Sigmund Freud

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• Born: 6 May 1856
• Birthplace: Freiberg, Moravia (now Czech Republic)
• Died: 23 September 1939 (cancer)
• Best Known As: Founder of psychoanalysis

Name at birth: Sigismund Freud

Sigmund Freud grew up in Vienna, Austria and became a doctor of psychiatry. Early in his career he was interested in hypnosis as a cure for hysteria, believing that the symptoms were directly related to repressed psychological trauma. He started the practice of "free association," an effort to reveal unconscious emotions, and increasingly emphasized sexual development as the basis for psychological tension. Freud worked briefly with Carl Jung, was a professor in Vienna and co-founded the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society and the International Psychoanalytic Association. In 1938 he left Austria for England to escape Hitler's government. Freud battled mouth cancer the last several years of his life, but continued to smoke cigars, his trademark.

Austrian psychoanalyst (1856–1939)

The son of a wool merchant from Freiberg (now Příbor in the Czech Republic), Freud graduated from the University of Vienna with an MD in 1881 having also spent much time in the study of physiology. He worked at the Vienna General Hospital until 1885 and, after a further period of study in Paris under the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, set up in private practice in Vienna in the same year. He took the post of part-time head of the neurological outpatients clinic at the Children's Hospital and also held the position of Privatdozent in neuropathology at the University of Vienna.

Before Freud worked out the basic principles of psychoanalysis in the 1890s he had produced a substantial body of research in more orthodox fields. In addition to early work on comparative neuroanatomy, he discovered the euphoric effects of cocaine in 1884 and produced two sizable monographs – one on aphasia (1891) and the other on paralysis in children (1893).

By this time he had developed a more ambitious research program, clearly stated in his unpublished Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895). In this unfinished work he aimed to explain “the theory of mental functioning” in terms of quantitative physical concepts that would apply to both normal and abnormal psychology. To this end he went into considerable detail, even supposing the existence of three types of neurones with different physiological properties.

Freud however drew back from such a neurological approach. In 1893 he collaborated with Josef Breuer on The Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena, later expanded into Studien über Hysterie (1895; Studies in Hysteria, 1955), a work that marked the beginning of psychoanalysis. During the period 1892–95 Freud evolved his psychoanalytical method using the technique of free association. Following this he developed his theory that neuroses were rooted in suppressed sexual desires.

Freud's major work, Die Traumdeutung (1899; The Interpretation of Dreams, 1953), is regarded as his most original. In this he analyzed dreams in terms of unconscious desires and experiences. His other works included Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens (1904; Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 1960), Totem und Tabu (1913; Totem and Taboo, 1955), Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1955), and Das Ich und das Es (1923; The Ego and the Id, 1961).

In 1902 Freud established a circle of colleagues who met to discuss psychoanalytical matters once a week at his house. The group's original members were Alfred Adler, Max Kahane, Rudolf Reitler, and Wilhelm Stekel. This grew, and later became the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society (1908), and finally, the International Psycho-Analytical Association (1910). Freud, now becoming famous in Europe, made a tour of America in 1909 where he was well received. By 1911 the International Psycho-Analytical Association had begun to break up through differences of opinion, Carl Jung and Alfred Adler being among the most significant to leave. However, by the 1920s Freud had become one of the most famous thinkers of the century.

In 1923 Freud was diagnosed as having cancer of the jaw. During the next 16 years he was to suffer more than 30 operations and be compelled to live with a prosthesis which, by substituting for his excised jaw and palette, allowed him to eat, drink, smoke, and talk.

In 1938 he was forced to leave Vienna by the Nazis for exile in London. He continued to see patients and to work on his last book, Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion (1939; Moses and Monotheism, 1960), but within a matter of months it was clear to him that he could continue to work no more. It was then that he reminded his doctor: “My dear Schur … you promised you would help me when I could no longer carry on.” Schur honored his pledge with morphine ensuring a peaceful death.

The work of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the Viennese founder of psychoanalysis, marked the beginning of a modern, dynamic psychology by providing the first systematic explanation of the inner mental forces determining human behavior.

Early in his career Sigmund Freud distinguished himself as a histologist, neuropathologist, and clinical neurologist, and in his later life he was acclaimed as a talented writer and essayist. However, his fame is based on his work in expanding man's knowledge of himself through clinical researches and corresponding development of theories to explain the new data. He laid the foundations for modern understanding of unconscious mental processes (processes excluded from awareness), neurosis (a type of mental disorder), the sexual life of infants, and the interpretation of dreams. Under his guidance, psychoanalysis became the dominant modern theory of human psychology and a major tool of research, as well as an important method of psychiatric treatment which currently has thousands of practitioners all over the world. The application of psychoanalytic thinking to the studies of history, anthropology, religion, art, sociology, and education has greatly changed these fields.

Sigmund Freud was born on May 6, 1856, in Freiberg, Moravia (now Czechoslovakia). Sigmund was the first child of his twice-widowed father's third marriage. His mother, Amalia Nathanson, was 19 years old when she married Jacob Freud, aged 39. Sigmund's two stepbrothers from his father's first marriage were approximately the same age as his mother, and his older stepbrother's son, Sigmund's nephew, was his earliest playmate. Thus the boy grew up in an unusual family structure, his mother halfway in age between himself and his father. Though seven younger children were born, Sigmund always remained his mother's favorite. When he was 4, the family moved to Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and one of the great cultural, scientific, and medical centers of Europe. Freud lived in Vienna until a year before his death.

Youth in Vienna

Because the Freuds were Jewish, Sigmund's early experience was that of an outsider in an overwhelmingly Catholic community. However, Emperor Francis Joseph had emancipated the Jews of Austria, giving them equal rights and permitting them to settle anywhere in the monarchy. Many Jewish families came to Vienna, where the standard of living was higher and educational and professional opportunities better than in the provinces. The Jewish people have always had a strong interest in cultural and intellectual pursuits; this, along with Austria's remaining barriers to social acceptance and progress in academic careers, was influential in Freud's early vocational interests. Had it been easier for him to gain academic success, it might have been more difficult for the young scientist to develop and, later, to defend his unpopular theories.

Although as he grew older Freud never practiced Judaism as a religion, his Jewish cultural background and tradition were important influences on his thinking. He considered himself Jewish and maintained contact with Jewish organizations; one of his last works was a study of Moses and the Jewish people. However, at times Freud was unhappy that the psychoanalytic movement was so closely tied to Jewish intellectualism. Freud went to the local elementary school and attended the humanistic high school (or gymnasium) from 1866 to 1873. He studied Greek and Latin, mathematics, history, and the natural sciences, and was a superior student. He passed his final examination with flying colors, qualifying to enter the University of Vienna at the age of 17. His family had recognized his special scholarly gifts from the beginning, and although they had only four bedrooms for eight people, Sigmund had his own room throughout his school days. He lived with his parents until he was 27, as was the custom at that time.

Prepsychoanalytic Work

Freud first considered studying law but then enrolled in medical school. Vienna had become the world capital of medicine, and the young student was initially attracted to the laboratory and the scientific side of medicine rather than clinical practice. He spent 7 instead of the usual 5 years acquiring his doctorate, taking time to work in the zoological and anatomical laboratories of the famous Ernst Brucke. At 19 he conducted his first independent research project while on a field trip, and at 20 he published his first scientific paper.

