Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939)

Sigmund Freud was, arguably, the most important personage in the history of psychiatry and psychology. His theory of personality, psychoanalysis, revolutionized both psychology and Western culture and remains the single, most in depth personality theory within the field. Many of his ideas have entered common culture, that is, the unconscious mind, defense mechanisms, Freudian slips, and dream symbolism. Freud is best known for his work regarding the unconscious mind, especially how memories too painful to recall consciously are exhibited in ways unknown to the sufferer, including nightmares and psychosomatic illnesses that are not “real” in the medical sense. This entry discusses his theories.

Freud was born May 6, 1856, in Freiberg (in what is now known as the Czech Republic). He was highly intelligent, matriculating at the University of Vienna at age 17. He studied neurology and earned his doctor of medicine degree, returning to Vienna to open a private practice emphasizing the study of nervous and brain disorders and to marry his fiancée, Martha Bernays.

He was an excellent researcher and spent most of his time engaged in studying the human personality. The more he studied, the more he realized that the most intriguing mysteries were not conscious; rather, they were the concealed operations of the human mind. By the early 1890s, he specialized primarily in “neurasthenics” (mainly severe hysterics), and the field taught him much, including the art of listening patiently as clients told their stories. At the same time, he began writing down his dreams, increasingly convinced that they might offer clues to the workings of the unconscious, a notion he borrowed from the Romantics. Freud saw himself as a scientist, taking material both from his patients and from himself, through introspection. By the mid-1890s, he had immersed himself in self-analysis, an exercise for which there were no guidelines or predecessors. During this period, he slowly remembered anger he had felt toward his father, while distantly recalling childhood sexual feelings for his mother, who was strikingly attractive. Later, Freud considered this time of emotional difficulty to be the most creative time in his life.

In 1900, he published the seminal The Interpretation of Dreams, but it sold poorly; even so, Freud's ideas became popular in Vienna, and he was awarded a professorship in psychiatry at the University of Vienna in 1901. He gathered around him a group of intelligent disciples, including Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Reich, and others. Freud had little tolerance for anyone who disagreed with his rigid ideas. He expelled those colleagues who disagreed with him, even if they accepted the basic tenets of the theory—Jung and Adler being the two most famous examples (interestingly, both created their own personality theories).

In 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party were voted into power in Germany. Shortly thereafter, Freud's works were burned publicly throughout the country as were those of other, well-known Jewish writers. In 1938, Germany's anschluss with Austria caused Freud to leave his home, immigrating to England where he remained for the rest of his life. Freud had been an excessive cigar smoker since age 24, smoking as many as 19 per day. He was told by different physicians that to continue would be a death sentence, but he kept smoking. Freud contracted oral cancer in 1923, at the age of 67 and underwent 30 operations, but he continued to smoke cigars until his death on September 23,1939. In the end, the pain caused by the cancer was intolerable and he had his personal physician give him an assisted overdose of morphine.

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