Birth and move to Vienna
Born in Freiberg in Moravia into a Jewish merchant family, he moved with his parents to Vienna in 1860.
Psychoanalysis · Viennese neurology · 1856–1939
Sigmund Freud
Reading in dreams and symptoms the wishes we do not know we have.
Příbor · Vienna · London
Biography
The thread of a life.
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis, both a method of treatment and a theory of the mind built on the claim that much of mental life is unconscious. Working in Vienna from 1886, when he opened his practice, until his exile to London in 1938, he read dreams, slips of the tongue, jokes and neurotic symptoms as compromises between wishes and the forces that repress them, and he extended this account to sexuality, morality, religion and civilization.
Medicine and Paris
He studied medicine in Vienna, qualified in 1881 and worked with Charcot in Paris in 1885 and 1886.
Hysteria and dreams
He published Studies on Hysteria with Josef Breuer in 1895, followed by The Interpretation of Dreams, dated 1900.
Sexuality and the movement
The Three Essays appeared in 1905; the International Psychoanalytical Association was founded in 1910, and the break with Jung came in 1913.
A new theory of the psyche
Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920 and The Ego and the Id in 1923 were followed by Civilization and Its Discontents, dated 1930.
Exile and death
Forced out of Vienna after the annexation of Austria in 1938, he settled in London, where he died on 23 September 1939.
Understanding a life in depth
01Moravia, Vienna and the laboratory
Sigmund Freud was born on 6 May 1856 in Freiberg in Moravia, now Příbor in the Czech Republic, the eldest of the eight children of Jacob Freud, a Jewish wool merchant, and his young wife Amalia Nathansohn. Economic difficulties took the family to Leipzig and in 1860 to Vienna, where Freud excelled at the gymnasium in the Leopoldstadt district. He began studying medicine at the University of Vienna in 1873, attended Franz Brentano’s lectures on philosophy and spent six years in Ernst Brücke’s physiological institute studying the nerve cells of the lamprey and the crayfish. He qualified as a doctor in 1881 and, needing an income in order to marry Martha Bernays, turned to clinical work at the Vienna General Hospital.
02From hysteria to the dream book
After a stay in Paris in 1885 and 1886 with Jean-Martin Charcot, who treated hysteria as a genuine disorder, Freud opened a private practice in Vienna and married Martha Bernays in 1886. With the physician Josef Breuer, whose patient Anna O. had called her treatment the talking cure, he published Studies on Hysteria in 1895, arguing that hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences. He gradually replaced hypnosis with free association, abandoned in 1897 the theory that hysteria always stems from a real seduction in childhood, and analysed his own dreams after his father’s death. The Interpretation of Dreams, dated 1900, set out the method and theory he now called psychoanalysis.
03The movement and its revisions
In 1902 Freud gathered a small circle that met on Wednesday evenings at his home at Berggasse 19, and in 1905 he published the Three Essays, a book on jokes and the case of Dora. Invited to Clark University in Massachusetts in 1909 with Carl Gustav Jung and Sándor Ferenczi, he saw the International Psychoanalytical Association founded the following year, before bitter breaks with Alfred Adler and then with Jung. During and after the First World War he reworked his theory: Beyond the Pleasure Principle of 1920 introduced the death drive, and The Ego and the Id of 1923 divided the psyche into id, ego and super-ego. That same year he was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw.
04Culture, exile and death
In his last years Freud turned to religion and civilization in The Future of an Illusion of 1927 and in Civilization and Its Discontents, and in 1932 he corresponded with Albert Einstein on whether war could be prevented. The city of Frankfurt awarded him the Goethe Prize in 1930, but in 1933 his books were burned in Berlin. After the annexation of Austria in March 1938 and the Gestapo’s questioning of his daughter Anna, he left Vienna for London, where he completed Moses and Monotheism. He died there on 23 September 1939. Four of his sisters, who had stayed in Vienna, were later murdered in Nazi camps.
Psychoanalysis became an international clinical movement, divided into rival schools from Anna Freud and Melanie Klein to Jacques Lacan. Philosophers have argued about its status ever since: Karl Popper denied that it could be falsified and Adolf Grünbaum questioned its clinical evidence, while Paul Ricœur, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault read Freud as a master of suspicion, a critic of repression or a key figure in the modern history of sexuality.
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