Sigmund Freud

Sigismund Schlomo Freud was born on May 6, 1856, in Freiberg, a small Moravian town in the Austrian Empire now known as Příbor in the Czech Republic. His father, Jacob Freud, was a wool merchant whose business struggled; his mother, Amalia Nathansohn, was Jacob's third wife and twenty years his junior. Sigmund was her first child and remained, by his own account, her favorite ^[1].

Economic trouble drove the family from Freiberg when the boy was three. After a brief stay in Leipzig they settled in Vienna in 1860, in the crowded Jewish district of Leopoldstadt. Vienna would be Freud's home for the next seventy-eight years, though he often claimed to dislike the city. He excelled at the Sperl Gymnasium, graduating with distinction in 1873, fluent in several languages and steeped in classical literature ^[2].

Any question of who was Sigmund Freud before psychoanalysis begins with medicine. He entered the University of Vienna at seventeen, initially drawn to law but converted to science after hearing a lecture on Goethe's essay on nature. He spent six years in the physiology laboratory of Ernst Brücke, dissecting the nervous systems of fish and studying nerve cells, and took his medical degree in 1881 ^[1].

Laboratory research paid poorly, and Freud's engagement to Martha Bernays in 1882 pushed him toward clinical practice. He trained at the Vienna General Hospital, published respected papers on neurology and aphasia, and for a time investigated the medical uses of cocaine, a line of work he later regretted after a friend became addicted ^[3].

A travel grant changed his direction. In 1885 and 1886 Freud studied in Paris under the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who used hypnosis to treat hysteria and argued that its symptoms had psychological rather than purely organic roots. Freud returned to Vienna convinced that the mind could sicken the body, opened a private practice in nervous disorders, and married Martha in September 1886 ^[2].

His older colleague Josef Breuer supplied the second decisive influence. Breuer had treated a patient known as Anna O., whose symptoms eased when she spoke about their origins, a process she called the talking cure. Freud and Breuer published Studies on Hysteria in 1895, proposing that hysterical patients suffer mainly from reminiscences ^[4]. Freud gradually abandoned hypnosis in favor of free association, asking patients to say whatever came to mind, and began the self-analysis that fed his first major book.

The Interpretation of Dreams, dated 1900 though released late in 1899, is the cornerstone of any account of Sigmund Freud achievements. In it he argued that dreams are disguised fulfillments of repressed wishes and that analyzing them offers, in his phrase, a royal road to knowledge of the unconscious ^[1]. The book sold slowly at first, but its central claim, that much of mental life proceeds outside awareness, became the foundation of psychoanalysis.

A stream of influential works followed. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) traced slips of the tongue and forgotten names to hidden motives, giving the language the term Freudian slip. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) argued that sexuality develops through stages from infancy onward, a claim that scandalized many contemporaries ^[3]. Later, in The Ego and the Id (1923), he mapped the mind into three agencies: the id, the ego, and the superego, a model that remains among the best known Sigmund Freud facts ^[5].

Institutions grew around the ideas. From 1902 a small circle met weekly at Freud's apartment at Berggasse 19; it became the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1908, and the International Psychoanalytical Association followed in 1910 ^[2]. An invitation from G. Stanley Hall brought Freud to Clark University in Massachusetts in 1909, his only visit to the United States, where his lectures introduced psychoanalysis to an American audience ^[6]. The movement also suffered famous ruptures: Alfred Adler broke away in 1911, and Carl Jung, once Freud's designated heir, split from him in 1913 over the role of sexuality in mental life ^[3].

Freud and Martha Bernays had six children between 1887 and 1895: Mathilde, Jean Martin, Oliver, Ernst, Sophie, and Anna. The household at Berggasse 19 ran on strict routine, with Freud seeing patients through the day, writing late into the night, and taking a daily walk around Vienna's Ringstrasse ^[1]. The youngest child, Anna Freud, became a distinguished psychoanalyst in her own right and a founder of child analysis ^[7].

He was a man of fixed habits and strong appetites. He smoked around twenty cigars a day for most of his adult life, collected antiquities obsessively, crowding his consulting room with Egyptian, Greek, and Roman figurines, and played a weekly card game of tarock with friends ^[2]. Though raised Jewish and unwavering in his identification with Jewish culture, he was a lifelong atheist who analyzed religion itself in works such as The Future of an Illusion (1927).

Grief marked his middle age. His daughter Sophie died in the influenza pandemic in 1920, and her young son Heinele, a grandchild Freud adored, died in 1923, the same year Freud was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw ^[1].

The cancer diagnosis of 1923 opened sixteen years of medical ordeal. Freud underwent more than thirty operations on his jaw and palate and wore an uncomfortable prosthesis he called the monster, yet he refused most painkillers, saying he preferred to think in torment than not to think clearly ^[3]. He kept writing, turning increasingly to culture and society in books such as Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), which weighed human happiness against the demands of communal life ^[5].

Recognition arrived alongside danger. He received the Goethe Prize for literature in 1930, but when the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933 his books were among those burned in Berlin. Freud remarked on the progress involved: in earlier centuries they would have burned him instead ^[1].

The Anschluss of March 1938 brought the threat home. The Gestapo searched Berggasse 19 and briefly detained Anna Freud. Through the efforts of Ernest Jones, Princess Marie Bonaparte, and American diplomatic pressure, the family secured exit visas, and in June 1938 the 82-year-old Freud left Vienna for London, settling at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead ^[7]. Four of his sisters, unable to leave, later died in Nazi camps. His cancer now inoperable, Freud asked his physician Max Schur to honor an old promise, and after doses of morphine he died on September 23, 1939 ^[2].

Any Sigmund Freud biography must reckon with a double legacy: enormous cultural influence and sustained scientific criticism. Psychoanalysis as a therapy has lost ground to medication and cognitive behavioral approaches, and philosophers of science such as Karl Popper argued that Freud's theories resist the kind of testing that science requires ^[8]. Later scholars have questioned his case histories and his handling of evidence.

Yet the vocabulary he coined saturates ordinary speech. Repression, denial, projection, ego, libido, and the Freudian slip all passed from his consulting room into common usage, and the assumption that childhood shapes adult character, or that people act on motives they do not recognize, is now close to common sense ^[5]. The poet W. H. Auden, in his elegy of 1939, wrote that Freud had become less a person than a whole climate of opinion ^[6].

His houses preserve the memory. The London home where he spent his final year is now the Freud Museum, keeping his library, his antiquities, and the famous analytic couch, while Berggasse 19 in Vienna houses the Sigmund Freud Museum ^[7]. More than eight decades after his death, clinicians, historians, and artists still argue over his ideas, which is perhaps the clearest sign of their durability.