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Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud was born with a caul, a membrane that covered his face at birth, which his mother interpreted as a positive omen for his future. This unusual beginning marked the start of a life that would fundamentally alter how humanity understands itself. Born Sigismund Schlomo Freud on the 6th of May 1856 in the Moravian town of Freiberg, he was the first of eight children to Galician Jewish parents. His father, Jakob Freud, a wool merchant, had previously been married and had two sons, Emanuel and Philipp, before marrying Amalia Nathansohn, who was twenty years younger than him. The family struggled financially, living in a rented room within a locksmith's house at Schlossergasse 117. In 1859, the family left Freiberg, moving first to Leipzig and then to Vienna in 1860, where four more children were born. Freud's early life was marked by a profound sense of displacement and the loss of his childhood playmate, Emanuel's son John, who had immigrated to Manchester, England. This early separation from his closest companion foreshadowed a lifelong pattern of intense, often turbulent relationships and a deep-seated need to understand the origins of human connection and loss. Freud's academic brilliance was evident from a young age. He entered the prestigious Akademisches Gymnasium in 1865 and graduated with honors in 1873. His linguistic abilities were extraordinary, allowing him to read literature in German, French, Italian, Spanish, English, Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. At seventeen, he entered the University of Vienna, initially intending to study law. However, his curiosity led him to the medical faculty, where he studied philosophy under Franz Brentano, physiology under Ernst Brücke, and zoology under Carl Claus. In 1876, Freud spent four weeks at Claus's zoological research station in Trieste, where he dissected hundreds of eels in a futile search for their male reproductive organs. This seemingly trivial task, which took up a significant portion of his early career, was actually a crucial step in his development as a scientist. It taught him the importance of meticulous observation and the value of persistence in the face of inconclusive results. His research on the biology of nervous tissue proved seminal for the subsequent discovery of the neuron in the 1890s. Despite his scientific achievements, Freud's early career was interrupted by compulsory military service in 1879, which allowed him to translate four essays from John Stuart Mill's collected works. He graduated with an MD in March 1881, setting the stage for a career that would eventually challenge the very foundations of medicine and psychology.
The Secret Life Of The Mind
Freud's transition from neurology to psychoanalysis was catalyzed by his time in Paris in October 1885, where he studied under Jean-Martin Charcot, a renowned neurologist known for his work on hypnosis and hysteria. Charcot's demonstrations of hysteria, often performed on stage before an audience, left a profound impression on Freud. He later recalled this experience as the moment that turned him toward medical psychopathology and away from a less financially promising career in neurology research. Upon returning to Vienna, Freud began using hypnosis in his clinical practice, adopting a method different from the French approach, which did not rely on suggestion. His work with Josef Breuer, particularly the case of Anna O., proved transformative. Anna O., whose real name was Bertha Pappenheim, was a highly intelligent 21-year-old woman suffering from persistent cough, hallucinations, and paralysis. Breuer discovered that when she told fantasy stories during her states of absence, her condition improved. After her father's death, her symptoms deteriorated, but full recovery was achieved by inducing her to recall events that had precipitated specific symptoms. This process, which Anna O. called the talking cure, became the foundation of Freud's new clinical method. Freud abandoned hypnosis, concluding that more consistent and effective symptom relief could be achieved by encouraging patients to talk freely, without censorship or inhibition, about whatever ideas or memories occurred to them. He called this procedure free association. In conjunction with this, Freud found that patients' dreams could be fruitfully analyzed to reveal the complex structuring of unconscious material and to demonstrate the psychic action of repression, which he believed underlay symptom formation. By 1896, he was using the term psychoanalysis to refer to his new clinical method and the theories on which it was based. Freud's development of these new theories took place during a period in which he experienced heart irregularities, disturbing dreams, and periods of depression, which he linked to the death of his father in 1896. This personal crisis prompted a self-analysis of his own dreams and memories of childhood. His explorations of his feelings of hostility to his father and rivalrous jealousy over his mother's affections led him to fundamentally revise his theory of the origin of the neuroses. Based on his early clinical work, Freud postulated that unconscious memories of sexual molestation in early childhood were a necessary precondition for psychoneuroses, a formulation now known as Freud's seduction theory. However, in the light of his self-analysis, Freud abandoned the theory that every neurosis can be traced back to the effects of infantile sexual abuse, now arguing that infantile sexual scenarios still had a causative function. It did not matter whether they were real or imagined, and in either case, they became pathogenic only when acting as repressed memories. This transition provided the basis for Freud's subsequent formulation of the theory of the Oedipus complex.
