Background

Sigmund Freud was born Sigismund Schlomo Freud on May 6, 1856, in Freiberg, Moravia, Austrian Empire (now Příbor, Czech Republic) to a family of Jacob Koloman Freud and Amalia Nathansohn. Both of his parents were from Galicia, a province straddling modern-day West Ukraine and Poland. Freud’s father, Jakob, was a Jewish wool merchant who had been married once before he wed the boy’s mother, Amalie Nathansohn. The father, 40 years old at Freud’s birth, seems to have been a relatively remote and authoritarian figure, while his mother appears to have been more nurturant and emotionally available. Although Freud had two older half-brothers, his strongest if also most ambivalent attachment seems to have been to a nephew, John, one year his senior, who provided the model of an intimate friend and hated rival that Freud often reproduced at later stages of his life. In 1859 the Freud family was compelled for economic reasons to move to Leipzig and then a year after to Vienna, where Freud remained until the Nazi annexation of Austria 78 years later.

Education

In 1873 Sigmund Freud graduated from the Leopoldstädter Kommunal-Realgymnasium (now Sigmund-Freud-Gymnasium) proving to be an outstanding pupil and receiving the Matura with honors. He enjoyed literature and was proficient in German, French, Italian, Spanish, English, Hebrew, Latin, and Greek.

Freud entered the University of Vienna in 1973 first intending to study law. Inspired by a public reading of an essay by Goethe on nature, he turned to medicine as a career. He was interested in science above all; the idea of practicing medicine was slightly repugnant to him. His early work was a harbinger of things to come – it focused on the sexual organs of the eel. The work was, by all accounts, satisfactory, but Freud was disappointed with his results and, perhaps dismayed by the prospect of dissecting more eels, moved to Ernst Brücke's laboratory in 1877. There, he switched to studying the biology of nervous tissue, an endeavor that would last for 10 years. Brücke was a pioneering physiologist interested, among other things, in the effects of electricity on the nerves and muscles. Together with contemporaries such as Hermann von Helmholtz and Emil du-Bois Reymond, he played a key role in overturning vitalism, the notion that living things differ from inanimate objects because they possess some kind of non-physical entity often called a "vital spark," or merely "energy," that was likened by some to the soul. (Brücke was also of the opinion that all living things are dynamic and subject to the laws of chemistry and physics, an idea later misappropriated by Freud in his psychodynamic theory.) Freud spent six years in Brücke's lab. Freud received his Doctor of Medicine in 1881. His research work was interrupted in 1879 by the obligation to undertake a year's compulsory military service.

During his training, he befriended Josef Breuer, another physician, and physiologist who would have a lasting influence on Freud.

Freud hoped to go into neuropsychological research, but pure research was hard to manage in those days unless you were independently wealthy. Freud was engaged and needed to be able to support a family before he could marry, and so he determined to go into private practice with a specialty in neurology. In 1882, he entered the General Hospital in Vienna as a clinical assistant to train with the psychiatrist Theodor Meynert and the professor of internal medicine Hermann Nothnagel.

In late 1885 Freud left Vienna to continue his studies of neuropathology at the Salpêtrière clinic in Paris, where he worked under the guidance of Jean-Martin Charcot. His 19 weeks in the French capital proved a turning point in his career, for Charcot’s work with patients classified as “hysterics” introduced Freud to the possibility that psychological disorders might have their source in the mind rather than the brain. Charcot’s demonstration of a link between hysterical symptoms, such as paralysis of a limb, and hypnotic suggestion implied the power of mental states rather than nerves in the etiology of the disease. Although Freud was soon to abandon his faith in hypnosis, he returned to Vienna in February 1886 with the seed of his revolutionary psychological method implanted.