Freud received his doctor of medicine degree at the age of 24. An episode at about this time reveals that he was not simply the "good boy" his academic career might suggest: he spent his twenty-fourth birthday in prison, having gone AWOL from his military training. For the next few years he pursued his laboratory work, but several factors shifted his interest from microscopic studies to living patients. Opportunities for advancement in academic medicine were rare at best, and his Jewish background was a decided disadvantage. More important, he fell in love and wanted to marry, but the stipends available to a young scientist could not support a wife and family. He had met Martha Bernays, the daughter of a well-known Hamburg family, when he was 26; they were engaged 2 months later. They were separated during most of the 4 years which preceded their marriage, and Freud's over 900 letters to his fiancée provide a good deal of information about his life and personality. They were married in 1887. Of their six children, a daughter, Anna, became one of her father's most famous followers.

Freud spent 3 years as a resident physician in the famous Allgemeine Krankenhaus, a general hospital that was the medical center of Vienna. He rotated through a number of clinical services and spent 5 months in the psychiatry department headed by Theodor Meynert. Psychiatry at this time was static and descriptive. A patient's signs and symptoms were carefully observed and recorded in the hope that they would lead to a correct diagnosis of the organic disease of the brain, which was assumed to be the basis of all psychopathology (mental disorder). The psychological meaning of behavior was not itself considered important; behavior was only a set of symptoms to be studied in order to understand the structures of the brain. Freud's later work revolutionized this attitude; yet like all scientific revolutions, this one grew from a thorough understanding and acknowledged expertise in the traditional methods. He later published widely respected papers on neurology and brain functioning, including works on cerebral palsy in children and aphasia (disturbances in understanding and using words).

Another of Freud's early medical interests brought him to the brink of international acclaim. During his residency he became interested in the effect of an alkaloid extract on the nervous system. He experimented on himself and others and found that small doses of the drug, cocaine, were effective against fatigue. He published a paper describing his findings and also participated in the discovery of cocaine's effect as a local anesthetic. However, he took a trip to visit his fiancée before he could publish the later findings, and during his absence a colleague reported the use of cocaine as an anesthetic for surgery on the eye. Freud's earlier findings were overshadowed, and later fell into disrepute when the addictive properties of cocaine became known.

During the last part of his residency Freud received a grant to pursue his neurological studies abroad. He spent 4 months at the Salpêtrière clinic in Paris, studying under the neurologist Jean Martin Charcot. Here Freud first became interested in hysteria and Charcot's demonstration of its psychological origins. Thus, in fact, Freud's development of a psychoanalytic approach to mental disorders was rooted in 19th-century neurology rather than in the psychiatry of the era.

Beginning of Psychoanalysis

Freud returned to Vienna, established himself in the private practice of neurology, and married. He soon devoted his efforts to the treatment of hysterical patients with the help of hypnosis, a technique he had studied under Charcot. Joseph Breuer, an older colleague who had become Freud's friend and mentor, told Freud about a hysterical patient whom he had treated successfully by hypnotizing her and then tracing her symptoms back to traumatic (emotionally stressful) events she had experienced at her father's deathbed. Breuer called his treatment "catharsis" and attributed its effectiveness to the release of "pent-up emotions." Freud's experiments with Breuer's technique were successful, demonstrating that hysterical symptoms could consistently be traced to highly emotional experiences which had been "repressed," that is, excluded from conscious memory. Together with Breuer he published Studies on Hysteria (1895), which included several theoretical chapters, a series of Freud's cases, and Breuer's initial case. At the age of 39 Freud first used the term "psychoanalysis," and his major lifework was well under way.

At about this time Freud began a unique undertaking, his own self-analysis, which he pursued primarily by analyzing his dreams. As he proceeded, his personality changed. He developed a greater inner security while his at times impulsive emotional responses decreased. A major scientific result was The Interpretation of Dreams (1901). In this book he demonstrated that the dreams of every man, just like the symptoms of a hysterical or an otherwise neurotic person, serve as a "royal road" to the understanding of unconscious mental processes, which have great importance in determining behavior. By the turn of the century Freud had increased his knowledge of the formation of neurotic symptoms to include conditions and reactions other than hysteria. He had also developed his therapeutic technique, dropping the use of hypnosis and shifting to the more effective and more widely applicable method of "free association."

Development of Psychoanalysis

Following his work on dreams Freud wrote a series of papers in which he explored the influence of unconscious mental processes on virtually every aspect of human behavior: slips of the tongue and simple errors of memory (The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 1901); humor (Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 1905); artistic creativity (Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, 1910); and cultural institutions (Totem and Taboo, 1912). He recognized that predominant among the unconscious forces which lead to neuroses are the sexual desires of early childhood that have been excluded from conscious awareness, yet have preserved their dynamic force within the personality. He described his highly controversial views concerning infantile sexuality in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), a work which initially met violent protest but was gradually accepted by practically all schools of psychology. During this period he also published a number of case histories and a series of articles dealing with psychoanalysis as a therapy.

After 1902 Freud gathered a small group of interested people on Wednesday evenings for presentation of psychoanalytic papers and discussion. This was the beginning of the psychoanalytic movement. Swiss psychiatrists Eugen Bleuler and Carl Jung formed a study group in Zurich in 1907, and the first International Psychoanalytic Congress was held in Salzburg in 1908. In 1909 Freud was invited to give five lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. He considered this invitation the first official recognition to be extended to his new science.

The new science was not without its difficulties. Earlier, Freud and Breuer had differed concerning their findings with regard to the role of sexual wishes in neurosis. Breuer left psychoanalysis, and the two men parted scientific company, not without some personal animosity. Ironically, Breuer saved his reputation at the time, only to be remembered by later generations because of his brief collaboration with Freud. During his self-analysis Freud developed a strong personal attachment to a philosophically inclined German otolaryngological physician, Wilhelm Fliess. From their letters one observes a gradual cooling of the friendship as Freud's self-analysis progressed.

At the same time Freud faced a major scientific reversal. He first thought that his neurotic patients had actually experienced sexual seductions in childhood, but he then realized that his patients were usually describing childhood fantasies (wishes) rather than actual events. He retracted his earlier statement on infantile sexuality, yet demonstrated his scientific genius when he rejected neither the data nor the theory but reformulated both. He now saw that the universal sexual fantasies of children were scientifically far more important than an occasional actual seduction by an adult.

Later, as psychoanalysis became better established, several of Freud's closest colleagues broke with him and established splinter groups of their own, some of which continue to this day. Of such workers in the field, Jung, Alfred Adler, Otto Rank, and Wilhelm Reich are the best known.

Later Years

In 1923 Freud developed a cancerous growth in his mouth that led to his death 16 years and 33 operations later. In spite of this, these were years of great scientific productivity. He published findings on the importance of aggressive as well as sexual drives (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920); developed a new theoretical framework in order to organize his new data concerning the structure of the mind (The Ego and the Id, 1923); revised his theory of anxiety to show it as the signal of danger emanating from unconscious fantasies, rather than the result of repressed sexual feelings (Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, 1926); and discussed religion, civilized society, and further questions of theory and technique.

In March 1938 Austria was occupied by German troops, and that month Freud and his family were put under house arrest. Through the combined efforts of Marie Bonaparte, Princess of Greece, British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, and W. C. Bullitt, the American ambassador to France (who obtained assistance from President Franklin D. Roosevelt), the Freuds were permitted to leave Austria in June. Freud's keen mind and ironic sense of humor were evident when, forced to flee his home at the age of 82, suffering from cancer, and in mortal danger, he was asked to sign a document attesting that he had been treated well by the Nazi authorities; he added in his own handwriting, "I can most warmly recommend the Gestapo to anyone." Freud spent his last year in London, undergoing surgery. He died on Sept. 23, 1939. The influence of his discoveries on the science and culture of the 20th century is incalculable.