Common questions
When and where was Sigmund Freud born?
Sigmund Freud was born on the 6th of May 1856 in the Moravian town of Freiberg. He was born Sigismund Schlomo Freud as the first of eight children to Galician Jewish parents.
What event in 1885 changed Sigmund Freud's career from neurology to psychoanalysis?
Sigmund Freud's career shifted from neurology to psychoanalysis after he studied under Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris in October 1885. Charcot's demonstrations of hysteria and hypnosis left a profound impression on Freud and turned him toward medical psychopathology.
Who was Anna O. and what role did she play in the development of Sigmund Freud's methods?
Anna O. was the pseudonym for Bertha Pappenheim, a 21-year-old woman whose treatment with Josef Breuer led to the development of the talking cure. This method became the foundation of Sigmund Freud's clinical practice of free association and psychoanalysis.
When did Sigmund Freud die and what caused his death?
Sigmund Freud died on the 23rd of September 1939 after receiving doses of morphine to end the pain from his inoperable jaw cancer. His death occurred at around 3 a.m. or midnight depending on the account, following a decision by his doctor Max Schur and daughter Anna Freud.
Why did Sigmund Freud leave Vienna in 1938 and when did he arrive in London?
Sigmund Freud left Vienna in 1938 due to the Nazi threat following the Anschluss of the 13th of March 1938 and the arrest of his daughter Anna by the Gestapo. He departed on the Orient Express on the 4th of June and arrived at London Victoria station on the 6th of June 1938.
Freud's early career was marked by a controversial fascination with cocaine, which he believed was a cure for many mental and physical problems. In his 1884 paper On Coca, he extolled the virtues of the drug, recommending its use as an antidepressant and even as a cure for morphine addiction. He had introduced cocaine to his friend Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, who had become addicted to morphine taken to relieve years of excruciating nerve pain resulting from an infection acquired after injuring himself while performing an autopsy. Freud's claim that Fleischl-Marxow was cured of his addiction was premature, though he never acknowledged that he had been at fault. Fleischl-Marxow developed an acute case of cocaine addiction, which ultimately led to his death. Freud narrowly missed out on obtaining scientific priority for discovering cocaine's anesthetic properties, of which he was aware but had mentioned only in passing. Karl Koller, a colleague of Freud's in Vienna, received that distinction in 1884 after reporting to a medical society the ways cocaine could be used in delicate eye surgery. Despite the dangers, Freud continued to use cocaine himself, believing it enhanced his capacity to work. He also developed a habit of smoking tobacco at age 24, initially as a cigarette smoker and later as a cigar smoker. He believed smoking enhanced his capacity to work and that he could exercise self-control in moderating it. Despite health warnings from colleague Wilhelm Fliess, he remained a smoker, eventually developing buccal cancer. Freud suggested to Fliess in 1897 that addictions, including that to tobacco, were substitutes for masturbation, the one great habit. His early work on cocaine and his later struggles with addiction reveal a man who was deeply invested in the power of substances to alter the human psyche, a theme that would later become central to his theories on desire and repression. Freud's relationship with cocaine also highlights his willingness to take risks and his belief in the transformative power of drugs, a belief that would later inform his views on the therapeutic potential of psychoanalysis itself.
