Who was Sigmund Freud?

Freud spent years in serious scientific research before turning to psychology. At Brücke's physiology laboratory he compared the brains of humans with those of vertebrates and invertebrates, work that contributed to the eventual discovery of the neuron. He graduated with a medical degree in March 1881 and began his clinical career at Vienna General Hospital in 1882, where research into cerebral anatomy led to an influential 1884 paper on cocaine and eventually his first book, on the neurological disorder aphasia, published in 1891.

The decisive shift toward psychology came after Freud travelled to Paris in late 1885 to study with the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who was using hypnosis to investigate hysteria. Back in Vienna, Freud initially used hypnosis in his practice, drawing on the approach of his colleague Josef Breuer, whose patient Anna O. had found relief by talking about her symptoms under hypnosis — coining the phrase 'talking cure.' Freud eventually abandoned hypnosis in favor of asking patients to speak freely without censorship, a method he named free association. By 1896 he was using the term 'psychoanalysis' to describe both the technique and the theories behind it.

In 1899 Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, the work he considered his most important. He argued that dreams were wish fulfillments shaped by unconscious desires, and that analyzing their content revealed the mechanisms of repression underlying psychological symptoms. An abridged version, On Dreams, appeared in 1901, and he extended his theories into everyday life with The Psychopathology of Everyday Life the same year. In 1905 he published Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, laying out his theory of infantile sexuality and the stages of psychosexual development, as well as the idea that neurosis could be traced to disturbances in this development.

Freud's theories of the mind went through two major phases of elaboration. His first model distinguished between the unconscious, the preconscious, and conscious thought. In later work, particularly The Ego and the Id published in 1923, he introduced a second structural model: the id, a reservoir of instinctual drives governed by the pleasure principle; the ego, the rational part that mediates between inner drives and external reality; and the superego, the moral component. Central to the whole system was the Oedipus complex — the child's erotic feelings toward one parent and rivalry toward the other — which Freud regarded as a universal feature of psychological development and a key source of neurotic conflict.

From 1902, a small circle of Viennese physicians began meeting at Freud's apartment every Wednesday to discuss psychology and neuropathology. This Wednesday Psychological Society, founded at the suggestion of Wilhelm Stekel, grew into the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and eventually into an international movement. By 1908, when Freud's followers gathered for what is now counted as the first International Psychoanalytic Congress in Salzburg, the group included figures such as Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Karl Abraham, and Sándor Ferenczi. In 1909, Freud was invited to give five lectures at Clark University in Massachusetts, the first major public recognition of his work in the United States.

The movement was marked by significant defections. Adler resigned from the Vienna society in 1911 after his views on neurosis diverged sharply from Freud's, going on to found what he called Individual Psychology. Jung broke away in 1912, calling his own system analytical psychology. To protect the theoretical core of psychoanalysis, Ernest Jones organized a secret inner committee of loyalists that included Freud, Jones, Abraham, Ferenczi, Otto Rank, and Hanns Sachs. Rank himself eventually departed in 1926 after his book The Trauma of Birth was read by other committee members as abandoning the Oedipus complex. His place on the committee was taken by Anna Freud.

Freud had been diagnosed with cancer of the jaw in 1923, a consequence of his lifelong cigar smoking. Despite serious illness he continued working and seeing patients. When the Nazi Party took control of Germany in 1933, his books were among those publicly burned. Even after the German annexation of Austria in March 1938 and the subsequent arrest of his daughter Anna by the Gestapo, Freud was reluctant to leave Vienna. It was Jones, then president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, who flew to Vienna and pressed Freud to seek exile in Britain. Funds to pay the Nazis' financially extortionate exit conditions were provided by the French psychoanalyst and princess Marie Bonaparte. Freud, his wife Martha, and Anna left Vienna on the Orient Express on 4 June 1938, arriving in London on 6 June.

Freud settled with his family at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, where his study was arranged to recreate the atmosphere of his Vienna consulting rooms. He continued seeing patients and completed his final books, including Moses and Monotheism. By mid-September 1939 his jaw cancer had become inoperable and was causing severe pain. Freud reminded his physician Max Schur of a prior agreement about the terminal stages of his illness. After consulting Anna Freud, Schur administered doses of morphine on 21 and 22 September, and Freud died in the early hours of 23 September 1939. He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium three days later, with funeral orations delivered by Jones and the Austrian author Stefan Zweig.