud Museum, London

Wealth at Death

£22,850 3 s . 2 d .: probate, 1 Dec 1939, CGPLA Eng. & Wales

• Freud, Anna (1895–1982), psychoanalyst
• Jones, (Alfred) Ernest (1879–1958), neurologist and psychoanalyst
• Strachey, Alix (1892–1973)
• Strachey, James Beaumont (1887–1967), psychoanalyst and translator

More on this topic

• Freud, Sigmund in Oxford Art Online
• Freud, Sigmund, (6 May 1856–23 Sept. 1939), Foreign Member of the Royal Society, 1936; Professor of Neurology, Vienna University, 1902–38; psycho-analyst in Who Was Who

External resources

• Bibliography of British and Irish history
• National Portrait Gallery
• National Archives
• English Heritage Blue Plaque
• The Royal Society

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Famous Scientists

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939), physiologist, medical doctor, psychologist, was an influential thinker of the twentieth century.

Freud’s innovative treatment of human actions, dreams, and indeed of cultural object s as invariably possessing implicit symbolic significance has proven to be extraordinarily productive, and has had immense implications for a wide variety of fields, including anthropology, semiotics, and artistic creativity and appreciation in addition to psychology.

However, Freud’s most important and frequently re-iterated claim, that with psychoanalysis he had invented a new science of the mind, remains the subject of much disapproval and controversy.

Contributions and Achievements:

Freud conceptualized the mind symbolically as an ancient ruin which had to been uncovered much like an archeologist would discover the treasures of an ancient civilization. This gave birth to Psychoanalysis. Freud’s account of the sexual genesis and nature of neuroses led him naturally to develop a clinical treatment for treating such disorders. This has become so influential today that when people speak of ‘psychoanalysis’ they frequently refer exclusively to the clinical treatment. The object of psychoanalytic treatment may be said to be a form of self-understanding, once this is acquired, it is largely up to the patient, in consultation with the analyst to determine how he shall handle this newly-acquired understanding of the unconscious forces which motivate him. Freud became more and more sophisticated in his technique of psychoanalysis, and he became particularly adept at using his patient’s biased impressions of him to help the patient to discover the origins of the unconscious memory which led to the symptoms from which they suffered.

Freud’s theories and research methods have always been controversial. He and psychoanalysis have been criticized in very extreme terms. For an often-quoted example, Peter Medawar, a Nobel Prize winning immunologist, said in 1975 that psychoanalysis is the “most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century”. However, Freud has had a tremendous impact on psychotherapy. Many psychotherapists follow Freud’s approach to an extent, even if they reject his theories.

The contemporary scientific climate in which Freud lived and worked should be taken into consideration. When the towering scientific figure of nineteenth century science, Charles Darwin, published his revolutionary Origin of Species, Freud was four years old. The evolutionary principle completely altered the existing conception of man, whereas before man had been seen as a being different in nature to the members of the animal kingdom by virtue of his possession of an immortal soul, he was now seen as being part of the natural order, different from non-human animals only in degree of structural difficulty.

This made it possible and reasonable for the first time to treat man as an object of scientific investigation, and to imagine of the vast and varied range of human behavior, and the motivational causes from which it springs, as being amenable in principle to scientific explanation. Much of the creative work done in a whole variety of diverse scientific fields over the next century was to be inspired by and derive nourishment from this new world-view which Freud, with his enormous esteem for science, accepted implicitly.

Freud also followed Plato in his account of the nature of mental health or psychological well-being, which he saw as the establishment of a melodic relationship between the three elements which constitute the mind. A key concept introduced by Freud was that the mind possesses a number of ‘defense mechanisms’ to attempt to prevent conflicts from becoming too acute, such as repression (pushing conflicts back into the unconscious), sublimation (channeling the sexual drives into the achievement socially acceptable goals, in art, science, poetry, etc.), fixation (the failure to progress beyond one of the developmental stages), and regression (a return to the behavior characteristic of one of the stages).

Published works:

Freud’s work is preserved in a 23 volume set called “The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud”.

Some of Freud’s most interesting works are “The Interpretation of Dreams”, his own favorite, “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life”, about Freudian slips and other day-to-day oddities, “Totem and Taboo”, Freud’s views on our beginnings, “Civilization and Its Discontents”, his pessimistic commentary on modern society, and “The Future of an Illusion”, on religion. All are a part of The Standard Edition, but all are available as separate paperbacks as well. This renowned man died of the cancer of the mouth and jaw that he had been suffering since 20 years of his life.

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Sigmund Freud summary

Learn about the life of sigmund freud and his contribution to psychoanalysis.

Sigmund Freud , (born May 6, 1856, Freiberg, Moravia, Austrian Empire—died Sept. 23, 1939, London, Eng.), Austrian neuropsychologist, founder of psychoanalysis , and one of the major intellectual figures of the 20th century. Trained in Vienna as a neurologist, Freud went to Paris in 1885 to study with Jean-Martin Charcot, whose work on hysteria led Freud to conclude that mental disorders might be caused purely by psychological rather than organic factors. Returning to Vienna (1886), Freud collaborated with the physician Josef Breuer (1842–1925) in further studies on hysteria, resulting in the development of some key psychoanalytic concepts and techniques, including free association, the unconscious, resistance (later defense mechanisms), and neurosis. In 1899 he published The Interpretation of Dreams , in which he analyzed the complex symbolic processes underlying dream formation: he proposed that dreams are the disguised expression of unconscious wishes. In his controversial Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), he delineated the complicated stages of psychosexual development (oral, anal, and phallic) and the formation of the Oedipus complex. During World War I, he wrote papers that clarified his understanding of the relations between the unconscious and conscious portions of the mind and the workings of the id, ego, and superego. Freud eventually applied his psychoanalytic insights to such diverse phenomena as jokes and slips of the tongue, ethnographic data, religion and mythology, and modern civilization. Works of note include Totem and Taboo (1913), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), The Future of an Illusion (1927), and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Freud fled to England when the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938; he died shortly thereafter. Despite the relentless and often compelling challenges mounted against virtually all of his ideas, both in his lifetime and after, Freud has remained one of the most influential figures in contemporary thought.

Sigmund Freud’s Theories & Contribution to Psychology

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

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On This Page:

Sigmund Freud (1856 to 1939) was the founding father of psychoanalysis , a method for treating mental illness and a theory explaining human behavior.

Freud believed that events in our childhood have a great influence on our adult lives, shaping our personality. For example, anxiety originating from traumatic experiences in a person’s past is hidden from consciousness and may cause problems during adulthood (neuroses).

Thus, when we explain our behavior to ourselves or others (conscious mental activity), we rarely give a true account of our motivation. This is not because we are deliberately lying. While human beings are great deceivers of others; they are even more adept at self-deception.

Freud’s life work was dominated by his attempts to penetrate this often subtle and elaborate camouflage that obscures the hidden structure and processes of personality.

His lexicon has become embedded within the vocabulary of Western society. Words he introduced through his theories are now used by everyday people, such as anal (personality), libido, denial, repression, cathartic, Freudian slip , and neurotic.

Who is Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud, born on May 6, 1856, in what is now Příbor, Czech Republic (then part of the Austrian Empire), is hailed as the father of psychoanalysis. He was the eldest of eight children in a Jewish family.

Freud initially wanted to become a law professional but later developed an interest in medicine. He entered the University of Vienna in 1873, graduating with an MD in 1881. His primary interests included neurology and neuropathology. He was particularly interested in the condition of hysteria and its psychological causes.

In 1885, Freud received a grant to study with Jean-Martin Charcot, a renowned neurologist who used hypnosis to treat women suffering from what was then called “hysteria.” This experience sparked Freud’s interest in the unconscious mind, a theme that would recur throughout his career.

In 1886, Freud returned to Vienna, married Martha Bernays, and set up a private practice to treat nervous disorders. His work during this time led to his revolutionary concepts of the human mind and the development of the psychoanalytic method.

Freud introduced several influential concepts, including the Oedipus complex, dream analysis, and the structural model of the psyche divided into the id, ego, and superego. He published numerous works throughout his career, the most notable being “ The Interpretation of Dreams ” (1900), “ The Psychopathology of Everyday Life ” (1901), and “ Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality ” (1905).

Despite controversy and opposition, Freud continued to develop his theories and expand the field of psychoanalysis. He was deeply affected by the outbreak of World War I and later by the rise of the Nazis in Germany. In 1938, due to the Nazi threat, he emigrated to London with his wife and youngest daughter.

Freud died in London on September 23, 1939, but his influence on psychology, literature, and culture remains profound and pervasive.

He radically changed our understanding of the human mind, emphasizing the power of unconscious processes and pioneering therapeutic techniques that continue to be used today.

Sigmund Freud’s Theories & Contributions

Psychoanalytic Theory : Freud is best known for developing psychoanalysis , a therapeutic technique for treating mental health disorders by exploring unconscious thoughts and feelings.

Unconscious Mind : Freud (1900, 1905) developed a topographical model of the mind, describing the features of the mind’s structure and function. Freud used the analogy of an iceberg to describe the three levels of the mind.

The id, ego, and superego have most commonly been conceptualized as three essential parts of the human personality.

Psychosexual Development : Freud’s controversial theory of psychosexual development suggests that early childhood experiences and stages (oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital) shape our adult personality and behavior.

His theory of psychosexual stages of development is predicated by the concept that childhood experiences create the adult personality and that problems in early life would come back to haunt the individual as a mental illness.

Dream Analysis : Freud believed dreams were a window into the unconscious mind and developed methods for analyzing dream content for repressed thoughts and desires.

Dreams represent unfulfilled wishes from the id, trying to break through to the conscious. But because these desires are often unacceptable, they are disguised or censored using such defenses as symbolism.

Freud believed that by undoing the dreamwork , the analyst could study the manifest content (what they dreamt) and interpret the latent content ( what it meant) by understanding the symbols.

Defense Mechanisms : Freud proposed several defense mechanisms , like repression and projection, which the ego employs to handle the tension and conflicts among the id, superego, and the demands of reality.

Sigmund Freud’s Patients

Sigmund Freud’s clinical work with several patients led to major breakthroughs in psychoanalysis and a deeper understanding of the human mind. Here are summaries of some of his most notable cases:

Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim) : Known as the ‘birth of psychoanalysis,’ Anna O . was a patient of Freud’s colleague Josef Breuer. However, her case heavily influenced Freud’s thinking.