Career

In 1885 Freud was appointed lecturer in neuropathology, having concluded important research on the brain’s medulla. At this time he also developed an interest in the pharmaceutical benefits of cocaine, which he pursued for several years. Although some beneficial results were found in eye surgery, which have been credited to Freud’s friend Carl Koller, the general outcome was disastrous. Not only did Freud’s advocacy led to a mortal addiction in another close friend, Ernst Fleischl von Marxow, but it also tarnished his medical reputation for a time. Whether or not one interprets this episode in terms that call into question Freud’s prudence as a scientist, it was of a piece with his lifelong willingness to attempt bold solutions to relieve human suffering.

In 1886, Freud opened his own medical practice, specializing in neurology. He experimented with hypnosis on his hysteric patients, producing numerous scenes of "seduction" under hypnosis. His success in eliciting these scenes of seduction (far beyond what he suspected had actually occurred) caused him to later abandoned this form of treatment, in favor of a treatment where the patient talked through his or her problems. This came to be known as the "talking cure." (The term was initially coined by the patient Anna O. who was treated by Freud's colleague Josef Breuer.) The "talking cure" is widely seen as the basis of psychoanalysis.

After the publication of Freud's books in 1900 and 1901, interest in his theories began to grow, and a circle of supporters developed in the following period. Freud often chose to disregard the criticisms of those who were skeptical of his theories, however, which earned him the animosity of a number of individuals, the most famous of which was Carl Jung, who originally supported Freud's ideas. They split over a variety of reasons, including Jung's insistence on addressing problems of the ego and the solely sexual nature of the Freudian unconscious. Part of the reason for their fallout was due to Jung's growing commitment to religion and mysticism, which conflicted with Freud's atheism.

In 1930, Freud received the Goethe Prize in appreciation of his contribution to psychology and to German literary culture, despite the fact that Freud considered himself not a writer but a scientist. Three years later the Nazis took control of Germany and Freud's books featured prominently among those burned by the Nazis. In March 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss. This led to violent outbursts of anti-Semitism in Vienna, and Freud and his family received visits from the Gestapo. Freud decided to go into exile "to die in freedom." He and his family left Vienna in June 1938 and traveled to London.

Achievements

• Sigmund Freud is commonly referred to as "the father of psychoanalysis" and his work has been highly influential in two related but distinct areas: he simultaneously developed a theory of the human mind's organization and internal operations and a theory that human behavior both conditions and results from how the mind is organized. This led him to favor certain clinical techniques for trying to help cure mental illness. He also theorized that personality is developed by a person's childhood experiences. The modern lexicon is filled with terms that Freud popularized, including the unconscious, defense mechanisms, Freudian slips, and dream symbolism. He made a long-lasting impact on fields as diverse as literature, film, Marxist and feminist theories, philosophy, and psychology. However, his theories remain controversial and widely disputed by numerous critics, to the extent that he has been called the "creator of a complex pseudo-science which should be recognized as one of the great follies of Western civilization."

Works

More photos

• book

  • Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

    (The first edition of this classic work from 1905 shows a ...)

    1905
  • Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis

    (Of the various English translations of Freud's major work...)

    1910
  • The Future of an Illusion

    (Of the various English translations of Freud's major work...)

    1927
  • New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis

    (Of the various English translations of Freud's major work...)

    1933
  • An Outline of Psycho-Analysis

    (Of the various English translations of Freud's major work...)

    1940
  • An Autobiographical Study

    (Of the various English translations of Freud's major work...)

    1925
  • Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious

    (Freud argues that the "joke-work" is intimately related t...)

    1905
  • Delusion and Dream in Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva

    (Here together in one edition is the strange and evocative...)

    1907
  • The Ego and the Id

    (In what is considered one of his most prominent ideas, Au...)

    1923
  • The Question of Lay Analysis

    (Freud believed that a medical education was not necessari...)

    1926
  • On Dreams

    (Among the first of Sigmund Freud's many contributions to ...)

    1901
  • Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria

    (A fascinating case study that reads like a detective nove...)

    1905
  • Moses and Monotheism

    (This volume contains Freud’s speculations on various aspe...)