The Betrayal Of A Friend
Freud's relationship with Wilhelm Fliess, a Berlin-based ear, nose, and throat specialist whom he had first met in 1887, was one of the most significant and complex of his life. Both men saw themselves as isolated from the prevailing clinical and theoretical mainstream because of their ambitions to develop radical new theories of sexuality. Fliess developed highly eccentric theories of human biorhythms and a nasogenital connection, which are today considered pseudoscientific. He shared Freud's views on the importance of certain aspects of sexuality, including masturbation, coitus interruptus, and the use of condoms, in the etiology of what was then called the actual neuroses, primarily neurasthenia and certain physically manifested anxiety symptoms. They maintained an extensive correspondence from which Freud drew on Fliess's speculations on infantile sexuality and bisexuality to elaborate and revise his own ideas. Freud's first attempt at a systematic theory of the mind, his Project for a Scientific Psychology, was developed as a metapsychology with Fliess as interlocutor. However, Freud's efforts to build a bridge between neurology and psychology were eventually abandoned after they had reached an impasse, as his letters to Fliess reveal. Freud had Fliess repeatedly operate on his nose and sinuses to treat nasal reflex neurosis, and subsequently referred his patient Emma Eckstein to him. According to Freud, her history of symptoms included severe leg pains with consequent restricted mobility, as well as stomach and menstrual pains. These pains were, according to Fliess's theories, caused by habitual masturbation, which, as the tissue of the nose and genitalia were linked, was curable by removal of part of the middle turbinate. Fliess's surgery proved disastrous, resulting in profuse, recurrent nasal bleeding; he had left a half-meter of gauze in Eckstein's nasal cavity, whose subsequent removal left her permanently disfigured. At first, though aware of Fliess's culpability and regarding the remedial surgery in horror, Freud could bring himself only to intimate delicately in his correspondence with Fliess the nature of his disastrous role, and in subsequent letters maintained a tactful silence on the matter or else returned to the face-saving topic of Eckstein's hysteria. Freud ultimately, in light of Eckstein's history of adolescent self-cutting and irregular nasal and menstrual bleeding, concluded that Fliess was completely without blame, as Eckstein's post-operative haemorrhages were hysterical wish-bleedings linked to an old wish to be loved in her illness and triggered as a means of rearousing Freud's affection. Eckstein nonetheless continued her analysis with Freud. She was restored to full mobility and went on to practice psychoanalysis herself. Freud, who had called Fliess the Kepler of biology, later concluded that a combination of a homoerotic attachment and the residue of his specifically Jewish mysticism lay behind his loyalty to his Jewish friend and his consequent overestimation of both his theoretical and clinical work. Their friendship came to an acrimonious end with Fliess angry at Freud's unwillingness to endorse his general theory of sexual periodicity and accusing him of collusion in the plagiarism of his work. After Fliess failed to respond to Freud's offer of collaboration over the publication of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1906, their relationship came to an end.