She suffered from various symptoms, including hallucinations and paralysis, which Freud interpreted as signs of hysteria caused by repressed traumatic memories. The “talking cure” method with Anna O. would later evolve into Freudian psychoanalysis.

Dora (Ida Bauer) : Dora, a pseudonym Freud used, was a teenager suffering from what he diagnosed as hysteria. Her symptoms included aphonia (loss of voice) and a cough.

Freud suggested her issues were due to suppressed sexual desires, particularly those resulting from a complex series of relationships in her family. The Dora case is famous for the subject’s abrupt termination of therapy, and for the criticisms Freud received regarding his handling of the case.

Little Hans (Herbert Graf) : Little Hans , a five-year-old boy, feared horses. Freud never met Hans but used information from the boy’s father to diagnose him.

He proposed that Little Hans’ horse phobia was symbolic of a deeper fear related to the Oedipus Complex – unconscious feelings of affection for his mother and rivalry with his father. The case of Little Hans is often used as an example of Freud’s theory of the Oedipal Complex in children.

Rat Man (Ernst Lanzer) : Rat Man came to Freud suffering from obsessive thoughts and fears related to rats, a condition known as obsessional neurosis.

Freud connected his symptoms to suppressed guilt and repressed sexual desires. The treatment of Rat Man further expanded Freud’s work on understanding the role of internal conflicts and unconscious processes in mental health disorders.

Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff) : Wolf Man was a wealthy Russian aristocrat who came to Freud with various symptoms, including a recurring dream about wolves.

Freud’s analysis, focusing on childhood memories and dreams, led him to identify the presence of repressed memories and the influence of the Oedipus Complex . Wolf Man’s treatment is often considered one of Freud’s most significant and controversial cases.

In the highly repressive “Victorian” society in which Freud lived and worked, women, in particular, were forced to repress their sexual needs. In many cases, the result was some form of neurotic illness.

Freud sought to understand the nature and variety of these illnesses by retracing the sexual history of his patients. This was not primarily an investigation of sexual experiences as such. Far more important were the patient’s wishes and desires, their experience of love, hate, shame, guilt, and fear – and how they handled these powerful emotions.

Freud’s Followers

Freud attracted many followers, who formed a famous group in 1902 called the “Psychological Wednesday Society.” The group met every Wednesday in Freud’s waiting room.

As the organization grew, Freud established an inner circle of devoted followers, the so-called “Committee” (including Sàndor Ferenczi, and Hanns Sachs (standing) Otto Rank, Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, and Ernest Jones).

At the beginning of 1908, the committee had 22 members and was renamed the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.

Neo-Freudians

The term “neo-Freudians” refers to psychologists who were initially followers of Sigmund Freud (1856 to 1939) but later developed their own theories, often modifying or challenging Freud’s ideas.

Here are summaries of some of the most notable neo-Freudians:

Carl Jung : Jung (1875 – 1961) was a close associate of Freud but split due to theoretical disagreements. He developed the concept of analytical psychology, emphasizing the collective unconscious, which houses universal symbols or archetypes shared by all human beings. He also introduced the idea of introversion and extraversion.

Alfred Adler : Adler (1870 – 1937) was another early follower of Freud who broke away due to differing views. He developed the school of individual psychology, highlighting the role of feelings of inferiority and the striving for superiority or success in shaping human behavior. He also emphasized the importance of social context and community.

• Otto Rank : Rank (1884 – 1939)  was an early collaborator with Freud and played a significant role in the development of psychoanalysis. He proposed the “trauma of birth” as a critical event influencing the psyche. Later, he shifted focus to the relationship between therapist and client, influencing the development of humanistic therapies.

Karen Horney : Horney (1885 – 1952) challenged Freud’s views on women, arguing against the concept of “penis envy.” She suggested that social and cultural factors significantly influence personality development and mental health. Her concept of ‘basic anxiety’ centered on feelings of helplessness and insecurity in childhood, shaping adult behavior.

• Harry Stack Sullivan : Sullivan (1892 – 1949) developed interpersonal psychoanalysis, emphasizing the role of interpersonal relationships and social experiences in personality development and mental disorders. He proposed the concept of the “self-system” formed through experiences of approval and disapproval during childhood.

Melanie Klein : Klein (1882 – 1960), a prominent psychoanalyst, is considered a neo-Freudian due to her development of object relations theory, which expanded on Freud’s ideas. She emphasized the significance of early childhood experiences and the role of the mother-child relationship in psychological development.

• Anna Freud : Freud’s youngest daughter significantly contributed to psychoanalysis, particularly in child psychology. Anna Freud (1895 – 1982) expanded on her father’s work, emphasizing the importance of ego defenses in managing conflict and preserving mental health.

Wilhelm Reich : Reich (1897 – 1957), once a student of Freud, diverged by focusing on bodily experiences and sexual repression, developing the theory of orgone energy. His emphasis on societal influence and body-oriented therapy made him a significant neo-Freudian figure.

• Erich Fromm : Fromm (1900-1980) was a German-American psychoanalyst associated with the Frankfurt School, who emphasized culture’s role in developing personality. He advocated psychoanalysis as a tool for curing cultural problems and thus reducing mental illness.

Erik Erikson : Erikson (1902 – 1994)  extended Freud’s theory of psychosexual development by adding social and cultural aspects and proposing a lifespan development model. His theory of psychosocial development outlined eight stages, each marked by a specific crisis to resolve, that shape an individual’s identity and relationships.

Critical Evaluation

Does evidence support Freudian psychology? Freud’s theory is good at explaining but not predicting behavior (which is one of the goals of science ).

For this reason, Freud’s theory is unfalsifiable – it can neither be proved true or refuted. For example, the unconscious mind is difficult to test and measure objectively. Overall, Freud’s theory is highly unscientific.

Despite the skepticism of the unconscious mind, cognitive psychology has identified unconscious processes, such as procedural memory (Tulving, 1972), automatic processing (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Stroop, 1935), and social psychology has shown the importance of implicit processing (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). Such empirical findings have demonstrated the role of unconscious processes in human behavior.

However, most evidence for Freud’s theories is from an unrepresentative sample. He mostly studied himself, his patients, and only one child (e.g., Little Hans ).

The main problem here is that the case studies are based on studying one person in detail, and regarding Freud, the individuals in question are most often middle-aged women from Vienna (i.e., his patients).

This makes generalizations to the wider population (e.g., the whole world) difficult. However, Freud thought this unimportant, believing in only a qualitative difference between people.

Freud may also have shown research bias in his interpretations – he may have only paid attention to information that supported his theories, and ignored information and other explanations that did not fit them.

However, Fisher & Greenberg (1996) argue that Freud’s theory should be evaluated in terms of specific hypotheses rather than a whole. They concluded that there is evidence to support Freud’s concepts of oral and anal personalities and some aspects of his ideas on depression and paranoia.

They found little evidence of the Oedipal conflict and no support for Freud’s views on women’s sexuality and how their development differs from men’.

Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American psychologist, 54 (7), 462.

Breuer, J., & Freud, S. (1895). Studies on hysteria . Standard Edition 2: London.

Fisher, S., & Greenberg, R. P. (1996). Freud scientifically reappraised: Testing the theories and therapy . John Wiley & Sons.

Freud, S. (1894). The neuro-psychoses of defence . SE, 3: 41-61.

Freud, S. (1896). Further remarks on the neuro-psychoses of defence . SE, 3: 157-185.

Freud, S. (1900). The interpretation of dreams . S.E., 4-5.

Freud, S. (1901). The psychopathology of everyday life. SE, 6.  London: Hogarth .

Freud, S. (1905). Three essays on the theory of sexuality.  Se ,  7 , 125-243.

Freud, S. (1915). The unconscious . SE, 14: 159-204.

Freud, S. (1920) . Beyond the pleasure principle . SE, 18: 1-64.

Freud, S. (1923). The ego and the id . SE, 19: 1-66.

Freud, S. (1925). Negation. Standard edition , 19, 235-239.

Freud, S. (1961). The resistances to psycho-analysis. In T he Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX (1923-1925): The Ego and the Id and other works (pp. 211-224).

Greenwald, A. G., & Banaji, M. R. (1995). Implicit social cognition: attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes. Psychological review, 102 (1), 4.

Stroop, J. R. (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. Journal of experimental psychology, 18 (6), 643.

Tulving, E. (1972). Episodic and semantic memory. In E. Tulving & W. Donaldson (Eds.), Organization of Memory , (pp. 381–403). New York: Academic Press.

What is Freud most famous for?

Why is freud so criticized, what did sigmund freud do.

His conceptualization of the mind’s structure (id, ego, superego), his theories of psychosexual development, and his exploration of defense mechanisms revolutionized our understanding of human psychology.

Despite controversies and criticisms, Freud’s theories have fundamentally shaped the field of psychology and the way we perceive the human mind.

What is the Freudian revolution’s impact on society?

• World Biography

Sigmund Freud Biography

Born: May 6, 1856 Freiberg, Moravia (now Czech Republic) Died: September 23, 1939 London, England Austrian psychologist, author, and psychoanalyst

The work of Sigmund Freud, the Austrian founder of psychoanalysis, marked the beginning of a modern, dynamic psychology by providing the first well-organized explanation of the inner mental forces determining human behavior.

Freud's early life

Sigmund Freud was born on May 6, 1856, in Freiberg, Moravia (now Czech Republic). Sigmund was the first child of his twice-widowed father's third marriage. His mother, Amalia Nathanson, was nineteen years old when she married Jacob Freud, aged thirty-nine. Sigmund's two stepbrothers from his father's first marriage were approximately the same age as his mother, and his older stepbrother's son, Sigmund's nephew, was his earliest playmate. Thus, the boy grew up in an unusual family structure, his mother halfway in age between himself and his father. Though seven younger children were born, Sigmund always remained his mother's favorite. When he was four, the family moved to Vienna (now the capital of Austria), the capital city of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy (the complete rule of Central Europe by Hungary and Austria from 1867 to 1918). Freud would live in Vienna until the year before his death.

Youth in Vienna

Because the Freuds were Jewish, Sigmund's early experience was that of an outsider in an overwhelmingly Catholic community. However, Emperor Francis Joseph (1830–1916) had liberated the Jews of Austria, giving them equal rights and permitting them to settle anywhere in the empire. Many Jewish families came to Vienna, as did the Freuds in 1860, where the standard of living was higher and educational and professional opportunities were better than in the provinces. They lived in an area that had a high concentration of Jewish people, called the Leopoldstadt slum. The housing was cramped and they had to move often, sometimes living with his father's family. By his tenth year, Sigmund's family had grown and he had five sisters and one brother.