    1939
  • The Interpretation of Dreams

    (First published in 1899, Sigmund Freud's groundbreaking b...)

    1900
  • Civilization and Its Discontents

    (Freud’s seminal volume of twentieth-century cultural thou...)

    1930
  • Studies On Hysteria

    (The cornerstone of psychoanalysis and legacy of the landm...)

    1895
  • Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety

    (On three or four occasions in his career as a psychoanaly...)

    1926
  • The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

    (Along with the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis, ...)

    1904
  • Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood

    (Leonardo da Vinci remains among the most fascinating, tho...)

    1910
  • The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 1986
  • On Aphasia 1891
  • On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena 1893
  • The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence 1894
  • Obsessions and Phobias 1895
  • Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses 1896
  • Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses 1898
  • Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia 1911
  • Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics 1913
  • Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 1917
  • From the History of an Infantile Neurosis 1918
  • Beyond the Pleasure Principle 1920
  • Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego 1921
  • Thomas Woodrow Wilson 1967
  • On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement 1914

Religion

Being born to a nonpracticing Jewish family, Sigmund Freud grew to become an atheist. He regarded God as an illusion, based on the infantile need for a powerful father figure; religion, he saw as necessary to help people restrain violent impulses earlier in the development of civilization and can now be set aside in favor of reason and science.

Politics

Freud was dismissive of radical politics. He thought that the belief that social change could make people healthier or happier was deluded; that is the point of "Civilization and Its Discontents."

Views

Freud spent six years in Brücke's lab, during which time he was tasked with comparing the brains of humans and other vertebrates with those of invertebrates, to determine whether there were any essential differences between them. This involved examining the brains of frogs, crayfish, and lampreys under the microscope, and led to a number of important discoveries.

Freud demonstrated, for example, that nerve fibres emerge from gray matter within a web-like substance, and that the lamprey spinal cord contains undifferentiated cells that later become the origin of the sensory nerve roots – a discovery that helped establish the evolutionary continuity between all organisms. He was also the first to describe the structure and function of a part of the brainstem called the medulla oblongata, and the white matter tracts connecting the spinal cord and cerebellum.

At the time, the structure of the nervous system was the subject of an ongoing debate. In the 1830s, Theodor Schwann and Matthias Schleiden had proposed, on the basis of what they had seen under the microscope, that all living things consisted of fundamental units called cells. But the microscopes available at the time were not powerful enough to resolve synapses, the miniscule gaps between nerve cells and histologists were divided into two camps - the neuronists, who argued that the nervous system must consist of cells like all other living things, and the reticularists, who believed that it was composed instead of a continuous network of tissue.

Freud made a significant contribution to this long-lasting debate. In the late 1870s and early 1880s, he observed the relationship between the grey matter and the nerve fibres that emerge from it, and described it accurately and consistently. The diagram above, from a paper that he published in 1877, shows the spinal cord of the lamprey, and includes what appear to be nerve cell bodies within the grey matter.

Freud also developed a new method for staining nervous tissue. "In the course of my studies of the structure and development of the medulla oblongate," he wrote in an 1884 paper entitled 'A new histological method for the study of nerve-tracts in the brain and spinal cord,' published in the prestigious journal Brain, "I succeeded in working out the following method… Pieces of the organ are hardened in bichromate of potash, or in Erlicki's fluid (2 1/2 parts of bichromate of potash and 1/2 of sulphate of copper to 100 parts of water) and the process of hardening is finished by placing the specimen in alcohol; thin sections are cut by means of a microtome and washed in distilled water. The washed sections are brought into an aqueous solution of chloride of gold (1 to 100) to which is added half or an equal volume of strong alcohol."

Freud described his observations in a lecture in 1884: "If we assume that the fibrils of the nerve fibre have the significance of isolated paths of conduction, then we would have to say that the pathways in which the nerve fibres are separate are confluent in the nerve cell: then the nerve cell becomes the 'beginning' of all those nerve fibres anatomically connected with it… I do not know if the existing material suffices to decide this important problem. If this assumption could be established it would take us a good step further in the physiology of the nerve elements: we could imagine that a stimulus of a certain strength might break down the isolated fibres, so that the nerve as a unit conducts the excitation, and so on."