Personal Life

Freud's personal life has been a subject of interest to admirers and critics. When it seemed necessary to advance his science, he exposed himself mercilessly, and, particularly in the early years, his own mental functioning was the major subject matter of psychoanalysis. Still, he was an intensely private man, and he made several attempts to thwart future biographers by destroying personal papers. However, his scientific work, his friends, and his extensive correspondence allow historians to paint a vivid picture.

Freud was an imposing man, although physically small. He read extensively, loved to travel, and was an avid collector of archeological curiosities. Though interested in painting, the musical charms of Vienna had little attraction for him. He collected mushrooms and was an expert on them. Devoted to his family, he always practiced in a consultation room attached to his home. He valued a small circle of close friends and enjoyed a weekly game of cards with them. He was intensely loyal to his friends and inspired loyalty in a circle of disciples that persists to this day.

Further Reading

The best English translation of Freud's works is The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud edited by James Strachey (24 vols., 1953-1964). Many of Freud's works have been published separately in other English-language editions. His brief An Autobiographical Study (1925), volume 20 of the standard edition, concentrates on his scientific work and almost ignores his personal life. More of his life is revealed, in a fragmented and incomplete way, in his The Interpretation of Dreams, volumes 4 and 5 of the standard edition. Freud's personality emerges most clearly from his letters, available in Letters of Sigmund Freud, selected and edited by Ernst L. Freud and translated by Tania and James Stern (1960). For an introduction to Freud's thought and style in his own words, the reader should begin with Freud's Clark University lectures, the General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (trans. 1920), or Problems of Lay-analysis (1927).

The definitive biography of Freud is Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (3 vols., 1953-1957), also available in a one-volume edition edited and abridged by Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus (1961). A balanced, somewhat negative discussion, which views Freud in relation to his predecessors and contemporaries, is Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (1970).

For more information on Sigmund Freud, visit Britannica.com.

Freud, Sigmund (Freiburg, Moravia, 1856-1939, London), was brought up in Vienna, where he began his medical studies in 1873. His specialization in neurology received a decisive stimulus through his work with J. M. Charcot in Paris and H. Bernstein in Nancy in 1885-6. In his practice in Vienna he developed experimental therapy of mental disorders. In 1896 he introduced the term psycho-analysis to embrace his investigation of subconscious phenomena. It has remained associated with his name. He continued his work in the field of psychotherapy throughout his life despite a serious illness during his last sixteen years, and he applied his psychological findings to philosophy in a variety of contexts. His most important work extends over a period of more than thirty years, during which he found both convinced followers (among them for a time C. G. Jung and A. Adler) and severe critics. His first important contribution was his reassessment of dreams as revealing the subconscious activities of the mind, particularly as wish-fulfilment. He published Die Traumdeutung (Interpretation of Dreams), dated 1900, and five years later Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten, in the light of which a joke ceases to be a joke by the time its underlying meaning has been apprehended. Not all types of joke are suitable for analysis, among them those with intellectual content, while tendentious jokes (i.e. obscene and hostile jokes) constitute the most revealing category. In the same year, 1905, Freud first published Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, which were followed by six revised editions spread over twenty years. They included his ideas on auto-erotism, narcissism, and object-choice, indicating three distinct stages in sexual development: the love of the self, the love of the image of the self in another person, and the sexual attraction to an external object. Where this is of an incestuous nature it can be referred to (as Freud first suggested in 1897) as an Oedipus complex since it can be detected in Oedipus (Freud also finds it in Hamlet). Its best-known form is that in which the child's love of his mother induces a hatred of the father. A later theory (published 1923) of the subconscious workings of the mind arises out of Freud's distinction between the Ego, the Id (Das Ich und das Es), and the Superego. These were designed to signify three different aspects of development, the Id denoting the primeval drives with which a child is born, the Ego the adjustment of the organism to reality, which gradually imposes upon the self a social consciousness, and with it a moral conscience corresponding to the concept of the Superego. Freud emphatically maintained that libido, the sexual drive, was the most important factor in human behaviour. He virtually anticipated a permissive society as the ideal, which he was led to formulate through investigations of the origins of anxiety and neurosis. He attributed these states to repression, and viewed the identification of symptoms as a preliminary to medical treatment. His wide erudition enabled him to illustrate his theories with literary examples, which stimulated further scientific discussion and also gave to writers of the medical profession, notably Schnitzler, a new orientation. Among other writers influenced by him H. von Hofmannsthal, Musil, Sternheim, Hesse, Wassermann, Kafka, and Th. Mann deserve particular mention. The influence of Schopenhauer's pessimism on Freud was a lasting one. Freud was a materialist and a determinist, and conceived civilization basically in terms of the antagonistic dualism inherent in the human species, the battle between Eros and Thanatos, the instinct or drive (‘Trieb’) of life and the instinct of death or destruction.

From 1912 Freud edited the journal Imago. In 1933 his books were burnt in Berlin because of his Jewish descent. Among the honours bestowed upon him on the occasion of his eightieth birthday (1936) was the Fellowship of the Royal Society. In 1938 Freud left Vienna and, with the help of friends, went into exile in London. Gesammelte Werke (18 vols.), including his autobiography (vol. 14), appeared 1942-8.

Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939) Viennese founder of psychoanalysis. Freud was born in Freiburg and educated in Vienna. His first work was in biology and clinical neurology; it was after study with Charcot in Paris that he turned his attention to an interest in hypnosis. In Vienna he collaborated with Breuer, who championed a method of having the patient re-live the stressful experiences responsible for his or her neuroses. However, it was Freud who postulated that an active process of repression needed confronting and disarming, and who extended the range of experiences involved to concentrate upon traumatizing experiences remembered or imagined from early childhood. In spite of the influence of psychoanalysis as a framework for psychological and social thought, Freud's handling of some of his most famous cases has attracted increasing scepticism, with it becoming apparent that he himself invented many of the scenes his patients were supposed to have recounted as memory or fantasy. Nevertheless his model for the dynamics of the mind (see ego) has been a potent influence on many philosophers, and of course on the culture in general.

1856-1939

Sigmund Schlomo Freud was born on May 6, 1856, in Freiberg (now Priborg), Moravia (now the Slovak Republic), and died on September 23, 1939, in London. He was the son of Amalia Nathanson and of Jakob Freud, a draper, who had two children (Emanuel and Philipp) from a previous marriage. Freud was the first child of a couple in which the husband was forty years old, twice as old as his young wife. Over the next ten years, five daughters and two more sons would be born.

He was circumcised a week after birth. When he was two years old, a younger brother, Julius, died at the age of seven months, the first of several traumas of his early childhood. Others included the arrest for theft of "Nanie" his nurse; the departure of his father for Austria after a series of bad business dealings; the emigration to Great Britain of his older half-brothers and their children, his first playmates; and, most crucially, his own exile at the age of three. He rejoined his father in Vienna in the company of his mother after a lengthy train trip that left a deep impression on him.

He remembered his constant poverty following his arrival in the Austrian capital in 1859 and during his childhood, but alluded only once to the family's shame after his uncle Josef was condemned to ten years of forced labor for trafficking in counterfeit currency in 1866. He was a brilliant student, however, and after completing his "matura" (equivalent of the first year of college), was able to choose between law and natural science. He enrolled in medical school and after briefly studying philosophy (Franz Brentano was one of his teachers), decided to major in zoology.