Freud went to the local elementary school, then attended the Sperl Gymnasium (a secondary school in Europe that students attend to prepare for college) in Leopoldstadt, from 1866 to 1873. He studied Greek and Latin, mathematics, history, and the natural sciences, and was a superior student. He passed his final examination with flying colors, qualifying to enter the University of Vienna at the age of seventeen. His family had recognized his special scholarly gifts from the beginning, and although they had only four bedrooms for eight people, Sigmund had his own room throughout his school days. He lived with his parents until he was twenty-seven, as was the custom at that time.

Pre-psychoanalytic work

Freud enrolled in medical school in 1873. Vienna had become the world capital of medicine, and the young student was initially attracted to the laboratory and the scientific side of medicine rather than clinical practice. He spent seven instead of the usual five years acquiring his doctorate.

Freud received his doctor of medicine degree at the age of twenty-four. He fell in love and wanted to marry, but the salaries available to a young scientist could not support a wife and family. He had met Martha Bernays, the daughter of a well-known Hamburg family, when he was twenty-six; they were engaged two months later. They were separated during most of the four years which preceded their marriage, and married in 1887. Of their six children, a daughter, Anna, would become one of her father's most famous followers.

Freud spent three years as a resident physician in the famous Allgemeine Krankenhaus, a general hospital and the medical center of Vienna. He spent five months in the psychiatry (the area of medicine involving emotional and mental health) department headed by Theodor Meynert. Psychiatry at this time was rigid and descriptive. The psychological meaning of behavior was not itself considered important; behavior was only a set of symptoms to be studied in order to understand the structures of the brain. Freud's later work changed this attitude.

Freud, during the last part of his residency, received some money to pursue his neurological (having to do with the nervous system) studies abroad. He spent four months at the Salpêtrière clinic in Paris, France, studying under the neurologist (a person who studies the nervous system and treats people with neurological problems) Jean Martin Charcot (1825–1893). Here, Freud first became interested in hysteria (an illness in which a person complains of physical symptoms without a medical cause) and Charcot's demonstration of its psychological origins.

Beginning of psychoanalysis

Freud returned to Vienna, established himself in the private practice of neurology, and married. He soon devoted his efforts to the treatment of hysterical patients with the help of hypnosis (the act of bringing about a change in a person's attention which results in a change in their bodily experiences), a technique he had studied under Charcot. Joseph Breuer (1857–1939), an older colleague (a partner or an associate in the same area of interest), told Freud about a hysterical patient whom he had treated successfully by hypnotizing her and then tracing her symptoms back to traumatic (emotionally stressful) events she had experienced at her father's deathbed. Breuer called his treatment "catharsis" and traced its effectiveness to the release of "pent-up emotions." Freud's experiments with Breuer's technique were successful. Together with Breuer he published Studies on Hysteria (1895). At the age of thirty-nine Freud first used the term "psychoanalysis," (a way to treat certain mental illnesses by exposing and discussing a patient's unconscious thoughts and feelings) and his major lifework was well under way.

At about this time Freud began a unique project, his own self-analysis (the act of studying or examining oneself), which he pursued primarily by analyzing his dreams. A major scientific result was The Interpretation of Dreams (1901). By the turn of the century Freud had developed his therapeutic (having to do with treating a mental or physical disability) technique, dropping the use of hypnosis and shifting to the more effective and more widely applicable method of "free association."

Development of psychoanalysis

After 1902 Freud gathered a small group of interested colleagues on Wednesday evenings for presentation of psychoanalytic papers and discussion. This was the beginning of the psychoanalytic movement. Swiss psychiatrists Eugen Bleuler and Carl Jung (1875–1961) formed a study group in Zurich in 1907, and the first International Psychoanalytic Congress was held in Salzburg in 1908.

Later years

In 1923 Freud developed a cancerous (having to do with cancer cells that attack the healthy tissues of the body) growth in his mouth, which eventually led to his death sixteen years and thirty-three operations later. In spite of this, these were years of great scientific productivity. He published findings on the importance of aggressive as well as sexual drives ( Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920); developed a new theoretical framework in order to organize his new data concerning the structure of the mind ( The Ego and the Id, 1923); and revised his theory of anxiety to show it as the signal of danger coming from unconscious fantasies, rather than the result of repressed sexual feelings ( Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, 1926).

In March 1938 Austria was occupied by German troops, and that month Freud and his family were put under house arrest. Through the combined efforts of many influential friends who were well connected politically, the Freuds were permitted to leave Austria in June. Freud spent his last year in London, England, undergoing surgery. He died on September 23, 1939. The influence of his discoveries on the science and culture of the twentieth century is limitless.

Personal life

Freud was an intensely private man. He read extensively, loved to travel, and was an avid collector of archeological oddities. Devoted to his family, he always practiced in a consultation room attached to his home. He valued a small circle of close friends to whom he was intensely loyal, and inspired loyalty in a circle of disciples that persists to this day.

For More Information

Gay, Peter. Freud: A Life for Our Time. New York: Norton, 1988.

Jones, Ernest. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. 3 vols. New York: Basic Books, 1953–1957.

Wollheim, Richard. Sigmund Freud. New York: Viking, 1971.

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Sigmund Freud (Psychologist Biography)

A 2002 empirical survey endorsed by the American Psychological Association (APA) ranked Freud as the third most eminent psychologist of the 20th century.

Who Is Sigmund Freud?

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founding father of psychoanalysis. He believed that childhood experiences can impact adult life and help to shape our personality. Despite proposing a number of controversial theories throughout his career, Freud's influence on the field of psychology is profound. 

Sigmund Freud's Family Background

Sigmund (originally Sigismund) Freud was born on May 6, 1856, in the small Moravian town of Freiberg (now Pribor, Czech Republic). He was the eldest of eight children born to Jewish parents Jakob Freud and Amalia Nathansohn. Freud’s father worked as a wool merchant and had two adult sons from a previous marriage. At the time of Freud’s birth, the family was relatively poor and lived in a single rented room. Due to mounting financial struggles, they left Freiberg in 1859, and eventually settled in Vienna when Freud was four years old.  

Freud was taught to read and write by his mother and displayed superior intellectual ability from an early age. He loved literature and began reading works by Shakespeare when he was eight years old. He had a flair for languages, and learned to speak Latin, Greek, English and French as a child. He also taught himself Spanish and Italian.

Freud had a close, positive relationship with his mother and is said to have been her favorite child. He was given a bedroom for himself so he could focus on his studies, a privilege none of his other siblings received. His mother would often serve him his meals in his room.

Early Schooling

Freud’s first exposure to formal education came in 1865 when he entered a prominent high school at age nine—a year earlier than most of his peers. He was an excellent student and was constantly at the top of his class. He graduated with honors at age 17.

Educational Background

In 1873, Freud enrolled at the University of Vienna to study medicine. He completed his studies and earned his MD in 1881. Between 1882 and 1885, Freud worked in various departments at the Vienna General Hospital, including the Department of Psychiatry. He was appointed as a Privatdozent (lecturer) at the University of Vienna in 1885. In that same year, he received a grant to study in Paris under neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who trained him in the use of hypnosis to treat the condition then known as hysteria.

Upon his return to Vienna, Freud began his private practice, specializing in nervous and brain disorders. During the 1890’s, he became dissatisfied with hypnosis as a treatment method for hysteria and began focusing more on an approach he learned previously from respected Viennese physician, Josef Breuer. While Freud was still in medical school, Breuer began treating a young woman pseudonymously called Anna O. for symptoms of hysteria. Breuer found that if he hypnotized the woman and asked her to recall events that occurred around the time a particular symptom first appeared, that symptom would disappear.

Free Association

Freud adapted Breuer’s method by having patients lie on a couch with their eyes closed, and encouraging them to talk freely about the first time they experienced a particular symptom. Unlike Breuer, Freud did not hypnotize his patients but found this method—which he termed free association —to be quite effective. Freud later coined the term ‘psychoanalysis’ to describe his approach to treatment, as well as the theory underlying his approach.

In 1902, Freud and a small group of scholars formed the first organized group of psychoanalysts, which was called the Wednesday Psychological Society (later known as the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society). That same year, he was promoted to the rank of full professor at the University of Vienna, a position which he held until 1938.

Freud's Theory of Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is both a theory that attempts to explain human behavior and a form of talk therapy. Freud believed that childhood experiences help to shape one’s personality and can impact a person when he or she becomes an adult. The goal of psychoanalysis is to release repressed or pent up memories and emotions so that the individual in treatment can heal. This form of therapy involves bringing events that are in the unconscious or the subconscious to the conscious.

Freud developed psychoanalysis over the course of several years. As the theory evolved, it eventually covered a number of different concepts and mechanisms. To get a better understanding of what is involved in psychoanalysis and how the theory developed, it may be best to start with Freud’s view of the human mind.

Freud’s Model of the Human Mind

One of Freud’s most significant contributions to psychology was his model of the human mind. He believed the mind was divided into three regions:

• The Conscious  - this is the part of the human mind that contains current thoughts and feelings. Anything you are aware of and are focusing on right now is in the conscious part of your mind.
• The Preconscious (also called the Subconscious)  - this region of your mind is home to emotions and experiences that you are not currently aware of, but you can easily retrieve them from memory.
• The Unconscious - this is the largest and deepest level of your mind and it contains all the instinctual desires, primitive wishes, hopes, and memories that are outside of your awareness. According to Freud, the things in your unconscious play a major role in driving your behavior. As mentioned before, psychoanalysis aims to bring unresolved material from your unconscious into your awareness so that you can process them fully and heal.

Freud later suggested that human personality was also divided into three major categories. These are:

• The Id  - this is the most primitive part of your personality and it focuses on satisfying your most basic urges and instincts. The id develops during the early stages of infancy. It resides in your unconscious mind and is the source of libidinal energy. It is composed of two biological drives called eros (this is your instinct to survive) and thanatos (this is your instinct to destroy). Eros helps you to survive by directing processes such as eating, breathing, and sex which are essential for maintaining life. As eros is stronger than thanatos, people tend to have a stronger drive to live than self-destruct. When thanatos is directed outward to other people, it may be interpreted as aggression or violence.
• The Ego  - this part of your personality deals with reality. It ensures that the basic urges and instincts of the id are satisfied in ways that are safe, realistic, and socially acceptable. Freud believed that the ego develops from the id during the later stages of infancy. The ego resides in your conscious, subconscious, and unconscious mind.
• The Superego -- this part of your personality develops during childhood and focuses on morality and higher principles. It contains all of the standards and morals you have learned from your parents, family members, and wider society. The superego encourages social responsibility. It resides in your conscious, subconscious, and unconscious mind.

