Sigmund Freud was born on 6 May 1856 in Frieburg, Moravia—now Pribor in the Czech Republic.
When Sigmund Freud was three, his family moved to Vienna. He stayed there until 1938, when, taking refuge from the Nazis, he left for England where he stayed until his death on 23 September 1939.
Freud remarked in 1933 when there was a public burning of his books in Berlin: “What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.”
Sigmund Freud enrolled in the medical department of the University of Vienna in 1873, and graduated in 1881. He initially studied zoological research and then carried out work in the Physiological Institute.
In 1882, Sigmund Freud fell in love with Martha Bernays, and with a view to earning enough money to raise a family, he started to gain medical experience in the Vienna General Hospital.
In 1885 he was appointed lecturer in neuropathology at the University of Vienna and he also started to work at Salpetriere Hospital.
In 1886 Freud opened his medical practice and on 13 September of that year he married Martha.
He had six children, the youngest of which, Anna Freud (born 1895) also became a psycholanalyst.
Sigmund Freud’s first psychoanalytic work, Studies on Hysteria written with Josef Breuer, was published in 1895.
A couple of years later he was to fall out with Breuer. In the course of his life, Freud was to have many fallings-out including with Adler, Stekel, Jung, and Rank.
In 1900 Sigmund Freud published his well-known work Interpretation of Dreams, which argued that dreams were disguised manifestations of repressed sexual desires.
Other important yet controversial works followed including The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.
In 1923 Ego and Id was published which expounded Freud’s theories on the elements of the subconcious mind Id, Ego and SuperEgo.
In his New Introductory Lessons on Psychoanalysis Freud said: “Where id was, there ego shall be.” Describing the intention of psychoanalysis: “to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the super-ego, to widen its field of perception and enlarge its organization, so that it can appropriate fresh portions of the id …it is a work of culture not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee.”
In 1933, together with Albert Einstein he published Why War.
Sigmund Freud, it appears, was obsessional. Extremely neat, a barber attended him daily, he was also superstitious about numbers.