In the summer of 1875, after a brief stay in Great Britain with his half-brothers in Manchester, he was able to put together a better idea of his place in the family genealogy. The following year he obtained a research grant to work at the Experimental Zoology Station of the University of Vienna in Trieste, where his work helped demonstrate the existence of testicles in the male eel. His work was presented to the Academy of Sciences in March 1877 and published in April (1877b), signaling his entry, at the age of twenty-one, into the world of science. In the following years his research and personal interest led him to study the anatomy of the nervous system; he hoped that through his research he would be able to achieve what he had always dreamed of—financial security. But in spite of his success, his material life remained precarious.

In October 1876 he entered Professor Ernst Brücke's Physiologisches Institut, where he remained until 1882. He became friends with the two assistants, Ernst von Fleischl and Josef Breuer, and investigated the posterior nerve roots of the Petromyzon, or sea lamprey. Impressed by Ernst Brücke's personality, he became an adept of the positivist school of Emil Du Bois-Reymond, who claimed that biology could be explained by physico-chemical forces whose effects are strictly deterministic. In March 1881, Freud was made doctor of medicine, while continuing his research and writing on subjects as distant from human clinical practice as the nerve cells of crayfish.

But his future as a laboratory researcher was called into question when he met Martha Bernays, who became his wife four years later. He needed to provide an income for his future household, and followed the advice Brücke had given him in June—to abandon pure research and go into medical practice. This prospect failed to excite Freud, as he wrote many years later, "After forty one years of medical activity, my self-knowledge tells me that I have never really been a doctor in the proper sense. I became a doctor through being compelled to deviate from my original purpose; and the triumph of my life lies in my having, after a long and roundabout journey, found my way back to my earliest path. I have no knowledge of having had any craving in my early childhood to help suffering humanity. My innate sadistic disposition was not a very strong one, so that I had no need to develop this one of its derivatives. Nor did I ever play the 'doctor game'; my infantile curiosity evidently chose other paths. In my youth I felt an overpowering need to understand something of the riddles of the world in which we live and perhaps even to contribute something to their solution" (1927a).

Freud worked in various departments of the Vienna General Hospital to complete his training. While continuing his research on cerebral anatomy and pathology, he became interested in psychiatry (while working with Professor Theodor Meynert) and the nascent field of neurology. This very likely contributed to Freud's failure to reap the rewards of his research on cocaine, which he had begun in 1884. More preoccupied with its euphoric effects and what he incorrectly believed to be its ability to serve as a substitute for the opiates, he missed the opportunity to discover its local ocular anesthetic properties. For several years he continued to ingest a certain amount of cocaine to overcome his timidity and increase his ability to work, which he discussed openly in his correspondence.

Appointed privatdocent in July 1885, he requested a grant to study neurology with Jean Martin Charcot in Paris. His internship at the Salpêtrière Hospital from October 13, 1885, to February 23, 1886 derailed his other projects, by exposing him to disturbances of mental origin. In terms of etiological research as well as his career as a specialist in neurology, the clinical lessons of the Parisian master, then at the height of his glory, demonstrated to Freud the importance of syndromes that had until then been characterized as "hysterical." Charcot's personality fascinated Freud and this first trip outside the Viennese family circle was to have a decisive effect on his future.

After returning to Vienna he set up a private practice on April 25, 1886, after a short stay in Berlin working with Professor Joseph Baginsky, where he familiarized himself with pediatrics. This enabled him, over a ten-year period, to maintain a steady practice in the department of neurology that the pediatrician Max Kassowitz (1842-1923) had opened at the Vienna Institute for Child Diseases. Once established he was finally able to get married, which he did on September 13, 1886. But his attempt to become Charcot's spokesman among Viennese neurologists and psychiatrists met with open rejection, especially from Theodor Meynert. Demanding, vulnerable, and passionate, for years he interpreted criticism or ignorance of his contributions as a form of systematic hostility that he often attributed to anti-Semitism, which was widespread in Vienna, especially in academic and medical circles.

His solitude was broken by a meeting that would later develop into a close friendship that lasted for nearly fifteen years. Wilhelm Fliess, an otorhinolaryngologist (ear-nose-and-throat specialist) in Berlin, gradually became a confidant who could share some of Freud's doubts and research activities, and a witness to the clinical experiments and theoretical hypotheses that littered the long road leading to the birth of psychoanalysis. An extensive correspondence and several meetings, referred to as "conferences," enabled them to exchange ideas about their research, which often fell upon deaf ears when Freud clearly overestimated his friend's comprehension. They also exchanged personal information. For Freud it was the anxiety about money and the birth of six children in succession, something Fliess's theories on menstruation and the hope that they brought of a possible method of contraception failed to resolve.

Their friendship gradually took the place of an earlier friendship with an older Viennese doctor, Josef Breuer. Breuer, who had helped Freud financially and professionally early in his career, had also related to him, in 1882, the story of his patient Anna O. and her treatment by the "cathartic method" that she and Breuer had invented. Having experimented with hypnosis for a period of time, Freud had determined that it was ineffective, especially after an 1889 visit to Nancy to see Hippolyte Bernheim, Charcot's rival. He then decided to make use of the "talking cure" Breuer had mentioned. This involved, in the attempt to overcome the patient's resistance, bringing back to consciousness an apparently forgotten memory, which had been repressed, of the first appearance of a symptom. This made hypnosis no longer necessary; gradually, the technique of incessant questioning it had given way to was in turn abandoned, in favor of the free association of ideas. Freud had developed the hypothesis of the unconscious, together with the idea that disturbances had their origin in the history of the subject's infantile sexuality.

These statements were shocking to many, especially because of Freud's public intransigence concerning them, and it was not without considerable reluctance, ultimately leading to the end of their friendship, that Josef Breuer agreed to cosign the Studies in Hysteria in 1895. Wilhelm Fliess remained his only confidant and the only one who listened to his theoretical suggestions and the results of his day-to-day clinical observations. Sexual etiology and childhood seduction by a parent were among the earliest etiological ideas, but the death of his father in October 1896 led Freud to question these ideas, and to practice the same methods on himself he had been using on his patients. His self-analysis continued throughout the summer and fall of 1897 and the discoveries followed: psychic reality, the Oedipus complex, and so on. Under various forms Freud would continue to question himself, as shown by his statement to James Jackson Putnam in 1911—"A self-analysis must be continued indefinitely. I note, in my own case, that each new attempt has brought surprises" (November 5 letter)—and the article dedicated to Romain Rolland, "A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis." (1936a)

Prompted by the frequency with which his patients spontaneously reported their dreams to him, Freud began to investigate their unconscious meanings. The first dream to which he applied his new method of interpretation through the fragmentation and association of ideas was the "injection given to Irma," of July 23, 1895. His systematic investigation of this dream became the origin of The Interpretation of Dreams, published at the end of 1899, but dated 1900 (1900a). It is a fundamental work in what Freud had referred to for the first time in 1896 (in an article published in French in the Revue neurologique) as "psychoanalysis."

The book was widely praised but sold poorly (421 copies in six years), although this did not impede his work. It was a period in which he described himself as a "conquistador," thereby summarizing the mixture of enthusiasm and obstinacy that characterized his personality. Anxious, suffering from hypochondriacal illnesses of the stomach and heart, preoccupied with the calculation of dates predicting his death, undecided about whether to continue or abandon smoking; there is nothing of the austere scholar depicted by his biographers. But he was primarily an indefatigable worker, who stayed up late at night to answer letters (a correspondence estimated at more than twenty thousand letters) and would fill large sheets of paper with his broad gothic handwriting.