Pleasure Principle

According to Freud, the id, ego, and superego interact to create complex human behavior. How is that possible? Consider the id, which is driven by the pleasure principle and seeks instant gratification for primitive urges such as hunger and thirst. The id is vital for infant survival as it ensures the baby’s needs are met quickly. As only the id is present during the early stages of infancy, the baby will cry until its primitive needs are satisfied. There is simply no point in trying to negotiate a later feeding time with a hungry baby.

As the baby grows older though, he may realize that getting all his needs met immediately may not be realistic or socially acceptable. For example, he may get in trouble if he gets hungry and decides to eat a box of cookies before dinner. Freud claimed that the id tries to resolve this tension by using primary process thinking . This involves forming a mental image of the desired object (in this case it would be cookies or another type of food) which helps to satisfy the primitive need temporarily.

The ego develops from the id during the latter part of infancy and operates on the reality principle. It tries to satisfy the desires of the id in a socially appropriate way. This means the child will weigh the pros and cons of a particular behavior instead of acting impulsively. In this case, a hungry child who is stuck in class may think about pizza (primary process thinking) until he finally gets the opportunity to eat during his lunch break and satisfy his desire in a way that is socially acceptable.

The superego is the last part of personality to develop. Freud claimed that the superego begins to emerge when an individual is about five years old. The superego contains a person’s sense of right and wrong, and it holds all the ideals and moral standards that have been learned over time. It provides the guidelines for making decisions.

The goal of the superego is perfect behavior. As it wants the individual to behave in a civilized manner, it works to restrict the unacceptable desires of the id and tries to make the ego act on standards that are idealistic rather than realistic.

Freud believed that a good balance between id, ego, and superego results in a healthy personality. If someone has an id that is too dominant, he may develop into an adult that is impulsive or uncontrollable. As such a person wants all his desires to be satisfied right away, he may be more likely to engage in criminal activity than the average person. On the other hand, an individual with a dominant superego may be extremely moralistic and judgmental. As a result, this individual may hold himself or other people to standards that are unreachable.

Defense Mechanisms

The term “ defense mechanism ” was first used by Freud in his psychoanalytic theory. According to Freud, the id, ego, and superego are in constant conflict with each other because each part of your personality has its own goal. A defense mechanism is a strategy used by the ego to protect against anxiety from unacceptable thoughts and feelings. It is an unconscious response that safeguards the individual from emotions or experiences that are too difficult to manage right now. In some cases, one or more defense mechanisms may prevent unacceptable thoughts and impulses from entering the conscious mind.

Common types of defense mechanisms include:

Repression  - the ego pushes disturbing thoughts out of consciousness and prevents them from coming back into the conscious mind. For example, a person who experienced sexual abuse as a child may have repressed memories of the abuse.

Denial  - overwhelming external events are blocked from awareness so that the individual refuses to believe or is not aware of what is currently happening. For example, people who are addicted to alcohol may refuse to believe that they have a drinking problem.

Rationalization  - the individual explains difficult feelings or unacceptable behavior in a rational or logical manner while avoiding the real reason for the feelings or behavior. For example, a student who fails a test may reason that the instructor did a poor job in teaching the topic.

Displacement  - the individual satisfies an urge or impulse by using a substitute object in a way that is socially inappropriate. For example, a man who is upset with his boss may come home and abuse his partner.

Sublimation  - the individual satisfies an urge or impulse by using a substitute object in a way that is socially acceptable. For example, an athlete who is jeered by the crowd may use his emotions to raise his performance during the game.

Projection  - the ego takes unacceptable thoughts or feelings and ascribes them to other people. For example, you may hate your teacher but you know these feelings are socially inappropriate. So you convince yourself that it is your teacher who hates you.

Regression  - the individual moves backward in psychological development in order to cope with stress. For example, an adult who is stressed out at work may start throwing tantrums like a child.

The 5 Stages of Psychosexual Development

Freud suggested that children develop through five distinct stages of psychosexual development . He believed that children focus on a different body part as a source of pleasure in each stage. This is one of Freud’s most well-known and controversial theories. The five stages he proposed include:

• The Oral Stage  (birth to 18 months) - the child seeks pleasure from the mouth (for example, sucking or feeding)
• The Anal Stage  (18 months to 3 years) - the child seeks pleasure from the anus (for example, expelling or withholding feces)
• The Phallic Stage  (3-6 years) - the child seeks pleasure from the penis or clitoris (for example, masturbation)
• The Latent Stage  (6 years to puberty) - little libidinal energy is present as the child has no sexual motivation
• The Genital Stage (puberty to adulthood) - the child seeks pleasure from the penis or vagina (for example, sexual intercourse).

Oedipal Complex

Freud also proposed that an Oedipal complex occurs during the phallic stage when children are roughly 3-6 years old. He claimed that children in this stage of development have an unconscious desire for their opposite-sex parent and feel jealous of their same-sex parent.

The Oedipal complex manifests as either an Oedipus complex in boys or an Electra complex in girls. According to Freud, a young boy will develop an Oedipus complex, become sexually attracted to his mother and view his father as a rival. As his mother shows affection for his father, the boy fantasizes about getting rid of his father and taking his place. However, the boy also develops a fear that his father will castrate him (castration anxiety) so he begins to identify with his father and adopt his attitudes, behaviors, roles, and values. This eventually results in the father becoming a role model for the boy as the boy develops his superego and learns his roles as a male in society.

Freud claimed that a young girl in the phallic stage will develop an Oedipal complex, become sexually attracted to her father, and treat her mother with hostility. The complex begins when the girl realizes that she does not have a penis and develops “penis envy.” She also blames her mother for her castration. However, fear of losing her mother’s love moves the girl to identify with her mother and adopt her attitudes, behaviors, roles, and values. This leads to the development of the girl’s superego as she learns her roles as a female in society.

Interestingly (and controversially), Freud suggested that the identification of a girl with her mother is less complete than the identification of a boy with his father. As a result, he claimed that the female superego is weaker and less developed than the male superego.

Freud believed that an individual must successfully complete each of the five psychosexual stages in order to develop into a healthy adult. If there is a conflict during any stage that remains unresolved, the individual may become stuck at that stage of development. For example, children who did not successfully complete the oral stage may demonstrate an excessive reliance on oral behaviors such as biting fingernails, eating, or smoking when they become adults.

Dream Analysis and Interpretation

Freud described dreams as “the royal road to the unconscious.” He believed that analyzing a person’s dreams could provide much insight into the thoughts, feelings, and memories that are buried deep within the mind. Freud viewed dreams as a way to see how the unconscious mind functions. He also used dreams to take a peek at what inappropriate thoughts lay outside of a person’s awareness.

Freud believed that the content in dreams could be separated into two categories called manifest content  and latent content . Manifest content refers to all the images, sounds, and events the dreamer remembers once he awakens. Latent content refers to the symbolic meaning or underlying wish that is hidden in the dream.

According to Freudian theory, the main purpose of dreams is to fulfill wishes. Freud believed that dreams change forbidden desires into less threatening forms. This transformation takes place via condensation (joining two or more ideas together), displacement (changing the person or thing we are concerned about into someone or something else), and secondary elaboration (putting all the pieces together to form a coherent narrative).When this is done, the anxiety caused by the forbidden desire is significantly reduced in the dream.

Applications of Psychoanalysis

There are three main applications of psychoanalysis. It is used to:

• Explore the human mind
• Explain human behavior
• Treat psychological or emotional issues during talk therapy

Psychoanalysis helps people in treatment to better understand the unconscious forces that influence their current thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. This approach often involves eliciting emotional responses and helping individuals to overcome negative defense mechanisms. Psychoanalysis also teaches coping techniques so that people can address problems that arise in the future rather than fall back on unhealthy defenses. Individuals in therapy develop deep personal insight and learn how to deal with feelings that are difficult to process.

Although fewer therapists currently use psychoanalysis to explore human behavior or diagnose and treat mental health concerns, the approach is still well-known and hotly debated in the field of psychology. Freud’s work also influenced many younger psychologists who would help to develop the field, including Carl Jung, Erik Erikson, Alfred Adler, and Anna Freud.

Criticisms of Psychoanalysis

One of the major criticisms of psychoanalysis is that the theory is highly unscientific. While Freud suggested explanations for human behavior, he was unable to predict behavior because his methods were not based on objective measurements. Freud developed the majority of his theories while working with a small sample of people. As a result, his theories may not be applicable to the wider population.

Some people who need mental health counseling may avoid psychoanalysis because it can be a very intense and personal treatment approach. Critics argue that the approach is too time-consuming (treatment may last for years), too costly, and is generally ineffective. Notable researchers such as Karl Popper and Noam Chomsky have repeatedly claimed that psychoanalysis is not based on empirical evidence. Some critics have suggested that Freud may have focused on information that supported his theories and ignored data that did not fit.

Sigmund Freud's Books, Awards, and Accomplishments

Sigmund Freud was a prolific writer and published a number of books on his theories. Some of his most important works include:

• The Interpretation of Dreams, 1899
• The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 1904
• Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 1905
• Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905
• Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 1910
• Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 1917
• Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920
• The Ego and the Id, 1923
• Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, 1926
• The Future of an Illusion, 1927
• Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930
• New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 1933

Personal Life

In 1886, Freud married Martha Bernays after a four-year engagement and the couple had six children—three boys and three girls. One of their daughters, Anna, later became a famous child psychoanalyst and was instrumental in leading the Freudian movement after her father’s death.

Though Jewish by birth, Freud did not practice Judaism as an adult. He developed an addiction to nicotine at age 24 and smoked roughly 20 cigars a day. He tried several times to quit but was unsuccessful. He was diagnosed with cancer of the palate and jaw at 67 years of age, resulting in a series of over 30 operations. He experienced chronic pain during the last 16 years of his life.

Following Nazi occupation of Austria in 1938, Freud fled Vienna, taking his wife and daughter, Anna, with him. The last 16 months of his life were spent in London, where he died on September 23, 1939, at 83 years of age.

