Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939)

Physician and psychoanalyst

Sigmund Freud was the most prominent and visible leader of the psychoanalytic movement. More than sixty years after his death, he remains the individual most closely associated in the public mind not just with psychoanalysis but with psychiatry in general.

Sigsimund Freud was born in Frieberg, Moravia (now the Czech Republic), on 6 May 1856. (Freud shortened his name to Sigmund in 1877.) Freud's father, Jacob, was a lower-middle-class, Jewish wool merchant. Freud was the first of eight children born to Jacob and his third wife, Amalia Nathansohn Freud. The family moved to Vienna, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Europe, when Freud was four, hoping that anti-Semitism would be less severe there [Page 519]than in the countryside. The family recognized that Freud was a brilliant student and supported his education. He earned a medical degree in 1881 from the prestigious University of Vienna and pursued a career in psychiatry after anti-Semitism prevented him from finding a position in neurology. Throughout his career Freud regarded himself as a scientist and viewed psychoanalysis as a science. He first worked with hysterias—physical disorders such as paralyzed limbs that had no physical cause—and was introduced to hypnosis and the “talking cure” by the Austrian physician Josef Breuer and French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. In 1886 Freud married Martha Bernays, and the couple had three sons and three daughters. Their youngest child, Anna, was analyzed by Freud and became his most loyal follower and strongest advocate later in his life. In 1891 Freud moved to Berggasse 19 in Vienna and opened his private practice. The house became the Freud Museum Vienna in 1971.

Freud developed his initial theories and method of treatment, which he labeled “psychoanalysis” in 1896, using a unique methodology that combined self-analysis and dream interpretation with analysis of several key patients, followed by discussions in his home with a small circle of fledgling analysts. By 1906 the circle included William Stekel, Alfed Adler, Otto Rank, Abraham Brill, Eugen Bleuler, and Carl Jung, and later Sandor Ferenczi and Ernest Jones. In 1908 it became the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. This society served as an organizational mode for local and regional psychoanalytic societies in Europe, Great Britain, and the United States.

Over the course of his lifetime, Freud and his colleagues amplified, revised, and added to their initial insights and extended psychoanalytic theory to encompass virtually all elements of the human experience, including jokes, accidents, religion, creativity, and even civilization itself. Freud and his followers also set forth guidelines for the conduct of psychoanalysis that have been revised substantially by others over the years. Freud was not tolerant of dissent, and Adler and Jung were forced to leave the group and went on to lead psychoanalytic schools of their own, with Jung's being especially popular in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Later, Freud also broke with Otto Rank. In the 1930s and 1940s, subsequent generations of analysts such as Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Erich Fromm were labeled neo-Freudians in that they followed many of Freud's basic ideas but added new insights that often considered social factors in personality formation and relationships to them.

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