As his friendship with Fliess waned, he prepared the Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b) and took notes for the Dora case, which was not published until 1905. Some of those who attended his courses at the university went to see him, either to be treated, like Wilhelm Stekel, or to discuss innovative theories with him. They formed the "Wednesday Psychological Society," which met every week and, in 1908, became the first Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. The publication of Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905c) and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d); followed by a collection of his earliest articles, Sammlung kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre aus den Jahren 1893-1906 (1906b); helped him break out of what he described as his "splendid isolation." Readers intrigued by the originality of his hypotheses came to visit him in Vienna: Max Eitingon in January 1907, Ludwig Binswanger and Carl Gustav Jung in February, Karl Abraham in December 1907, Sándor Ferenczi in February 1908. They were to form the core group of his future disciples.

In response to the growing number of followers and the high level of interest, the first International Psychoanalytical Congress was held in Salzburg on April 27, 1908. Freud spoke for nearly five hours on the Ratman (1909d), a case which, by systematizing nondirectivity, helped establish the parameters of the psychoanalytic "framework." Here the patient was stretched out on a couch with the psychoanalyst seated behind him, out of sight of the patient, sessions were held daily and lasted for about an hour, the patient was free to say whatever he wished. Freud laid down the groundwork for the theory of "transference" with the therapist and, in 1910, in response to Curl Gustav Jung's affair with his patient Sabina Spielrein, the theory of the "counter-transference." That same year, the risks of "wild" psychoanalysis led to the creation, at Ferenczi's initiative, of an international psychoanalytic association to monitor the development of "die Sache" (the cause) and distinguish the wheat from the chaff among its practitioners.

Although Freud maintained friendly relations with Sándor Ferenczi—notwithstanding periods of tension and the short analysis his younger colleague began with him in 1914—until Ferenczi's death in 1933, his relationships with his other students were often strained. Alfred Adler, who developed a theory based on aggression, the will to power, and organ inferiority, and rejected sexual etiology, distanced himself from Freud to found a new school in 1911. He was followed by Wilhelm Stekel in 1912. But the greatest disappointment came from Carl Gustav Jung, who in 1909 had been declared "successor and crown prince" by Freud, who had glimpsed the doors of academic psychiatry opening to him, along with the possibility that psychoanalysis would no longer be viewed as a "Jewish matter." Their personal relationship, as shown in their correspondence, and the intellectual exchange this involved, encouraged Freud to study psychosis, using the Memoirs of My Nervous Illness by Daniel Schreber (1911c), and to speculate on anthropological issues, of which Totem and Taboo (1912-1913a) is the first expression.

However, Jung's personality was such that he could not remain for long in the position of the submissive son, and his religious training and interest in mysticism led to no more than a superficial acceptance of Freud's materialism and insistence on sexual etiology. This rejection of what was considered an outrageous and obscene "pansexualism" was fairly general, even though Freud gradually enlarged the concept of sexuality, which the majority of his critics reduced to adult forms of genital sexuality. The concepts of "infantile sexuality" and "polymorphous perversity" were even more unacceptable to those who believed they sullied what was believed to be an original infantile purity.

As is often the case in such situations, Jung's departure in 1914 served as a spur to Freud's creativity, who wrote "On Narcissism: An Introduction" (1914c) and developed his analysis of the primal scene in his essay on the Wolfman, which he also completed that year (1918b [1914]). He also provided the first historical overview of the origins of psychoanalysis in On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement (1914d), which was intended to sway those who were still undecided between him and Jung.

The First World War seemed to sound the death knell for the young science of psychoanalysis. Freud's sons were at the front and he initially supported a German victory. However, he soon revised his position, which he explained in "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" (1915b). Times were difficult and material scarcity became a growing problem as war progressed. However, it was also a period of considerable intellectual creativity, and Freud laid out the groundwork for the broad theoretical foundations of psychoanalysis, primarily the twelve essays on metapsychology, only five of which (and the newly discovered draft of the twelfth) were published. In spite of his pessimism there was renewed interest in psychoanalysis among the public and within the medical establishment when it proved useful in treating war neuroses. The end of hostilities brought about a minor institutional triumph for, following the Fifth International Psychoanalytical Congress in Budapest (September 28-29, 1918), Béla Kun's revolutionary government offered a university chair to Sándor Ferenczi. Another Hungarian, the rich brewer Anton von Freund, whom Freud analyzed, invested his fortune in "the cause," which led to the creation of the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, but he died of cancer in 1920.

Freud was sixty-five at this time, and around him he saw sickness and death. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g) reflected this, with its theory of the repetition compulsion and the duality between a life impulse, Eros, and a death impulse, Thanatos, whose theoretical necessity Freud maintained until his death, despite the opposition of many psychoanalysts to such "speculation." In real life his daughter Sophie (he called her "Sunday's child") died during the Spanish flu epidemic, on January 25, 1920. Three years later, in April 1923, he experienced the first signs of cancer of the jaw, which had a profound effect on the remaining sixteen years of his life; that same year, on June 19, his favorite grandson, Heinele, died.

He was now sixty-seven years old and, although he often complained of growing old, this was but one of the many hypochondriacal conditions he had always referred to in his letters. His fear of death is most evident in his superstitious fears and morbid calculations, borrowed from Wilhelm Fliess, but the fateful days passed without event. Freud also showed considerable interest in telepathy and clairvoyance, and conducted experiments in this field, often together with Sándor Ferenczi.

In spite of his shortness, he was still the "professor" and was authoritarian with his family, his students, and his patients. He showed himself to be the undisputed leader of the psychoanalytic movement, interest in which he stimulated through his many publications. He had overcome pain and disappointment, and watched as the "cause" to which he had devoted his life continued to grow. Interest spread to France, and its identification with a founding father, a Moses—for Freud the creator of monotheism—seemed increasingly justified. It is in this context that his decision to become his daughter Anna's analyst must be understood. This is not as unusual as it may seem, especially for the time, and Freud speaks of it in his letters. It was only after the Second World War that Anna Freud's accession to the status of guardian of Freudian orthodoxy cast into oblivion a form of training so inconsistent with the strict criteria that had been laid out. There was a risk the lapse would be viewed as something very nearly incestuous.

With the onset of his cancer, old age and death became a reality for Freud. It was at this time that he strengthened the death instinct and deepened the concept of identification discussed in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c). He also revised the theoretical model that he had been developing for the past quarter-century with the "second topographical" structure introduced in The Ego and the Id (1923b). Some of his contemporaries, like Otto Rank, were reluctant to accept Freud's newest theories, which appeared to disturb the fantastic and somewhat unreal experience represented by the birth of psychoanalysis for those who had lived through it. Freud's life was now marked by painful and disfiguring operations that forced him to interrupt his activities while he recovered in the Weiner Cottage-Sanatorium or the Schloss Tegel clinic, which Ernest Simmel ran from 1927 to 1931 in Berlin. The uncomfortable prosthetic devices he was required to wear caused him to remain silent for long periods of time.

Change was in the works, however. There were disagreements within the secret committee, formed at the request of Ernest Jones in 1912 to provide support for Freud during Jung's defection, and it ceased to exist entirely in 1927. The quarrels weren't so much about who would inherit Freud's mantle, as they were about jealousies and rivalries, all of which helped feed Freud's increasingly pessimistic—some would say realistic—vision of the human race. The first generation of psychoanalysts had evolved and began to develop their own theories. It often fell to Freud to resolve the resulting theoretical disputes and arbitrate personal conflicts.