American Psychological Association. (2002). Eminent psychologists of the 20th century. Retrieved from https://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug02/eminent

Hergenhahn, B. R. (2009). An introduction to the history of psychology  (6th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Rudnytsky, P. L. (2002). Freud, Sigmund. (1856-1939). In E. Erwin (Ed.), The Freud encyclopedia: Theory, therapy, and culture . New York: Routledge.

Sheehy, N. (2004). Fifty key thinkers in psychology . New York: Routledge.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). (n.d.). Retrieved from  https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/freud_sigmund.shtml

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The life and work of Sigmund Freud

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Sigmund Freud: Biography And Work Of The Famous Psychoanalyst

Sigmund Freud He is, perhaps, the most famous, controversial and charismatic thinker in 20th century psychology.

His theories and work have left an important mark on the way in which for decades explanations have been given about childhood development, personality, memory, sexuality and therapy. Many psychologists have been influenced by his work, while others have developed his ideas in opposition to him.

Today, scientific psychology develops outside the ideas of Sigmund Freud. However, that does not diminish the historical value of this researcher. Next we will review his life and his work through a biography of Sigmund Freud in which we will learn about his vital and intellectual career.

Table of Contents

Brief biography of Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis

Freud is the father of psychoanalysis, a method that aims to treat mental illnesses. Freudian psychoanalysis is a theory that attempts to explain the behavior of human beings and is based on the analysis of unconscious sexual conflicts that originate in childhood.

This theory maintains that instinctive impulses that are repressed by consciousness remain in the unconscious and affect the subject. The unconscious is not observable by the patient: the psychoanalyst is the one who must make these unconscious conflicts accessible through interpretation of dreams, failed acts and free association

The concept called “free association” is a technique that seeks for the patient to express, during therapy sessions, all their ideas, emotions, thoughts and images as they are presented to them, without restrictions or orders. After this opening, the psychoanalyst must determine which factors, within these manifestations, reflect an unconscious conflict.

Early years and university training

Sigmund Freud was born in Freiberg, Austria, in 1856 within a Ukrainian family of Jewish origin and a humble economic situation.

When 1860 arrived, his family moved to Vienna, and settled in this city for the following years. At the age of 17, young Freud entered the University of Vienna to study medicine, graduating shortly after. Then, around 1877, He specialized in the study of the nervous system in fish an area in which he stood out as a researcher.

Then, in 1882, he began working as a doctor at the Vienna General Hospital. In 1886 he married Martha Bernays and began private practice specializing in disorders based on alterations in the nervous system. However, he soon became interested in the purely psychological. Around 1889, he began to develop psychoanalytic theory.

Sigmund Freud’s relationship with Charcot and Breuer: Origin of Psychoanalysis

To understand his theory, you have to know that it all started in Paris, where Sigmund Freud was thanks to a scholarship. There he spent a lot of time with Jean-Martin Charcot , a famous neurologist who studied the hypnotic phenomenon, and thus began his interest in suggestion and the study of hysteria. Once the fellowship was over, Freud returned to Vienna and shared Charcot’s theories with other doctors, but they all rejected him except Joseph Breuer a friend of his.

Besides, Breuer played a very important role in Sigmund Freud’s life as a father figure advising him on the different aspects of the career they shared, supporting him financially to establish his office as a private doctor, creating the cathartic method and writing with it the inaugural work in the history of psychoanalysis.

The famous case of Anna O.

In case of Anna O . (her real name was Bertha Pappenheim) marked a before and after in the career of a young Freud Anna O. was a patient of Breuer’s who suffered from hysteria, but they both took care of her problem. The patient was a young woman who fell ill in the fall of 1880. When she was 21 years old, her father unexpectedly fell ill and she was forced to take care of him. Her attention to her father was so great that the great neglect she gave to herself led her to anemia and weakness. But these problems; which soon put her in bed, were followed by even more alarming discomforts: paralysis, a serious disturbance of speech and other symptoms that appear after the death of her father, and for which she is diagnosed as hysterical.

Breuer’s treatment focused on inducing the patient into a hypnotic state and persuading her to recall the circumstances prior to the first appearance of each of the symptoms suffered. Upon emerging from the hypnotic trance, these hysterical symptoms disappeared one by one. The doctor performed this treatment twice a day, and Anna O. used to call it the “talking cure.” Breuer called it a cathartic method. In the case of Anna O., it was concluded that she had suffered sexual abuse during her childhood by a family member, and although the therapy seemed to work, a sexual transference appeared between the patient and the doctor. Then there were problems with a false pregnancy of the patient, who was in love with her therapist, and Breuer left, harassed by his wife’s jealousy.

Breuer and hysteria

Breuer concluded that patients who showed the symptoms of hysteria did not have physical ailments but, in reality, their symptoms were the result of the permanent action of certain traumatic experiences from the past that had been repressed, although not forgotten. , and furthermore, that by releasing these repressed thoughts, externalizing them and consciously accepting them, the symptoms disappeared.

Breuer did not initially make his discoveries public, but he shared them with Freud. The latter used this method, but left aside hypnosis and instead established the “free association” procedure.

Later, the relationship between Breuer and Freud began to decline due to various arguments in the scientific field. Breuer adhered to a classical scientific conception that did not accept the total separation between physiology and psychology while Freud opted for the creation of a whole new theoretical system for psychology and absolute independence from any other medical branch.

On the other hand, Breuer conceived the cathartic method with hypnosis, but without the adoption of “free association” or other modifications and extensions suggested by Sigmund Freud. The friendship finally broke down definitively a year after a joint publication.

The unconscious mind

Sigmund Freud developed a topographical map of the mind in which he described the characteristics of the structure and functioning of the mind. In this model, the conscious mind is just the tip of the iceberg Many of our primitive impulses and desires rest in the unconscious mind, which are mediated by the preconsciousness

Freud developed the theory that some events and desires caused his patients so much fear and pain that They remained stored in the dark subconscious , affecting behavior in a negative way. This happened due to the process called “repression.”

In his theory he gives a lot of importance to the unconscious mind, since the objective of psychoanalysis is to make conscious what is bothering the unconscious.

However, he still needed to know the mechanisms by which unconscious psychological processes take place. As we will see, he soon developed a series of concepts created to understand the way in which, hypothetically, the unconscious dominates the conscious.

The psychic instances

Later, Freud developed a model of the mind that was composed of the IT, the SELF, and the SUPER-EGO, and called it the “psychic apparatus.” As he IT he I and SUPER-ME They are not physical areas, but rather hypothetical conceptualizations of important mental functions.

When you are born you are all IT, your needs for food, hygiene, sleep and contact must be satisfied immediately, because you do not have the capacity to wait, that is, you are governed by a pleasure principle, you are impatient. Little by little he learns to wait, he perceives that someone is encouraging him, he distinguishes situations, that is the moment in which the SELF emerges and as he grows he continues with his learning.

Among these learnings, he distinguishes that there are things that he cannot do and others that he can, and that is when the SUPER-EGO begins to form. A child guides her behavior as indicated by the adults who give her rewards or punishments depending on whether or not she responds to the rules or instructions they give.

Defense mechanisms

Freud tells us about defense mechanisms, such as the techniques of the unconscious, responsible for minimizing the consequences of too intense events. In this way, through these mechanisms, the individual is able to function normally. It is a response of the EGO, which defends itself both from the excessive pressure of the IT, when it demands the satisfaction of impulses, and from the excessive control of the SUPER-EGO; Thanks to them, the SELF is also protected from the presence of past traumatic experiences.

Defense mechanisms are incorrect ways of resolving psychological conflict and can lead to disorders in the mind, behavior, and in the most extreme cases to the somatization of the psychological conflict and the physical dysfunctions that express it. These are some of the defense mechanisms:

Displacement

It refers to the redirection of an impulse (usually aggression) towards a person or an object. For example, someone who feels frustrated with his boss and kicks his dog.

Sublimation

It is similar to displacement, but the momentum is channeled into a more acceptable form. A sexual drive is sublimated towards a non-sexual purpose, aiming at socially valued objects, such as artistic activity, physical activity or intellectual research.

It is the mechanism that Freud discovered first. He refers to the SELF erasing events and thoughts that would be painful if they were kept at the conscious level.

It refers to individuals who attribute their own thoughts, motives or feelings to another person. The most common projections may be aggressive behaviors that provoke a feeling of guilt, and sexual fantasies or thoughts.

It is the mechanism by which the subject blocks external events so that they are not part of consciousness and treats obvious aspects of reality as if they do not exist. For example, a smoker who refuses to face the fact that smoking can cause serious health problems.

Stages of Freud’s theory

The time in which the author of the psychosexual theory lived, and in which the strong repression of sexual desires was common, especially in the female sex, Sigmund Freud understood that there was a relationship between neurosis and sexual repression. Therefore, it was possible to understand the nature and variety of the disease by knowing the patient’s sexual history.

Freud considered that children are born with a sexual desire that they must satisfy, and that there are a series of stages, during which the child seeks pleasure from different objects. This is what led to the most controversial part of his theory: the theory of psychosexual development.

It begins at birth and continues during the first 18 months of life. This stage focuses on pleasure in the mouth, that is the erogenous zone. The child sucks everything he finds because it is pleasurable and thus he knows his surroundings. Therefore, in this phase the child is already experimenting with his sexuality. If the adult, for example, prohibits him from sucking his finger, hand, etc. He is blocking his ability to explore himself and the world around him. Which can bring future problems for the child.

The anal phase of development occurs between 18 months and three years of age. At this stage the concern of the child and his parents revolves around the anus, it is the stage of sphincter control. Sexual enjoyment for the child is in defecation. He feels that he gives, a production of his body, a part of himself and that is why it is so important to him.

It is a stage of great importance and it is essential that sphincter control is done progressively, without pressure. Mishandling this stage will have a negative impact on future behavior.

phallic stage

The phallic phase of Sigmund Freud’s theory begins at age three and lasts until age six. At this stage the genitals are the object of pleasure and interest in sexual differences and genitals appears, so it is very important not to repress and properly manage this stage, since it could obstruct the capacity for research, knowledge and general learning. . Freud claims that men begin to experience sexual feelings towards their mothers and see their fathers as competitors, so they fear being castrated, a process that results in the Oedipus Complex. Later, children identify with their fathers and repress their feelings towards their mothers to leave this phase behind.