The Birth Of A Movement
In 1902, Freud, at last, realized his long-standing ambition to be made a university professor. The title professor extraordinarius was important to Freud for the recognition and prestige it conferred, there being no salary or teaching duties attached to the post. He would be granted the enhanced status of professor ordinarius in 1920. Despite support from the university, his appointment had been blocked in successive years by the political authorities and it was secured only with the intervention of an influential ex-patient, Baroness Marie Ferstel, who supposedly had to bribe the minister of education with a valuable painting. Freud continued with the regular series of lectures on his work, which, since the mid-1880s as a docent of Vienna University, he had been delivering to small audiences every Saturday evening at the lecture hall of the university's psychiatric clinic. From the autumn of 1902, several Viennese physicians who had expressed interest in Freud's work were invited to meet at his apartment every Wednesday afternoon to discuss issues relating to psychology and neuropathology. This group was called the Wednesday Psychological Society and it marked the beginnings of the worldwide psychoanalytic movement. Freud founded this discussion group at the suggestion of the physician Wilhelm Stekel. Stekel had studied medicine; his conversion to psychoanalysis is variously attributed to his successful treatment by Freud for a sexual problem or as a result of his reading The Interpretation of Dreams, to which he subsequently gave a positive review in the Viennese daily newspaper Neues Wiener Tagblatt. Stekel's review appeared in 1902. In it, he declared that Freud's work heralded a new era in psychology. The other three original members whom Freud invited to attend, Alfred Adler, Max Kahane, and Rudolf Reitler, were also physicians and all five were Jewish by birth. Reitler's family had converted to Catholicism. Both Kahane and Reitler were childhood friends of Freud who had gone to university with him and kept abreast of Freud's developing ideas by attending his Saturday evening lectures. In 1901, Kahane, who first introduced Stekel to Freud's work, had opened an out-patient psychotherapy institute of which he was the director in Vienna. In the same year, his medical textbook, Outline of Internal Medicine for Students and Practicing Physicians, was published. In it, he provided an outline of Freud's psychoanalytic method. Kahane broke with Freud and left the Wednesday Psychological Society in 1907 for unknown reasons, and in 1923, he died by suicide. Reitler was the director of an establishment providing thermal cures in Dorotheergasse, which had been founded in 1901. He died prematurely in 1917. Adler, regarded as the most formidable intellect among the early Freud circle, was a socialist who, in 1898, had written a health manual for the tailoring trade. He was particularly interested in the potential social impact of psychiatry. By 1906, the group had grown to sixteen members, including Otto Rank, who was employed as the group's paid secretary. In the same year, Freud began a correspondence with Carl Gustav Jung, who was by then already an academically acclaimed researcher into word-association and the Galvanic Skin Response, and a lecturer at Zurich University, although still only an assistant to Eugen Bleuler at the Burghölzli Mental Hospital in Zürich. In March 1907, Jung and Ludwig Binswanger, also a Swiss psychiatrist, traveled to Vienna to visit Freud and attend the discussion group. Thereafter, they established a small psychoanalytic group in Zürich. In 1908, reflecting its growing institutional status, the Wednesday group was reconstituted as the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society with Freud as president, a position he relinquished in 1910 in favor of Adler in the hope of neutralizing his increasingly critical standpoint. The first woman member, Margarete Hilferding, joined the Society in 1910, and the following year she was joined by Tatiana Rosenthal and Sabina Spielrein, who were both Russian psychiatrists and graduates of the Zürich University medical school. Before she completed her studies, Spielrein was a patient of Jung's at the Burghölzli, and the clinical and personal details of their relationship became the subject of an extensive correspondence between Freud and Jung. Both women would go on to make important contributions to the work of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society, founded in 1910. Freud's early followers met together formally for the first time at the Hotel Bristol, Salzburg on the 27th of April 1908. This meeting, which was retrospectively deemed to be the first International Psychoanalytic Congress, was convened at the suggestion of Ernest Jones, then a London-based neurologist who had discovered Freud's writings and begun applying psychoanalytic methods in his clinical work. Jones had met Jung at a conference the previous year, and they met up again in Zürich to organize the Congress. There were, as Jones records, forty-two present, half of whom were or became practising analysts. In addition to Jones and the Viennese and Zürich contingents accompanying Freud and Jung, also present and notable for their subsequent importance in the psychoanalytic movement were Karl Abraham and Max Eitingon from Berlin, Sándor Ferenczi from Budapest and the New York-based Abraham Brill. Important decisions were taken at the Congress to advance the impact of Freud's work. A journal, the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen, was launched in 1909 under the editorship of Jung. This was followed in 1910 by the monthly Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse edited by Adler and Stekel, in 1911 by Imago, a journal devoted to the application of psychoanalysis to the field of cultural and literary studies edited by Rank and in 1913 by the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, also edited by Rank. Plans for an international association of psychoanalysts were put in place and these were implemented at the Nuremberg Congress of 1910, where Jung was elected, with Freud's support, as its first president.