Freud never claimed to be a great therapist and was often irritated by the "furor sanandi" shown by some of his followers, notably Sándor Ferenczi, as being contrary to a strictly psychoanalytic attitude. Although he had encouraged the use of "active technique" in 1918-1920, he hesitated to complete the project for a "psychoanalytic method" that his followers demanded of him and which he had begun to write down in 1908. During this last period of his life, he devoted himself almost exclusively to training analyses. Having been a patient of Freud was widely viewed as a kind of diploma, and there was an unending stream of candidates, especially from North and South America.

His theoretical interest turned increasingly to what he felt to be his most important contribution: the importance of psychoanalysis to culture. It was in keeping with this that he resumed his anthropological ideas about the primitive horde and the murder of the primitive father, which had been introduced in Totem and Taboo (1912-1913a), extending their scope with the new theory of impulses, the importance of primal fantasies, and the concept of primary identification (in 1923b). In The Future of an Illusion (1927c), Freud analyzed religious sentiment; aside from being an affirmation of his scientific and materialist beliefs, the book also served as a warning against the religious leanings that jeopardized psychoanalysis. Civilization and its Discontents (1930a) resumed the discussion of human destiny, torn between its contradictory impulses and condemned to negotiate the avoidance of suffering for its survival. Freud's focus on culture in his writings became increasingly obvious; he described a "process of civilization" whose evolution paralleled the process of mental development in the individual. The last essay, "Weltanschauung," in the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933a) resumed these themes, which had also been discussed in his letter to Albert Einstein, "Why War?" (1933b), but it was in Moses and Monotheism (1939a) that Freud outlined the last great fresco of man's relation to culture, which continued to preoccupy him.

Freud continued to refine psychoanalytic theory. The second topographical model and the theory of impulses, "our mythology," as he called it in 1933, as well as upheavals in the psychoanalytic movement, led to new considerations and refinements. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926d) is a response to the reduction of the Oedipus theory to the "birth trauma" proposed by Otto Rank in 1924, the first manifestation of a defection that would continue until 1926. "The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex," (1924d) "Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes," (1925j) and "Female Sexuality" (1931b) provide an outline of the libido that was supported by the work of the first female psychoanalysts. The emphasis on a phallic phase responded to the criticism of Ernest Jones on Freudian views about femininity, discussed in chapter 30 of the New Introductory Lectures (1930a). There, Freud insists on the primordial role played by the threat and fear of castration. The ego defenses raised to counter the threat led Freud to introduce elements for a new approach to perversion, which he did in "Negation" (1925h). "Fetishism," (1927e) and his final manuscript, "Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defense." (1940e [1938]) Freud gave increasing consideration to the death impulse in his clinical work and eventually it became not speculative but a key element of his theory, in spite of the opposition of many of his students.

Some of his older students passed away—Karl Abraham in 1925 and Ferenczi, who had grown distant from him, in 1933. The most important person in Freud's circle was now Anna, his daughter. While she was undergoing analysis, Freud arranged her initial contacts with the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, to which she was elected a member in 1922. The worsening of his cancer and subsequent infirmity led to his becoming increasingly dependent on his "Antigone," who began to represent him at conferences and accepted the Goethe Prize in his stead, when it was awarded in 1930 by the city of Frankfurt to acknowledge the literary value of his writing. She took his place at the funeral of his mother, Amalia Freud-Nathanson, who died at the age of ninety-five in September 1930. It is easy to understand why Freud looked askance at Ernest Jones and English psychoanalysts when, in 1925, they welcomed Melanie Klein and her theories, which contradicted the views of Anna Freud on child psychoanalysis.

Moreover, the Old World was crumbling, incapable of stopping the rise of Adolf Hitler. Freud's books were burned publicly in May 1933, and Jewish psychoanalysts were forced to flee or condemned to death. Initially, Freud negotiated in the hope of preserving the "cause," but the Anschluss forced him to face the bleak reality. With the assistance of Princess Marie Bonaparte, who, after an analysis begun in 1925, had become an attentive and influential friend, and the U.S. Ambassador William C. Bullitt, with whom he had attempted to write a psychological study of President Woodrow Wilson (1966b), he was able to emigrate with his wife and daughter to Great Britain on June 6, 1938. His other children as well as his brother Alexander left Austria, but his four sisters remained in Vienna; they died in the Nazi concentration camps in 1942 and 1943.

The "peau de chagrin" (Balzac's novel was one of the last books he read) began to tighten around Freud, who had settled on the outskirts of London, where he continued to write and see patients. The onset of the Second World War on September 1, 1939, and his physical decline led him to ask Max Schur, his doctor, to keep the promise they had made when they first met: not to give him a sedative but to shorten his suffering when he felt the hour was near. He died on September 23, 1939, and three days later his ashes were placed in a Greek urn that, knowing his fondness for antiques, Marie Bonaparte had given him.

Freud's death did not go unnoticed in spite of the upheavals in Europe and elsewhere. Aside from the eulogies and numerous critical assessments, it marked the beginning of a considerable expansion of psychoanalysis that began in the United States, a country Freud claimed to have little liking for. It also resulted in an astonishing idolization of Freud in the years following the war. For a time, under the impetus of the lengthy biography written by Ernest Jones, Freud became a subject for hagiography; mention of his name took the place of original thinking and the "return to Freud" served as a theoretical pretext, for others as for Jacques Lacan in France. The home at Maresfield Gardens, where Martha Freud died in 1951, became, under the watchful eye of Anna Freud, the center of Freudianism and, after her death in 1982, was transformed into a museum, as was Freud's apartment at Berggasse 19 in Vienna. In New York, Kurt Eissler began gathering documents and eye-witness accounts of Freud for the Freud Archives. However, because of his demand for secrecy, this material was for years kept from researchers, arousing their anger, exciting their curiosity, and giving rise to a number of spiteful rumors.

By the 1960s Freud's books were often bestsellers. The body of Freud's writings increased with the publication of his correspondence to his students and friends. His letters to Wilhelm Fliess, purchased in 1937 by Marie Bonaparte and miraculously preserved throughout the Second World War, provided insights into the birth of psychoanalysis, a theme that was to serve as inspiration for filmmakers and dramatists (among others, John Huston's film, Freud, of 1962). Unfortunately, some passages were censured, which led to the growth of research on an unexpurgated history of Freud and psychoanalysis. Paul Roazen helped promote these efforts with his study on the relationship between Freud and Viktor Tausk (1969), which emphasized Freud's responsibility in the suicide of this brilliant student and triggered a backlash against "orthodox" Freudians by adversaries who, thirty years later, would be labeled "revisionists." Ardent supporters and angry critics confronted one another on a regular basis. Freud and his ideas were called into question by an increasingly large number of people, in a way compensating for the glorious early years psychoanalysis. The number of essays and criticisms multiplied with the discovery of historical documents—some authentic, some not. The anger and bitterness of his critics became increasingly obvious, betrayed by the excess of the accusations: there was an alleged attempt on Fliess's life, reports of lies about his patients or errors of diagnosis by a Freud who was hungry for glory, tales of a ménageà trois involving Minna Bernays, and rumors of an abortion. A band of "moralists" obsessed with the "truth" about Freud and Freudianism kept up the pressure, especially in the United States.