Latency stage

Freud’s latency phase develops between the age of six and the beginning of puberty. It coincides with the school stage and for a long time it was wrongly believed that sexuality remained dormant, latent. What happens is that during this period the child’s interest focuses on knowing, learning and investigating. Good management of the previous stages contributes very favorably to academic success.

genital stage

This phase occurs during puberty, and once again, the focus falls on the genitals. Individuals show curiosity about genital sexuality and it is essential that they find in their parents and in the adult world the openness and availability to talk about sex and to clarify and answer their doubts.

Dream analysis

Freud considered that dreams were important to explain what was happening in the unconscious, since while we dream the ego’s defenses are not present. Because of this, much repressed material becomes conscious, albeit in a distorted way. Remembering fragments of dreams can help uncover buried emotions and memories. Therefore, dreams play an important role in the unconscious mind and serve to give clues to how it operates.

Sigmund Freud distinguished between manifest content (what is remembered from the dream) and latent content , the symbolic meaning of the dream (what it is trying to say). The first is superficial and the second manifests itself through the language of dreams. The author of the “Theory of Dream Interpretation” mentions that all dreams represent the fulfillment of a wish by the dreamer, even nightmares. According to his theory, the “censorship” of dreams produces a distortion of their content. So what may seem like a set of meaningless dream images, through analysis and its “deciphering” method, can actually be a set of coherent ideas.

His legacy in Western thought

Freudian ideas had a great impact, and his work gathered a wide group of followers. Among them we can mention: Karl Abraham, Sandor Ferenczi, Alfred Adler, Carl Gustav Jung, Otto Rank and Ernest Jones. Some, like Adler and Jung, moved away from Freud’s principles and created their own psychological conception.

There is no doubt that Psychoanalysis has been revolutionary for psychology and has served as the basis for the development of a large number of psychological theories and schools. In its beginnings, and even today, it has been a doctrine that has awakened great passions, for and against Possibly one of the main criticisms refers to the lack of objectivity in observation and the difficulty of deriving specific verifiable hypotheses from this theory, but no matter how much they criticize it, in the development of psychology, there is a before and a after this famous person.

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Sigmund Freud: A Life From Beginning to End (Biographies of Psychologists Book 1) Kindle Edition

Sigmund Freud

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What Does Freud Still Have to Teach Us?

There are more than thirty full-length biographies of Sigmund Freud in circulation today. Why keep writing them? Generally, there are two justifications for a new biography: an obscure archive may come to light, changing what is known about the subject, or it can become clear that earlier biographers have misunderstood—or even abused—existing sources. In the absence of a discovery or a scandal, what hangs in the balance for the second or third or thirtieth biographer must be a significant reinterpretation of the subject’s ideas—where they came from, what they mean, and how they have been transmitted to us from increasingly alien times and places.

With Freud, the possibilities for interpreting his life are limitless, as he well knew. In an 1885 letter to his wife, Martha, written when he was twenty-eight, he boasted that he had burned all his letters, notes, and manuscripts, “which one group of people, as yet unborn and fated to misfortune, will feel acutely. Since you can’t guess whom I mean I will tell you: they are my biographers.” He added, “Let each one of them believe he is right in his ‘Conception of the Development of the Hero’: even now I enjoy the thought of how they will all go astray.” Freud’s wish for the birth of his “unborn” biographers was also a curse laid upon them. Under his ferocious hubris ran an equally ferocious insecurity. He had yet to publish anything of significance, and the ideas that made him famous—repression, infantile sexuality, the libido, and the death drive—were still far in the future.

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Nearly all Freud’s biographers have brandished this letter as proof of their daring in accepting his challenge. Like children, some have done so respectfully, others with contempt. His official biographer, the Welsh psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, met Freud in 1908, at the inaugural International Psychoanalytic Congress, in Salzburg, and never strayed far from his side. In the mid-fifties, Jones published a three-volume behemoth, “ The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud ,” which proceeded with the tender, painstaking, and sometimes misleading attention of an eldest child cataloguing his deceased father’s belongings. The historian Peter Gay’s “ Freud: A Life for Our Time ,” which appeared thirty years later, reads like the work of a clear-eyed younger son. Anchoring Freud’s origins in the unstable project of nineteenth-century Austrian liberalism and the vexed insider-outsider status of the Jewish bourgeoisie, Gay systematically linked each of Freud’s major writings to its historical epoch. Despite their differences, Jones, the disciple, and Gay, the scholar, were both completists. No one has improved on their essential and extraordinarily vivid books. Efforts to do so—for instance, Élisabeth Roudinesco’s “ Freud: In His Time and Ours ” (2014)—read like the imitative, if perfectly serviceable, remembrances of latecomers to a funeral.

After those two monumental works, the next wave of Freud biographies seemed to respond to a strong reciprocal impulse; after all, he had written the most influential biography of us—of man, a creature of pleasure who had been civilized into unhappiness, and of mankind, its members instinctively bound by Eros and aggression. Reciprocity, however, can take the form of gratitude or vengeance. Frederick Crews’s “Freud: The Making of an Illusion ” (2017) is a work of propaganda so savage that one cannot help but imagine its author as a disowned son. His Freud is lazy, insecure, abusive, and deluded, and the practitioners who have followed him are saps and chumps. In contrast, the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips’s devoted and meandering “ Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst ” (2016) offers no new details about its subject’s life but meditates at length on the sibling rivalry between biography and psychoanalysis. He takes Freud’s allergy to biography so deeply to heart that he more or less talks himself out of writing one. Crews and Phillips occupy opposite ends of the love-hate spectrum of biography, but the result is the same. The biographer’s psychodrama prevails over the subject’s life.

Periodically, though, the call to biography is occasioned by an urge to construct a Freud “for our time,” a time that resembles Freud’s own in its apprehension and instability. This was an urge whose repetition was foreseen by W. H. Auden , in his 1940 poem “In Memory of Sigmund Freud”:

When there are so many we shall have to mourn, when grief has been made so public, and exposed to the critique of a whole epoch the frailty of our conscience and anguish, of whom shall we speak?

“This doctor” was the poem’s answer—“an important Jew who died in exile,” and who spoke to all the “exiles who long for the future that lives in our power.” As Matt Ffytche observes at the beginning of his biography, “ Sigmund Freud ” (2022), “there has been a Freud for 1920s Bengal and 1930s Tokyo; a Freud for the early days of the Bolshevik revolution and for modernist poets; a Freud for apartheid South Africa.” The past few years have given us a Freud for the pandemic, a Freud for Ukraine and a Freud for Palestine, a Freud for transfemininity, a Freud for the far right, and a Freud for the vipers’ nest that is the twenty-first-century American university.

The latest biography, “ Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna, and the Making of the Modern Mind ” (St. Martin’s), is by Frank Tallis, a British clinical psychologist and a crime novelist. (His popular series, “ The Liebermann Papers ,” is set in an opulent fin-de-siècle Vienna, and features Dr. Max Liebermann, billed as “literature’s first psychoanalytic detective.”) Tallis is not the first to give us a Freud for Vienna—the intellectual historian Carl Schorske’s “ Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture ,” from 1980, remains the standard-bearer—but what Tallis lacks in novelty or political verve he makes up for in sheer entertainment, drawing inspiration from the briskly plotted intrigue of his crime fiction. Quotation is jettisoned in favor of dramatic paraphrase. Chapters are anchored by colorful Viennese personalities, including patients from Freud’s case studies—Anna O., Dora, Rat Man, Wolfman—and the melancholy aristocrats and philandering artists of his milieu. Reading “Mortal Secrets” is like waltzing around a crowded ballroom, past quivering gold leaf and sternly curved flowers, while your partner murmurs in your ear very elegant, very precise summaries of primal parricide and the topographical model of the mind.

The experience is not just entertaining. It is refreshingly honest. Tallis, to echo Freud, has no “hobby-horse, no consuming passion.” His biography intends to synthesize and clarify, and to dispel any baseless speculation about his subject. He uses his lifetime of professional expertise to adjudicate freely and fairly between the “Freud bashers” and the fanatics who “have treated his works like scripture.” Their battles, he points out, have made it difficult to assess the importance of a thinker who, though routinely debunked, indelibly shaped our ideas about the self. “He is obviously important,” Tallis writes. “But how important?”

Every biographer of Freud must contend with the gruff, withholding story that he told about his own life in “An Autobiographical Study,” which he published in 1925, at the height of his success. From the start, Freud adopts a tone of pure facticity. “I was born on May 6th, 1856, in Freiberg in Moravia, a small town in what is now Czecho-Slovakia,” he writes. “My parents were Jews and I have remained a Jew myself.” He describes his family’s move from Freiberg to Vienna, when he was three, without detail or emotion. His references to his early influences—the Bible, Darwin, Goethe—are glancing. The formative mentorships of Ernest Brücke and Jean-Martin Charcot, and his professional relationship with Josef Breuer, with whom Freud co-authored the 1895 book “ Studies on Hysteria ,” are swept aside after a few paragraphs. Martha makes a single, strange appearance, in a digression about how she persuaded Freud to stop experimenting with cocaine. “It is the fault of my fiancée that I was not already famous,” he complains. Their six children and eight grandchildren are largely absent. The faithful disciples are subordinated to the founding institutions of psychoanalysis; the unfaithful Carl Jung is dismissed in an icy parenthetical.

Militantly impersonal in his style, Freud narrates his life through a series of lucid and economic summaries of the ideas that defined his career: first, repression; then infantile sexuality; and, finally, the grand battle between Eros and the death instinct, within individuals and across civilization. It was the first of these ideas, he writes, that gave rise to all the others: “It is possible to take repression as a centre and to bring all the elements of psychoanalytic theory into relation with it.” The subject opened one of his earliest papers, “Screen Memories,” from 1899, which recounted a conversation that Freud had had with a patient, a thirty-eight-year-old man whose family had moved when he was three from the small town where he was born to a big city. They had suffered “long years of hardship,” the man confided. “I don’t think there was anything about them worth remembering.” He had thrown himself into his studies, achieving considerable intellectual and financial success. Only once, when he was seventeen, did he return to his home town, for the summer; on the trip, he fell in love with a daughter of a family that he was staying with, a girl who wore a striking yellow dress. His most perplexing childhood memory, he told Freud, was of picking bright-yellow flowers in a meadow with his two cousins, a girl his age and a boy slightly older, while a farmer’s wife and a nursemaid watched them. “The little girl has the nicest bunch, but we two boys, as if by prior agreement, fall upon her and snatch her flowers from her. She runs up the meadow in tears, and the farmer’s wife consoles her by giving her a big slice of black bread.”