Thus, Freud very nearly discovered the neuron, but the way in which he presented his findings was somewhat reserved and vague. The Neuron Doctrine – which states that nerve cells are the fundamental structural and functional element of the nervous system - finally gained wide acceptance in the early 1890s, a full seven years after Freud's lecture. This was, in large part, because of Cajal, who used staining methods similar to that developed by Freud to visualize and compare nervous tissue from various animals.

Today, the Neuron doctrine is the cornerstone of modern neuroscience. But although Freud's early observations were cited in Cajal's magnum opus, Histology of the Nervous System of Man and Vertebrates, as evidence for the existence of neurons, his contribution to the development of this crucial idea are all but forgotten, and were eventually overshadowed by his work in psychoanalysis.

Freud's theories and research methods were controversial during his life and still are so today, but few dispute his huge impact on the development of psychotherapy.

Most importantly, Freud popularized the "talking-cure"(which actually derived from "Anna O.," a patient of one of Freud's mentors, Joseph Breuer - an idea that a person could solve problems simply by talking over them. Even though many psychotherapists today tend to reject the specifics of Freud's theories, this basic mode of treatment comes largely from his work.

Most of Freud's specific theories - like his stages of psychosexual development - and especially his methodology, have fallen out of favor in modern cognitive and experimental psychology.

Some psychotherapists, however, still follow an approximately Freudian system of treatment. Many more have modified his approach or joined one of the schools that branched from his original theories, such as the Neo-Freudians. Still, others reject his theories entirely, although their practice may still reflect his influence.

Psychoanalysis today maintains the same ambivalent relationship with medicine and academia that Freud experienced during his life.

While he saw himself as a scientist, Freud greatly admired Theodor Lipps, a philosopher and main supporter of the ideas of the subconscious and empathy. Freud's theories have had a tremendous impact on the humanities - especially on the Frankfurt School and critical theory - where they are more widely studied today than in the field of psychology. Freud's model of the mind is often criticized as an unsubstantiated challenge to the enlightenment model of rational agency, which was a key element of much modern philosophy.

While many enlightenment thinkers viewed rationality as both an unproblematic ideal and a defining feature of man, Freud's model of the mind drastically reduced the scope and power of reason. In Freud's view, reasoning occurs in the conscious mind - the ego - but this is only a small part of the whole. The mind also contains the hidden, irrational elements of id and superego, which lie outside of conscious control, drive behavior, and motivate conscious activities. As a result, these structures call into question humans' ability to act purely on the basis of reason, since lurking motives are also always at play. Moreover, this model of the mind makes rationality itself suspect, since it may be motivated by hidden urges or societal forces (e.g. defense mechanisms, where reasoning becomes "rationalizing").

Another common assumption in pre-Freudian philosophy was that people have immediate and unproblematic access to themselves. Emblematic of this position is René Descartes' famous dictum, "Cogito ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am"). For Freud, however, many central aspects of a person remain radically inaccessible to the conscious mind (without the aid of psychotherapy), which undermines the once unquestionable status of first-person knowledge.

Freud was an early champion of both sexual freedom and education for women (Freud, "Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness"). Some feminists, however, have argued that at worst his views of women's sexual development set the progress of women in the Western culture back decades and that at best they lent themselves to the ideology of female inferiority.

Believing as he did that women are a kind of mutilated male, who must learn to accept their "deformity" (the "lack" of a penis) and submit to some imagined biological imperative, he contributed to the vocabulary of misogyny.