On a more serious note, after the leading biography by Fritz Wittels, which had irritated Freud in 1924, and the monument erected by Ernest Jones from 1953 to 1957, a number of books have been written to describe Freud's life and work, by serious scholars: Max Schur (1972), Ronald W. Clark (1980), Peter Gay (1988). Some of these presented original, and often questionable, interpretations of Freud's work, such as the biographies by Frank Sulloway (1979) and Marianne Krüll (1979). The gradual appearance of new documents and the opening of the secret archives opened the door to future research and new assessments of Freud's importance for the history and evolution of the civilization of his time and for human thought.

Bibliography

Mijolla, Alain de. (1982). Aux origines de la pratique psychanalytique. In R. Jaccard (Ed.), Histoire de la psychanalyse (v. I, pp. 11-43). Paris: Hachette.

——. (1989). Images of Freud from his correspondence. International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 5, 87-110.

——. (1993). Freud, biography, his autobiography and his biographers. Psychoanalytic History, 1 (1), 4-27.

——. (1996). Un adolescent bien tranquille. Sig(is)mund Freud, 1870-1876. Cahiers du Collège international de l'Adolescence, 1, 231-267.

Wittels, Fritz. (1924). Sigmund Freud, his personality, his teaching, his school (E. and C. Paul, Trans.). London: Allen & Unwin.

—ALAINDE MIJOLLA

(1856-1939)

Founder of psychoanalysis. Freud conducted some experiments in parapsychology but was unsympathetic to public discussion of the occult, which he believed to be enveloped in dangerous superstition. Freud was born at Freiburg, Moravia, on May 6, 1856. He graduated from Vienna University, Austria, and became a demonstrator at the physiological institute and an assistant physician at Vienna General Hospital. In 1885 he worked under the neurologist J. M. Charcot in Paris and, after returning to Vienna, started to treat patients by hypnosis. In 1902, while a professor of neurology at Vienna University, he also treated patients in his private clinic.

In 1904 he abandoned hypnosis and developed his own theories of psychoanalysis using techniques of free association in the treatment of neurosis. He later attached great significance to the role of dreams and the importance of the sexual drive, both in individuals and in the development of civilization. His sexual theories were supported and developed in new directions by his pupil Wilhelm Reich.

It was Freud's emphasis on sex and mistrust of mystical and occult areas that caused the defection of another pupil, C. G. Jung, who later established his own system of psychotherapy with elaborate theories of the significance of mythology and symbolism in human affairs. Jung himself had personal occult experiences.

By 1921 Freud had reached a reluctant private conclusion that there might be something to telepathy; he experimented with the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi but did not wish his interest to be made public. His papers on the paranormal were later gathered and published by George Devereaux. He died in London, September 23, 1939.

Freud once wrote to Hereward Carrington, "If I had my life to live over again, I should devote myself to psychical research rather than to psychoanalysis."

Sources:

Berger, Arthur S., and Joyce Berger. The Encyclopedia of Parapsychology and Psychical Research. New York: Paragon House, 1991.

Devereaux, George, ed. Psychoanalysis and the Occult. New York: International Universities Press, 1953.

Fodor, Nandor. Freud, Jung, and Occultism. New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1971.

Freud, Sigmund. Studies in Parapsychology. Edited by Philip Rieff. New York: Collier Books, 1963.

Pleasants, Helene, ed. Biographical Dictionary of Parapsychology. New York: Helix Press, 1964.

A physician in Vienna, Austria, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who founded psychoanalysis and developed the theory of the Oedipus complex. He believed that psychological problems could be traced to repressed childhood experiences, particularly to repressed sexual desires. He also argued that dreams provide clues to the nature of psychological problems. His theories introduced concepts such as those of the id and superego into the language of psychiatry.

(1856–1939). Sigmund Freud, who was born of Jewish ancestry at Freiberg in Moravia, was educated in Vienna, in which city he spent almost the whole of his long life. Here he enrolled at the university as a student of biology and medicine in 1873 and while still a medical student embarked on some research under the distinguished physiologist Ernst Brücke, whose interests lay predominantly in the vertebrate nervous system. In 1878, this work resulted in Freud's first published scientific paper, on the histology of the spinal cord in a primitive fish. He qualified in medicine in 1881 at the age of 26, somewhat tardily, and after working for a time in Theodor Meynert's Institute of Cerebral Neurology, decided to specialize in clinical neurology. He was appointed to a lectureship in neuropathology in 1885 and, soon after, was awarded a travelling fellowship to enable him to study in Paris with the world-famous neurologist J. M. Charcot. This proved to be the turning point in Freud's career; from it can be dated his metamorphosis from a clinical neurologist into a medical psychologist in the modern sense of the term.

While still active in neurology, Freud published several papers and two books. One of the latter, on disorders of speech (aphasia) resulting from lesions of the brain, attracted considerable interest and has since been regarded as well in advance of its time. It has also been argued that his ideas about aphasia provided some basis for his later psychological thinking. It may be added that, as a young doctor, Freud only narrowly missed becoming the first to recognize the anaesthetic properties of cocaine.

In 1885, he arrived at the Salpêtrière in Paris, which then enjoyed a worldwide reputation as the Mecca of clinical neurologists. At this period, Charcot had become much preoccupied with the so-called functional nervous diseases, in particular hysteria, in which no clear-cut somatic basis had been established. This protean disease was at that time widely treated by hypnosis, upon which Charcot held strong views. First, he maintained that only those of innate hysterical disposition are amenable to hypnosis; and, secondly, that hypnosis provides a kind of laboratory for the induction and modification of hysterical symptoms. But whereas Charcot still believed that hypnosis had a physical basis, Freud became increasingly convinced of its psychological origin. It is not without interest that some years later he paid a special visit to M. Bernheim, of Nancy, who was perhaps the first to insist upon the overriding role of suggestion in bringing about hypnosis, and to stress its applicability to a wide range of individuals who sought his aid as a physician. Although Freud later repudiated hypnosis as a clinical tool, it is most improbable that, had it not been for Charcot's influence, he would have been led to collaborate with Joseph Breuer and ultimately to evolve the psychoanalytical method.

This work with Breuer began soon after Freud's return to Vienna. Breuer had been interested for some time in using hypnosis in the treatment of hysterical illness, and came to place great reliance on the therapeutic benefit of what came to be called abreaction. This was essentially a kind of re-enactment, during hypnosis, of stressful and disturbing experiences which appeared to have precipitated the illness, and the free and uninhibited expression of emotion was actively encouraged. While seeing some benefit in abreaction, Freud quickly came to realize not only that the structure of neurosis was much more complex than Breuer, at least, was prepared to admit, but also that it involved active processes of defence (repression) against the reproduction, or even the mere acknowledgement, of painful, distressing, or otherwise emotionally disturbing memories. He surmised that many of these had to do with sexual life, a conclusion which Breuer appears to have been ill disposed to concede. Freud also came to appreciate that the understanding and disarming of these defences could often be achieved more effectively in the waking than in the hypnotic state. In consequence, hypnosis was replaced by the so-called method of free association, from which psychoanalysis as a technical psychotherapeutic procedure gradually evolved.

Over the next few years, Freud was essentially concerned in developing his brilliantly original, if to many people extremely disconcerting, ideas about the causation and treatment of neurotic illness. He was led increasingly into study of the sexual life of his patients, at first believing that much neurosis is attributable to distressing sexual experiences in early adult life. Soon, however, he discovered that many of these supposed experiences existed only in imagination and were the products of fantasies evolved at a very much earlier age, often in quite early infancy. Analysis of these fantasies led him to believe not only that psychosexual life has its origins in early infancy but also that it involves intense and often complicated emotional relationships, both positive and negative, with the parents. These ideas were brought together in his Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex (1906), a book which shocked many people but which nevertheless had wide influence on modern conceptions of personality and its development. It also marks the transition from psychoanalysis conceived as a special theory of neurosis to psychoanalysis as a general theory of human personality.

