Sigmund Freud

Sigismund Schlomo Freud was born on May 6, 1856, in Freiberg in Mähren, a small town in the Austrian Empire (now Příbor in the Czech Republic). His father, Jacob Freud, was a Jewish wool merchant. His mother, Amalia Nathansohn, was Jacob's third wife and twenty years his junior. Freud was the first child of their marriage. The family moved to Leipzig in 1859 and to Vienna in 1860, where they settled in the Jewish quarter of Leopoldstadt.

He entered the University of Vienna in 1873. His studies extended beyond medicine to include comparative anatomy under Carl Claus and physiology under Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke. He graduated with a medical degree in 1881. At Brücke's laboratory he had conducted research on the neural anatomy of fish and other organisms, developing the histological techniques and analytical habits that would characterize his later work.

In 1882 he became engaged to Martha Bernays; they married in 1886 and had six children. Between 1885 and 1886 he studied in Paris under Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière, observing Charcot's work with hysteria and hypnosis. Returning to Vienna, he began private practice and collaborated with the internist Josef Breuer. Their joint publication Studies on Hysteria (1895), based on cases including the patient known as Anna O., introduced the concept of the cathartic method — the idea that symptoms might be resolved through verbally revisiting their origin.

The Interpretation of Dreams was published in November 1899 (dated 1900 by the publisher). The book argued that dreams were the disguised fulfillment of repressed wishes and introduced the theoretical distinction between manifest and latent content. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life followed in 1901, analyzing slips of the tongue and memory errors as evidence of unconscious mental activity. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality appeared in 1905, extending his theoretical framework to include infantile sexuality and the developmental history of sexual organization.

He founded the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1910, with Carl Jung as the first president. Disagreements over theory led to breaks with Adler in 1911 and Jung in 1912-13. His later theoretical revisions included the introduction of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and a revised model of mental structure — id, ego, superego — in The Ego and the Id (1923).