The Flight From Vienna
In January 1933, the Nazi Party took control of Germany, and Freud's books were prominent among those they burned. Freud remarked to Ernest Jones: What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now, they are content with burning my books. Freud underestimated the growing Nazi threat and remained determined to stay in Vienna, even following the Anschluss of the 13th of March 1938 and the outbreaks of violent antisemitism that ensued. Jones, the then president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, flew into Vienna on the 15th of March determined to get Freud to change his mind and seek exile in Britain. This prospect and the shock of the arrest and interrogation of Anna Freud on the 22nd of March by the Gestapo finally convinced Freud it was time to leave. Jones left for London the following week with a list provided by Freud of the party of émigrés for whom immigration permits would be required. Back in London, Jones used his personal acquaintance with the Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, to expedite the granting of permits. There were seventeen in all, and work permits were provided where relevant. Jones also used his influence in scientific circles, persuading the president of the Royal Society, Sir William Bragg, to write to the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, requesting to good effect that diplomatic pressure be applied in Berlin and Vienna on Freud's behalf. Freud also had support from American diplomats, notably his ex-patient and American ambassador to France, William Bullitt. Bullitt alerted U.S. President Roosevelt to the increased dangers facing the Freuds, resulting in the American consul-general in Vienna, John Cooper Wiley, arranging regular monitoring of Berggasse 19. He also intervened by phone during the Gestapo interrogation of Anna Freud. The departure from Vienna occurred in stages throughout late April and early May 1938. Freud's grandson, Ernst Halberstadt, and Freud's son Martin's wife and children left for Paris in April. Freud's sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, left for London on the 5th of May, Martin Freud the following week, and Freud's daughter Mathilde and her husband, Robert Hollitscher, on the 24th of May. By the end of the month, arrangements for Freud's own departure for London had become stalled, mired in a legally torturous and financially extortionate process of negotiation with the Nazi authorities. Under regulations imposed on the Jewish population by the Nazis, a Kommissar was appointed to manage Freud's assets and those of the IPA. Freud was allocated to Dr. Anton Sauerwald, who had studied chemistry at Vienna University under Professor Josef Herzig, an old friend of Freud's. Sauerwald read Freud's books to learn more about him and became sympathetic. Though required to disclose details of all of Freud's bank accounts to his superiors and to arrange the destruction of the historic library of books housed at the IPA, Sauerwald did neither. Instead, he removed evidence of Freud's foreign bank accounts to his own safekeeping and arranged the storage of the IPA library in the Austrian National Library, where it remained until the end of the war. Though Sauerwald's intervention lessened the financial burden of the Reich Flight Tax on Freud's declared assets, other substantial charges were levied concerning the debts of the IPA and the valuable collection of antiquities Freud possessed. Unable to access his own accounts, Freud turned to Princess Marie Bonaparte, the most eminent and wealthy of his French followers, who had traveled to Vienna to offer her support, and it was she who made the necessary funds available. This allowed Sauerwald to sign the necessary exit visas for Freud, his wife Martha, and daughter Anna. They left Vienna on the Orient Express on the 4th of June, accompanied by their housekeeper and a doctor, arriving in Paris the following day, where they stayed as guests of Marie Bonaparte, before traveling overnight to London, arriving at London Victoria station on the 6th of June. Among those soon to call on Freud in London to pay their respects were Salvador Dalí, Stefan Zweig, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and H. G. Wells. Representatives of the Royal Society called with the Society's Charter for Freud, who had been elected a Foreign Member in 1936, to sign himself into membership. Marie Bonaparte arrived near the end of June to discuss the fate of Freud's four elderly sisters in Vienna. Her subsequent attempts to get them exit visas failed; they all were murdered in Nazi concentration camps. In early 1939, Sauerwald arrived in London in mysterious circumstances, where he met Freud's brother Alexander. He was tried and imprisoned in 1945 by an Austrian court for his activities as a Nazi Party official. Responding to a plea from his wife, Anna Freud wrote to confirm that Sauerwald used his office as our appointed commissar in such a manner as to protect my father. Her intervention helped secure his release in 1947. Freud's new family home was established in Hampstead at 20 Maresfield Gardens in September 1938. Freud's architect son, Ernst, designed modifications of the building, including the installation of an electric lift. The study and library areas were arranged to create the atmosphere and visual impression of Freud's Vienna consulting rooms. He continued to see patients there until the terminal stages of his illness. He also worked on his last books, Moses and Monotheism, published in German in 1938 and in English the following year, and the uncompleted An Outline of Psychoanalysis, which was published posthumously.
