Who is Sigmund Freud?

Sigmund Freud was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1856. His father was a small-time merchant, and his father’s second wife was Freud’s mother. Freud had two half-brothers some 20 years older than himself. His family moved to Vienna when he was four years old, and though he often claimed he hated the city, he lived there until it was occupied by Germany in 1938. Freud’s family background was Jewish, though his father was a freethinker and Freud himself an avowed atheist. In 1900, Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, and introduced the wider public to the notion of the unconscious mind. In 1901, he published The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in which he theorized that forgetfulness or slips of the tongue (now called “Freudian slips”) were not accidental at all, but it was the “dynamic unconscious” revealing something meaningful. To many, these ideas seemed to be making science out of a folk art, but Freud had still more controversial ideas to come. He concluded that the sexual drive was the most powerful shaper of a person’s psychology and that sexuality was present even in infants. He shocked society when he published these ideas in 1905. His most well-known theory is that of the “Oedipus complex” — that in children, there is a sexual attraction towards the mother and a sense of jealousy to the point of hatred of the father. He later developed a parallel theory for girls. Freud continued working, developing his theories, and writing — producing a stunning volume of work. In 1909 he made his first international presentation of his theories, at Clark University in Massachusetts. His name was becoming a household word. In 1923, he 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. Meanwhile, a political cancer was growing in Europe. By 1933, the Nazi party had risen to power in Germany. They burned books by Freud, among others. They took over Austria in 1938. Freud’s passport was confiscated, but his fame and the influence of foreigners persuaded the occupying forces to let him go, and he and his wife fled to England. He died there in September, 1939.

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