Sigmund Freud
1856–1939 2 entries
Biography
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist, the founder of psychoanalysis. He was born in 1856 in Freiberg in Moravia, in today’s Czech Republic, to a Jewish family that moved to Vienna when he was a child, and he studied medicine there. After working with the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris and with the physician Josef Breuer in Vienna, he developed a way of treating patients by letting them speak freely about whatever came to mind.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1899, he argued that dreams are the disguised fulfilment of wishes and a way into the unconscious, and he went on to write about slips of the tongue, jokes, childhood sexuality and the structure of the mind as id, ego and superego. His ideas, much disputed then and now, changed medicine, literature, art and the way people speak about themselves. In 1938, after Nazi Germany annexed Austria, he fled with his family to London, where he died in September 1939.
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