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 Central Hospital from 1882 to 1885. From 1886 until 1938, he held an appointment as a professor of neurology at the University of Vienna, in addition to opening his own private psychiatric practice specializing in nervous diseases.

After a four-year engagement, he married Martha Bernays. The couple had six children, including the youngest, Anna, who became a respected child psychoanalyst. During his early medical career, Freud's interests shifted from neurology to psychopathology of the mind, and eventually to the groundbreaking idea that neurotic behavior was the manifestation of repressed, unconscious libidinal desires—desires that could only be revealed and resolved (in however limited a fashion) through talk therapy involving free association. Importantly, he posited that these desires developed in deeply gendered ways inextricably tied to the sexual dynamics of family life, the patient's childhood relationship with each parent, and in particular how they, especially fathers, fit into the child's process of sexual maturation. Most notable among Freud's writings are his The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), which was based largely on his own self-analysis; The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901); and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). Following Hitler's invasion of Austria and the Nazis' seizure and destruction of his publications, Freud escaped to London in 1938. He died there of cancer at the age of 83 on September 23, 1939.