The Final Contract
By mid-September 1939, Freud's cancer of the jaw was causing him increasingly severe pain and had been declared inoperable. The last book he read, Balzac's La Peau de chagrin, prompted reflections on his own increasing frailty. A few days later, he turned to his doctor, friend, and fellow refugee, Max Schur, reminding him that they had previously discussed the terminal stages of his illness: Schur, you remember our contract not to leave me in the lurch when the time had come. Now it is nothing but torture and makes no sense. When Schur replied that he had not forgotten, Freud said, I thank you, and then, Talk it over with Anna, and if she thinks it's right, then make an end of it. Anna Freud wanted to postpone her father's death, but Schur convinced her it was pointless to keep him alive; on the 21st and the 22nd of September, he administered doses of morphine that resulted in Freud's death at around 3 a.m. on the 23rd of September 1939. However, discrepancies in the accounts Schur gave of his role in Freud's final hours led to inconsistencies between Freud's main biographers. A revised account proposes that Schur was absent from Freud's deathbed when a third and final dose of morphine was administered by Dr. Josephine Stross, a colleague of Anna Freud, leading to Freud's death at around midnight on the 23rd of September 1939. Three days after his death, Freud's body was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium, with Harrods acting as funeral directors, on the instructions of his son, Ernst. Funeral orations were given by Ernest Jones and the Austrian author Stefan Zweig. Freud's ashes were later placed in a corner of the crematorium's Ernest George Columbarium on a plinth designed by his son, Ernst, in a sealed ancient Greek bell krater painted with Dionysian scenes that Freud had received as a gift from Marie Bonaparte and had kept in his study in Vienna for many years. After his wife, Martha, died in 1951, her ashes were also placed in the urn. Freud's death marked the end of an era, but his ideas continued to shape the world. His work has suffused contemporary Western thought and popular culture. A 1940 poetic tribute to Freud describes him as having created a whole climate of opinion under whom we conduct our different lives. Though in overall decline as a diagnostic and clinical practice, psychoanalysis remains influential within psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, and across the humanities. It thus continues to generate extensive and highly contested debate concerning its therapeutic efficacy, its scientific status, and whether it advances or hinders the feminist cause. For its efficacy and the influence of psychoanalysis on psychiatry and psychotherapy, see The Challenge to Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, Chapter 9, Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry: A Changing Relationship by Robert Michels and Tom Burns, Our Necessary Shadow: The Nature and Meaning of Psychiatry. For the influence on psychology, see The Psychologist, December 2000. For the influence of psychoanalysis in the humanities, see Forrester, John. The Seductions of Psychoanalysis Cambridge University Press 1990, pp. 2, 3. For the debate on efficacy, see Fisher, Seymour and Greenberg, Roger P. Freud Scientifically Reappraised: Testing the Theories and Therapy, New York: John Wiley, 1996, pp. 193, 217. For the debate on the scientific status of psychoanalysis see Gay, 2006 p. 745, and for the debate on psychoanalysis and feminism, see Appignanesi, Lisa and Forrester, John. Freud's Women. London: Penguin Books, 1992, pp. 455, 74. Nonetheless, Freud's work has suffused contemporary Western thought and popular culture. A 1940 poetic tribute to Freud describes him as having created a whole climate of opinion under whom we conduct our different lives.