Yet this patient did not really exist. He was, Tallis writes, “Freud’s invented doppelganger,” an immigrant who had left his home only to learn how solitary, how grim the reality of growing up was in comparison with childhood. He wondered, What if he had never left his home town? What if he had married the girl he had fallen in love with that summer? Freud knew that all people ask questions like these, and that, upon asking them, life suddenly appears in split screen, with one side drenched in color and the other black-and-white, with long interludes in which nothing much seems to happen. Human beings, Freud wrote, “find reality unsatisfying quite generally, and for that reason entertain a life of phantasy in which we like to make up for the insufficiencies of reality.”

These unrealizable fantasies, which were too melancholy to confront, had to be “repressed,” or pushed out of consciousness. Yet “the repressed wishful impulse continues to exist in the unconscious,” he explained. At opportune moments, the impulse sent “into consciousness a disguised and unrecognizable substitute for what had been repressed.” The screen memory, a substitute, emerged “almost like a work of fiction.” It was constructed out of superimposed fantasies of sex and satiation—in this case, the deflowering, as it were, of the little girl, whose flowers were the same vivid yellow as the dress of Freud’s first love, and also the bread, a source of material comfort. The screen memory, associated with the wish to return home and find love waiting there, represented a “compromise” between knowledge and illusion. It was a bearable sign of an unbearable disappointment.

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“Screen Memories” belongs to the earliest period of Freud’s writings, along with “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900), “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life” (1901), and “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious” (1905). All of them concern a repressed wish’s substitutive forms—memories, dreams, slips of the tongue, and jokes, which Freud wrote about with great charm. An enthusiastic popularizer of his ideas, he imagined his audience as anyone who had not managed to turn “his wishful phantasies into reality”—not titans of industry or artists but ordinary people who longed for more than what they had. The act of attending to their substitutions—of fantasizing—provided a daily experience of creativity, surprise, humor, and interpretive activity. One needed to have only the “courage and determination,” Freud urged, to heed the minor poetry of the unconscious.

“The idea of repression makes Freud’s interest in sex logical,” Tallis writes. The realization, in “Screen Memories,” that the figure of the demanding, sexually aggressive child persisted in the psyche of the self-possessed adult put Freud on the scent of his next major discovery, infantile sexuality. His 1905 book, “ Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality ,” described how the child passed through a predictable series of relations—with his mother, his father, and his own body—that guided his libido. Sometimes, however, the pathway of the libido was disturbed—by an ailing parent, a harassing sibling—thereby releasing a desire that had to be repressed. The substitute was not a gratifying aesthetic experience, like a screen memory or a joke, but a disruptive symptom, “expressed in disturbances of other, non-sexual, somatic functions.” In Freud’s patients, symptoms ranged from an aversion to food and drink to migraines, a persistent cough, momentary aphasia, and obsessive-compulsive behaviors.

Infantile sexuality lent the child’s life a generic shape and a sense of fatedness. In “The Interpretation of Dreams,” Freud had noted the prevalence in his neurotic patients of the “Oedipus dream”—having sex with one’s mother—which he understood as an intense and agitated expression of natural filial love. “The persons who are concerned with a child’s feeding, care, and protection become his earliest sexual objects: that is to say, in the first instance his mother,” Freud wrote. The father, a rival for the mother’s attention, presented an obstacle. Indulging his libidinal attachment to his mother, a boy behaved in discomfiting ways—watching his mother undress, sleeping in her bed, proposing marriage, and wishing his father were dead. “One may easily see that the little man would like to have the mother all to himself,” Freud wrote. This behavior may have seemed mild in comparison with incest and patricide, but Freud held that it was “essentially the same”—a difference of degree rather than of kind.

Crucial to Oedipus’ story is that he did not realize that Queen Jocasta was his mother. His was a tragedy of misrecognition, and his eventual self-blinding literalized his blindness to the nature of his desire. A similar blindness afflicted Freud’s patients, he observed, and nowhere more powerfully than in their relationships with “persons who can revive in them the picture of the mother and the father”—lovers, teachers, bosses, priests, and, of course, psychoanalysts. The patient would act out the same patterns that had structured his encounters with his parents, often without understanding what he was doing or why. This displacement of emotion, which Freud called “transference,” manifested as a “stormy demand for love or in a more moderate form.” Some people “understand how to sublimate the transference, how to modify it until it attains a kind of fitness for existence,” he wrote. Others, failing to identify the source of their longings, would never solve the riddle of their need and their hostility.

The Oedipus complex, with its touch of mythological grandeur, has obscured more radical claims about infantile sexuality—and, by extension, sexuality in general—that Freud made in his mid-period writings, especially his 1909 lectures at Clark University. Against the fantasy of the innocent, angelic child, Freud insisted on a baby as a rapacious pleasure-seeker, a thumb-sucking, ear-pulling, cheerfully masturbating creature lacking “shame, loathing, and morality.” (Tallis summarizes Freud, wonderfully: “A baby is a promiscuous voluptuary with irregular tastes.”) The baby was all instinctual need, attending to his own body with profound concentration, deigning to allow his mother to tickle and stroke and nurse him while he mewled with contentment. He would enter a latency period before the onset of puberty, when the behaviors he exhibited as a child would be checked by adults. But his narcissism and his Oedipal grief would remain forever submerged in his unconscious.

Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality allowed him to pursue a startling critique of “ ‘civilized’ sexual morality,” as he called it, in his 1908 essay of the same name. It was a critique that he prosecuted subtly, at first, with an ironic and counterintuitive definition of the sexual as anything “improper.” Impropriety encompassed any sexual activity that had “given up the aim of reproduction” to pursue “the attainment of pleasure”—a child sucking his mother’s breast for comfort, oral sex between married people, anal sex between men. Civilization, Freud argued, did not teach people to repress specific sexual activities per se. It taught them to repress the inutile pleasure of sex—and to understand as sexual, or “improper,” any experience of pleasure that exceeded the act of reproduction. “All these crazy, eccentric and horrible things really constitute the sexual activity of people,” Freud observed. Laying the irony on thick, he suggested that all his readers were in thrall to the uselessness of pleasure; that they had been educated into heterosexual object choice, marriage, and having children; and that this education entailed a lifetime of repressing one’s unruly libidinal instincts. People “do not show their sexuality freely,” Freud wrote. “To conceal it they wear a heavy overcoat woven of a tissue of lies, as though the weather were bad in the world of sexuality.”

Among Freud’s biographers, there is much prurient speculation about his own sexuality. How erotic was his early relationship with the otolaryngologist Wilhelm Fliess, who propounded an intimate connection between the nose and the genitals? Did Freud have an affair with his sister-in-law Minna, who was prettier and more attentive to his research than Martha? On such points, Tallis is levelheaded where others have been foolishly excitable, like naughty boys peeking through keyholes. “The truth of the matter is that we can never know what really happened,” he writes. Instead, he stresses what Freud repeatedly stressed: that psychoanalysis, in its encounters with so-called perversions, “has no concern whatever with such judgments of value.” Freud made this point with increasing vehemence in his later work: “The demand for a uniform sexual life for all . . . disregards all the disparities, innate and acquired, in the sexual constitution of human beings, thereby depriving fairly large numbers of sexual enjoyment and becoming a source of grave injustice.” Psychoanalysis erased the difference between “perverts” of all stripes—gays, lesbians, sadists, masochists, fetishists, exhibitionists—and faithfully married heterosexuals. For all of them, Freud held, the aim was the same: “Transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.”

The scandal of infantile sexuality and the Oedipal plot have distracted many of Freud’s biographers from the final phase of his career, when he broadened his fierce and unsettling gaze from the history of the individual to the history of humankind. His postwar writings—“ Mourning and Melancholia ” (1917), “ Reflections on War and Death ” (1918), “ Beyond the Pleasure Principle ” (1920), “ Civilization and Its Discontents ” (1930), and “ Moses and Monotheism ” (1939)—attempted to comprehend a world besieged by war and illness. Man was ensnared in a “battle of the giants”: Eros versus Thanatos, the libido against what Freud named the death drive. The libido drew people together. The death drive tore them apart, repeatedly, across every epoch, and with a bleak determinacy that led Freud to conclude that “the aim of all life is death.”

A strong pessimism had marked Freud’s work from the beginning, but it had been tempered by his quiet appreciation of the poetry of the unconscious. Yet the consolations of fantasy could not withstand the First World War, which sent his sons to the front and bankrupted his practice, leaving his family in Vienna starving. In 1915, he drafted a short and hopelessly poignant essay, “Transience,” on why people mourn. “Mourning over the loss of something that we have loved or admired seems so natural to the layman that he takes it quite for granted,” he wrote. “But for the psychologist, mourning is a great mystery.” The libido bound itself to objects—a lover, a homeland, a profession—that it absorbed into the ego, incorporating them into one’s sense of self. The loss of these objects freed the libido to seek substitutes. Yet it also provoked a wrenching displeasure, which, Freud marvelled, “we have at present no hypothesis to explain.” Mourning, he observed, compelled people to create more ferocious attachments to whatever objects were still present to them. His primary example was the war, which “made our fatherland small again, and made the rest of the world remote.” In the face of war’s losses “the love of the fatherland, the affection for our neighbors and pride in what we have in common have been suddenly reinforced.”

The preoccupation with death in his writings of the twenties and thirties was hardly surprising. The streets of Vienna teemed with veterans suffering “war neuroses” and civilians suffering “the traumatic neuroses of peace,” he observed in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” While he was writing that book, his daughter Sophie, his best-beloved child, died of the Spanish flu, at the age of twenty-six. A terrible pathos hangs over “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” which is concerned with absences that can and cannot be mastered. At its center is a diptych of loss. On one side of it, Freud tells the story of Sophie’s older son, Ernst, who delighted in playing a repetitive and apparently pointless game. He would take a wooden spool attached to a piece of string and throw it into his crib, out of sight. Then he would pull it back, cooing “O-o-o-o,” and shout “Da!” when it reappeared. Freud speculates that the game, “ fort-da ” (“gone-there”), is evidence of the child learning to renounce his instinctual need for his mother. He “compensated himself” by “staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach,” learning to win pleasure from his mastery of loss. On the other side of the diptych are situations in which people repeated painful relations passively and unconsciously, such as “the man whose friendships all end in betrayal by his friends” or “the lover each of whose love affairs with a woman passes through the same phases.” They presented no thrill of novelty, no compensating pleasures. Instead, they modelled the “compulsion to repeat,” leading Freud to conjecture that the death drive is “a need to restore an earlier state of things”—an annihilatory instinct that exceeded sex drives and ego drives.