Terms such as "penis envy" and "castration anxiety" contributed to discouraging women from entering any field dominated by men, until the 1970s. Some of Freud's most criticized statements appear in his 'Fragment of Analysis' on Ida Bauer such as "This was surely just the situation to call up distinct feelings of sexual excitement in a girl of fourteen" in reference to Dora being kissed by a 'young man of prepossessing appearance' implying the passivity of female sexuality and his statement "I should without question consider a person hysterical in whom an occasion for sexual excitement elicited feelings that were preponderantly or exclusively pleasurable."

On the other hand, feminist theorists such as Juliet Mitchell, Nancy Chodorow, Jessica Benjamin, Jane Gallop, and Jane Flax have argued that psychoanalytic theory is essentially related to the feminist project and must, like other theoretical traditions, be adapted by women to free it from vestiges of sexism. Freud's views are still being questioned by people concerned about women's equality. Another feminist who finds potential use of Freud's theories in the feminist movement is Shulamith Firestone. In "Freudianism: The Misguided Feminism," she discusses how Freudianism is essentially completely accurate, with the exception of one crucial detail: everywhere that Freud wrote "penis," the word should be replaced with "power."

Membership

• 

  Royal Society , United Kingdom

• 

  At the first international congress, a scientific gathering of interested colleagues organized by Jung and held at Salzburg, Germany, in 1908, Freud presented the case of the Rat Man, a presentation that took over four hours. The outstanding success of this meeting and the growing concern over the spread of substandard psychoanalytic work by uninformed outsiders, as well as antipathies and attacks emanating from the organized medical and academic worlds, led to the official founding of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) during the second congress at Nuremberg in 1910. The primary goals of the Association were to advance the development of psychoanalysis as a science and as a therapeutic discipline, to promote the disciplined growth of psychoanalysis as a profession, and to protect the public from untrained practitioners by establishing training standards for professional training and a professional membership credential designating its members. The IPA continues to pursue these goals today by sponsoring research activities, professional publications, and scientific conferences, including its biennial "congresses," an organizational tradition since 1908, and by accrediting psychoanalytic training institutes in accordance with the highest international training standards in the world. The IPA today hosts 70 constituent organizations in 33 countries and represents 11,500 Members.

  International Psychoanalytical Association

• 

  Throughout his lifetime Sigmund Freud was concerned to maintain the unity of the theory and practice of psychoanalysis - an enterprise that he had labored so prodigiously, so single-handedly, and for so long to create. To him, psychoanalysis was not only a science and profession, but also a movement calling for dedicated and disciplined allegiance. When confronted with the enormously painful blow of Carl Gustav Jung's defection, he readily took to the idea, which Ernest Jones claimed to introduce, of creating a secret committee of seven ring holders, a group of his geographically scattered closest friends and adherents, to try to ensure the stability of his central psychoanalytic doctrines. This desire to safeguard psychoanalysis as a unified enterprise against both destructive pressures from without and human divisiveness from within also served as a principal impetus for organizing the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA).

  Secret Committee

Personality

In his forties, Freud "had numerous psychosomatic disorders as well as exaggerated fears of dying and other phobias." During this time Freud was involved in the task of exploring his own dreams, memories, and the dynamics of his personality development. During this self-analysis, he came to realize the hostility he felt towards his father (Jacob Freud), who had died in 1896, and "he also recalled his childhood sexual feelings for his mother (Amalia Freud), who was attractive, warm, and protective." Gerald Corey considers this time of emotional difficulty to be the most creative time in Freud's life. He wasn't much into sport activities except for regular mountain hiking every year. Freud's passion was collecting antique pieces of art, and he managed to gather a valuable collection to the end of his life.

Physical Characteristics: In 1923, Sigmund Freud was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw, a result of years of cigar smoking. He was 67. He would have 30 operations over the next 16 years to treat the progressive disease and had a needed for a prosthetic device for a roof of the mouth as a result of a series of operations on his cancerous jaw. In September 1939 he prevailed on his doctor and friend Max Schur to assist him in suicide. After reading Balzac's La Peau de chagrin in a single sitting he said, "My dear Schur, you certainly remember our first talk. You promised me then not to forsake me when my time comes. Now it is nothing but torture and makes no sense anymore." Schur administered three doses of morphine over many hours that resulted in Freud's death on September 23, 1939.

