Freud, Sigmund

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis and a prolific author of numerous volumes on the subject, was born on May 6, 1856, in Freiberg, Moravia. Freud was the third child of Amalia and Jacob, a wool merchant; originally named Sigismund Schlomo, he grew up in a large middle-class Jewish family of 10 children and spent nearly all of his adult life in Vienna. He obtained his medical degree from Vienna University, where he studied from 1873 to 1881, then spent several years working as a laboratory [Page 429]researcher under Professor Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke at the Physiological Institute of Vienna from 1876 to 1882. With poverty as his prime motivator, Freud reluctantly went on to work as a physician specializing in neuropathology at the Vienna ...