Freud, Sigmund 1856-1939
Austrian neurologist, the founder of psychoanalysis

Freud was born in Freiburg, Moravia. He studied medicine at Vienna and joined the staff of the Vienna General Hospital in 1882, specializing in neurology. He collaborated with the Austrian neurologist Joseph Breuer in the treatment of hysteria by the recall of painful experiences under hypnosis, then moved to Paris in 1885 to study under Jean Martin Charcot; it was there that he changed from neurology to psychopathology. Returning to Vienna, he developed the technique of conversational 'free association' in place of hypnosis and refined psychoanalysis as a method of treatment.

In 1895 he published, with Joseph Breuer, Studien �ber Hysterie ('Studies in Hysteria'), but two years later their friendship ended as a result of Freud's theories of infantile sexuality. He developed his revolutionary thinking despite opposition from friends, patients and medical colleagues, and in 1900 he published his seminal work, Die Traumdeutung ('The Interpretation of Dreams'), arguing that dreams, like neuroses, are disguised manifestations of repressed sexual desires. He was appointed Extraordinary Professor of Neuropathology at the University of Vienna in 1902; there he began to hold weekly seminars in his home with kindred minds like Alfred Adler, and produced the further crucial works, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1904), and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), which met with intense and uncomprehending opposition. In 1908 these weekly meetings became those of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society, and, in 1910, the International Psychoanalytical Association, with Carl Jung as its first president.

Both Adler (1911) and Jung (1913) broke with Freud to develop their own theories. Undeterred, Freud produced Totem and Tabu (1913), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1919-20) and Ego and Id (1923), elaborating his theories of the division of the unconscious mind into the 'Id', the 'Ego', and the 'Super-Ego'. In 1927 he published a controversial view of religion, The Future of an Illusion. He was awarded the prestigious Goethe prize in 1930, and in 1933 published Why War?, written in collaboration with Albert Einstein. Under the Nazi regime psychoanalysis was banned, and in 1938, after the annexation of Austria, Freud was extricated from Vienna and brought to London with his family. He made his home in Hampstead, but died of cancer the following year.

Bibliography: H S Decker, Freud, Dora and Vienna 1900 (1990); E M Thornton, Freud and Cocaine: The Freudian Fallacy (1983); Lionel Trilling and Stephen Marcus, The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud (1961).