Interests

• collecting antiques

• Politicians

  Franz Joseph I of Austria

• Writers

  Honoré de Balzac, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• Artists

  Michelangelo

• Sport & Clubs

  mountain hiking

• Music & Bands

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Connections

Several months after his return Freud married Martha Bernays, the daughter of a prominent Jewish family whose ancestors included a chief rabbi of Hamburg and Heinrich Heine. She was to bear six children, one of whom, Anna Freud, was to become a distinguished psychoanalyst in her own right. Although the glowing picture of their marriage painted by Ernest Jones in his study The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud has been nuanced by later scholars, it is clear that Martha Bernays Freud was a deeply sustaining presence during her husband’s tumultuous career.

There has long been a dispute about the possibility that a romantic liaison blossomed between Freud and his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, who had moved into Freud's apartment at 19 Berggasse in 1896. This rumor of an illicit relationship has been most notably propelled forward by Carl Jung, Freud's disciple, and later his archrival, who had claimed that Miss Bernays had confessed the affair to him. (This claim was dismissed by Freudians as malice on Jung's part.) It has been suggested that the affair resulted in a pregnancy and subsequently an abortion for Miss Bernays. A hotel log dated August 13, 1898, seems to support the allegation of an affair.

Father:

Jacob Koloman Freud

Mother:

Amalia Nathansohn

Wife:

Martha Bernays

Daughter:

Mathilde Freud

Son:

Jean-Martin Freud

Son:

Oliver Freud

Son:

Ernst Freud

Daughter:

Sophie Freud

Daughter:

Anna Freud

Friend:

Josef Breuer

Josef Breuer was an Austrian physician and physiologist who was acknowledged by Sigmund Freud and others as the principal forerunner of psychoanalysis. Breuer found, in 1880, that he had relieved symptoms of hysteria in a patient, Bertha Pappenheim, called Anna O. in his case study, after he had induced her to recall unpleasant experiences under hypnosis. He concluded that neurotic symptoms result from unconscious processes and will disappear when these processes become conscious. The case of Anna O. introduced Freud to the cathartic method (the "talking cure") that was pivotal in his later work.

teacher:

Jean-Martin Charcot

mentor:

Ernst von Brücke

Friend:

Joseph Paneth

Friend:

Wilhelm Fliess

On Josef Breuer's suggestion, Fliess attended several conferences with Sigmund Freud beginning in 1887 in Vienna, and the two soon formed a strong friendship, which resulted in a lengthy correspondence from 1887 to 1902, reaching its peak in 1899. Freud was treated by Fliess and was his enthusiastic collaborator; the two men met approximately once a year. Freud was interested in several aspects of Fliess' own theory but doubted the cohesion of the three features (biperiodicity, bisexuality, and bilateralism) that were essential for Fliess and its predictive nature, which Fliess viewed as a rejection. He experienced this as a kind of persecution and in 1900 began distancing himself from his friend although Freud was not fully aware of it.

Their final break occurred in 1906. At the same time as the appearance of his major work on the theory of periods, The Course of Life, Fliess wrote a scathing pamphlet, "Pour ma propre cause," in which he accused Freud of having served as an intermediary in the plagiarism of his work by two young Viennese authors, Hermann Swoboda and Otto Weininger, who each had appropriated half of his ideas.

pupil:

Carl Jung

References

• The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud
  2014
• Freud: A Life for Our Time
  1998
• Freud: The Making of an Illusion
  2018
• Sigmund Freud: The Founder of Psychoanalysis
  2019
• Freud: An Intellectual Biography
  2020
• Escape of Sigmund Freud
  2012
• Sigmund Freud: Pioneer of the Mind
  2001
• Sigmund Freud: A Life From Beginning to End
  2018