As the psychoanalyst Ilse Gubrich-Simitis discovered, Freud inserted the death drive into “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” after Sophie’s death; the concept is the impersonal marker of a profoundly personal loss. More losses followed. In 1923, Sophie’s younger son, Heinz, died of tuberculosis; the same year, doctors found cancer in Freud’s mouth. No wonder, then, that his next book, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” stands as his most anxious and disordered work. It can be difficult to determine its central theme, so frantically does Freud shift his topic and tone. He begins by expressing his skepticism about religion, but he also avows interest in a sense of “oneness with the universe”—an “oceanic feeling” corresponding to a “more intimate bond between the ego and the world around it.” Some individuals pursue this bond through prayer. Others seek it in love, which Freud seems to have hardened his heart against. “We never have so little protection against suffering as when we are in love,” he warns. The greatest testament to the human sense of “oneness” is civilization itself, man’s “mastery over space and time” in the form of shared aesthetic and political projects—beauty, order, religion, nationhood.

Yet civilization had not “increased the amount of pleasure” that men could “expect from life.” The telephone that allowed one to hear the voice of a child thousands of miles away would not be needed had the railways not allowed the child to move far away. The ideas that united people in shared projects would not be necessary if civilization had not sacrificed both desire and aggression on the false altar of human perfectibility. Civilization contained within its structures the urge to destroy them. Whoever recalls “the people known as the Mongols under Genghiz Kahn and Tamerlane, the conquest of Jerusalem by the pious Crusaders, or indeed the horrors of the Great War, will be obliged to acknowledge this as a fact,” Freud wrote. Existence was the struggle between “the life drive and the drive for destruction.” It was impossible to know which would win.

In a letter to Albert Einstein, written in 1932, the year before the Nazis came to power, Freud expressed his hope that “everything that promotes the development of civilization also works against war.” Yet he feared that he belonged to a minority. “How long must we wait before the others become pacifists as well?” he wondered. Shortly after the Anschluss, in 1938, the Gestapo detained and interrogated Freud’s youngest child, Anna, then raided the Freuds’ home. The family fled to London, where Freud died a year later, delirious, inarticulate, and in agony from the cancer that had eaten away at his jaw. The end of his story makes it difficult to disagree with his dejected assessment of civilization. “The life imposed on us is too hard to bear,” he wrote. “It brings too much pain, too many disappointments, too many insoluble problems.”

But it would be wrong to end on such unremitting pessimism. No matter his private grief, Freud always allowed the analytic pendulum to swing in the opposite direction. The smallest but brightest entry among the Freud biographies is “Writing on the Wall,” a 1944 tribute by the modernist poet H.D., who was treated by Freud in the thirties. Dedicated to “Sigmund Freud, blameless physician,” its chapters flit between H.D.’s memories of her sessions with “the Professor” and memories of her father and mother, her stillborn child, and her flight to Greece under a gathering mist of madness. The poetic spirit that animates psychoanalysis—the subterranean glow of fiction, of fantasy, of useless pleasure—finds its apotheosis in H.D.’s free-associative style. She had evidently watched Freud listening just as carefully as he had listened to her speaking. He was “like a curator in a museum, surrounded by his priceless collection of Greek, Egyptian, and Chinese treasures,” she wrote. She found him withdrawn, “quiet, a little wistful.” When he grew annoyed with her, he beat his hand on the headpiece of his famous couch. Re-creating Freud as a mixture of myth and reality, H.D. offered the reader a singularly intimate account of the method of a man who claimed intimacy with everyone but seemed to offer it to no one.

“Writing on the Wall” was published several decades after it was written, in a volume called “ A Tribute to Freud ,” along with excerpts from H.D.’s diaries and the letters that Freud wrote to her during and after her analysis. Her side of the correspondence is not included, but in May, 1936, she seems to have sent him an especially affectionate letter, for his eightieth birthday. His response was brief but tender. “I had imagined I had become insensitive to praise and blame,” he wrote. “Life at my age is not easy, but spring is beautiful and so is love.” This idea would stay with H.D., and later became a form of psychic protection when air-raid sirens screamed across the London sky: “The Professor himself proclaimed the Herculean power of Eros and we know that it was written from the beginning that Love is stronger than Death.” ♦

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Sigmund Freud: Biography of a Brilliant Mind

Sigmund Freud was the man behind the concept and method of psychoanalysis, which was a means of delving into a person's inner conflicts that lie within the unconscious mind. This method is based on the understanding that people's fantasies and dreams say something about these problems that affect them in their daily lives. Freud also formed several theories that relate to the ego, libido and sexuality of the child, which are only a few of the other topics he studied and specialized on during his lifetime. Hence, Freud was regarded as one of the most influential and controversial personalities of the 20th century.

Sigmund Freud lived most of his years in Vienna, although Freiberg (a town in Austria) was his birthplace. When his family relocated to Vienna, Freud was only four years of age. It was in this city in Austria where he received a degree in the field of medicine, which was in 1881. A year after, he married and decided to practice his profession for a living. His main focus was on treating patients who suffered from psychological disorders, and this started his journey and preoccupation on studying human experience and instincts. He also worked with other scientists and scholars throughout his life, although he eventually formulated his own theories and developed a method for the treatment of psychological conditions among individuals.

Immediately after obtaining a medical degree at the University of Vienna, Sigmund Freud decided to work as a physician. He later expanded his knowledge by studying the works of Jean-Martin Charcot, who was a French neurologist. It was during this time that Freud developed an interest in the treatment of hysteria, which is an emotional disorder. Afterwards, Josef Breuer, one of Freud's mentors, introduced him to one patient's case study. The patient's name was Bertha Pappenheim, although she was simply known as "Anna O.". The patient suffered from various symptoms including paralysis, tactile anesthesia and a nervous cough. The two scientists discovered that Anna suffered from various traumatic experiences, which they believed had a significant contribution to her mental illness. Breuer and Freud encouraged the patient to talk freely about her symptoms and experiences. Since there was no known specific cause for Anna's difficulties, they simply allowed her to express her feelings and thoughts through talking. In 1895, the Studies on Hysteria was published, which was the outcome of their analysis on the improvement on Anna's condition by implementing the so-called "talking cure". Freud explored deeper into the human mind and sexuality, and this allowed him to publish several works including Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and The Interpretation of Dreams . Both of these written works by Freud became known worldwide, but his study of the psychosexual stages left a more lasting impact on critics and scholars alike. His theory was also met with much controversy and skepticism, yet this has a massive influence on the field of psychology up to this modern era.

Contributions

Sigmund Freud mainly worked on formulating theories that impact the human mind, mental disorders and sexuality. His works provided a deeper understanding on abnormal and clinical psychology, as well as the stages of human development. Some of his scholarly publications included The Ego and the Id , Moses and Monotheism , Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality , Studies on Hysteria, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, Civilization and Its Discontents , and The Interpretation of Dreams . He believed that mental disorders were rooted to cultural differences aside from physiological causes, as presented in his case studies. Although Freud initially worked with Breuer, the two parted ways because the latter believed that much of Freud's preoccupations were on the sexual origins of neuroses. They were unable to settle the differences in their viewpoints, and this triggered Freud to go deeper into his study. He also published his work "The Interpretation of Dreams", and he maintained the belief that a person's dreams reveal so much about the inner conflicts within. While he may have refined his theories and gained popularity with his publications, his contemporaries agreed on the assumption that Freud was more focused on sexuality as one of the topics of his studies. Nevertheless, Freud's fame increased worldwide as he received numerous invitations to deliver lectures in various parts of the United States, beginning 1909.

Sigmund Freud admitted that he had gone through conflicts within himself, which started during his early years. His father's death had an impact on him, and he went through feelings of guilt and shame, as well. He recalled how he viewed his father as his rival to the love and affection of his mother, which caused him to develop negative emotions. He reflected on this experience he had as a child and used it as one of his basis and inspiration in developing the theory on infantile sexuality and the concept of Oedipus Complex. There were several theories that Freud established, which are still recognized even up to this day. He also inspired several scholars and scientists during his time. For instance, Charles Darwin's theory on the evolution of man had some fascinating links to the study of Freud on human behavior. Then, there was this scientific theory by Helmholtz, which referred to energy and its constant quality in any physical system. This was related to Freud's analysis of the structural components of the human mind. Thus, the theories and scientific works of Freud may have been criticized and praised at the same time by his contemporaries, yet these are evidences of his strong influence in the field of psychology. Sigmund Freud battled with a serious illness during the last years of his life. He developed oral cancer, which caused him to struggle physically and emotionally. In 1939, while he was living in exile in England, he requested from his doctor a lethal dose of the drug morphine to end his sufferings. This resulted to the death of this controversial and influential scientist whose works remain with us until this very day.

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Freud’s Notebook: “To Remember is to Relive”

June 27, 2024

Posted by: Neely Tucker

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—This is a guest post by Meg McAleer, a former historian in the Manuscript Division .

Sigmund Freud returned again and again to the problem of memory as he formulated his theories of psychoanalysis during the 1890s, as the Library’s significant collection of his papers show.

“What is essentially new about my theory,” Freud wrote in this letter to fellow physician and confidante Wilhelm Fliess, “is the thesis that memory is present not once but several times over, that it is laid down in various kinds of indications.” The second page of this letter sketches the progression of memory from perception (“W”) to the unconscious (“Ub (II)”) and eventually to consciousness (“Bew”).

Freud refined his theories over time in significant ways but remained committed to the notion that the past exerts a powerful influence over the present as memories embedded in the unconscious break through into consciousness through selective, altered and fluid remembering and forgetting.

Slipped into a pocket and kept close to the body, pocket notebooks are intimate, hidden and always accessible.

Freud purchased this small leather-bound notebook while vacationing in Florence in the waning summer of 1907. Its cover bears the Italian words “Ricordare è rivivere” (“to remember is to relive”). Freud owned many similar notebooks, filling them sequentially through the decades with jottings of names, addresses, expenses, ideas and observations.

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