This period, too, was marked by Freud's Herculean attempt at self-analysis, using many of his own dreams to furnish clues as to his own early development and emotional relations with his parents. It further provided the occasion for the writing of what is often regarded as his greatest book, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). As Freud's views on dreams are considered in a separate article, Freud on dreams, it is unnecessary to say more here than that dreams, in his view, have meaning and are largely the product of infantile wishes and thought processes, and that their personal significance can be assessed if their language can be understood and translated into the currency of adult, waking thought.

Although Freud's ideas incurred much odium in medical circles, his work none the less attracted a small but devoted band of followers, many of them neurologists who, like Freud himself, had felt challenged by the ubiquity of neurosis among their patients. Among them were Karl Abraham, Sandor Ferenczi, Alfred Adler, Carl Gustav Jung, Otto Rank, and the Welsh physician Ernest Jones, who became for many years Britain's foremost Freudian. Shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, this group was weakened by two major defections, those of Adler and Jung. Adler's defection was less important, as it is doubtful whether he was ever a committed Freudian, and Freud himself thought little of his ideas. (None the less, after Adler's death, some of his views, in particular those associated with the nature of aggression, came to exert considerable influence on neo-Freudian theory.) Jung, on the other hand, was a man of real distinction of mind and impressive literary productivity. As a psychiatrist, he did much in his early days to extend Freudian thinking to the psychoses, in particular schizophrenia, and is remembered as the originator of the word-association test at one time much in vogue as a 'lie detector'. There can be no question that Freud thought of Jung as his eventual successor in the leadership of the psychoanalytical movement, and his defection caused him very real chagrin. Subsequently, Jung wrote widely (if somewhat obscurely) on individual development, psychological types, and the cultural frontiers of psychology.

In his later writings, Freud displayed an admittedly speculative turn of mind, and though some of his ideas are of great interest, their empirical foundation became decidedly weaker. Among them are Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1922), The Ego and the Id (1923), Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1936), and, finally, the work of his old age, Moses and Monotheism, published a year before his death.

Freud's work came to be widely known to the general reader, particularly through such works as The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1904), Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious (1905), Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1922), and New Introductory Lecures on Psychoanalysis (1933). In America, the five lectures which he delivered at Clark University in 1910 (at the invitation of the veteran psychologist G. Stanley Hall, then president of the university) subsequently appeared in English and enjoyed a certain vogue. But Freudian thinking did not seriously penetrate American psychiatry until after the end of the Second World War, when it came to dominate psychiatric practice for some years, possibly to the detriment of other and less doctrinaire approaches. It has also had wide influence on literature, particularly on biography, on some aspects of painting (for example, Surrealism), and on much contemporary thinking in anthropology and the social sciences. Indeed many people nowadays regard psychoanalysis in the light of a social rather than a biological or medical discipline. Even so, its roots, like those of Freud himself, are wholly within the biological domain.

Following the Nazi invasion of Austria, Freud, by then a very sick man, fled from Vienna and lived quietly in London for the last year of his life. Shortly before his death, he was made a Foreign Fellow of the Royal Society, a belated though none the less imaginative tribute to his world stature and influence on modern thought. His daughter, Anna Freud, a pioneer in the psychoanalytical study of children, became a leading member of the British psychoanalytical community. As a person, Freud is remembered by those who knew him as a man of some austerity but unchallenged personal integrity.

(Published 1987)

— O. L. Zangwill

Bibliography
• Freud, S. (1935). An Autobiographical Study. Trans. J. Strachey.
• Jones, E. (1953–7). Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, 3 vols.

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Quotes:

"Anatomy is destiny."

"The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him."

"Woe to you, my Princess, when I come... you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body."

"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection."

"Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts."

"We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a dark continent for psychology."

See more famous quotes by Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was the founder of psychoanalysis and one of the great thinkers of this century. As a practicing medical doctor, Freud became interested in the role of the mind in disease. Partially as a result of his work with patients afflicted with hysteria (a psychosomatic illness), as well as his training in hypnosis under the brilliant French neurologist J. Martin Charcot, Freud was led to specialize in psychological disturbances. His early theorizing about the sexual origins of mental illness was scandalous to contemporaneous polite society, and it was many years before he was able to convince his medical colleagues of the truth of his basic discoveries. Although few if any current analysts adhere to "orthodox" Freudianism, certain fundamental Freudian notions, such as the idea that we are influenced by unconscious motivations, are widely accepted among psychotherapists.

Freud's theory of human nature (what contemporary psychologists would call Freud's personality theory) presents a highly uncomplimentary picture of the human being. Basically selfish animals driven by aggressive urges and the desire for pleasure, people learn how to repress their animal impulses as they grow up in order to get along in society. They never, however, completely conquer their primitive selves. Freud called this animal self, which constitutes the core of the psyche, the id. The other aspects of the psyche, the ego and the superego, are later developments that arise from the need to survive and to adapt to the surrounding social environment. The ego is the rational, reasoning part of the psyche that undertakes the task of adjusting our inner urges to the demands and restrictions of the surrounding environment. The superego represents the internalized mores of society and tells us what is right and wrong.

The superego is frequently in conflict with the id. The demands of external reality (an ego function) also tend to conflict with certain id drives. Thus, in Freud's theory of human nature, the psyche is a kind of battleground in which the various components of the personality are engaged in an ongoing struggle. At the core of conflicts that lead to mental illness is often a denial of urges that people regard as unacceptable and that they do not wish to admit are a part of themselves. One might, for instance, wish to have intercourse with the parent of the opposite sex (termed Oedipus complex; in women also termed Electra complex). This desire, however, is so beyond the bounds of what our society regards as proper that we repress our awareness of the urge and it remains unconscious. Mental illness comes about when such desires become too strong to deal with through the normal coping process.

Freudian therapy involves discovery of the repressed urges causing dysfunction. Once patients are confronted with their real desires and accept them as part of themselves, a cure is effected because the psyche no longer need go to extraordinary lengths to hide the "terrible truth" from the conscious mind. Freud initially hoped that hypnosis would be a useful tool for accessing the unconscious, but soon gave that technique up in favor of free association.

He also came to believe that the analysis of dreams was a powerful avenue for uncovering repressed desires, even referring to dreams as "the royal road" to the unconscious. Freud's principal work on this subject, The Interpretation of Dreams, was first published in 1900 and went through eight editions in his lifetime. At one point he wrote that The Interpretation of Dreams "contains even according to my present day judgment the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make. Insights such as this fall to one's lot but once in a lifetime." Despite many minor revisions, his basic theory of dreams remained remarkably constant after its initial formulation.

In Freud's view, the purpose of dreams is to allow us to satisfy in fantasies the instinctual urges that society judges unacceptable. So that we do not awaken as a result of the strong emotions that would be evoked if we dreamed about the literal fulfillment of such desires, the part of the mind that Freud called the censor transforms the dream content so as to disguise its true meaning. Freud called the censorship process the dreamwork. Freud explicitly identified five processes brought into play during dreamwork: displacement, condensation, symbolization, projection, and secondary revision.

After undergoing one or more of the dreamwork process, the secondary processes of the ego reorganize the otherwise bizarre components of a dream so that it has a comprehensible surface meaning, called the manifest dream. The process of dream interpretation in psychoanalysis involves "decoding" the manifest dream content to discover the real, hidden meaning of the dream, called the latent dream.

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