Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud was a physiologist, medical doctor, psychologist, and influential thinker of the 20th century. Working in close collaboration with Joseph Breuer, Freud elaborated the theory that the mind is a complex energy-system, the investigation of which is the base of psychology. He articulated and refined the concepts of the unconscious, infantile sexuality and repression, and he proposed a three part account of the mind’s structure, which was all part of a radically new therapeutic frame of reference for the understanding of human psychological development and the treatment of abnormal mental conditions. Psychoanalysis, in almost all fundamental respects can be traced directly back to Freud’s original work. Freud’s innovative treatment of human actions, dreams, and indeed of cultural artifacts as invariably possessing implicit symbolic significance has proven to be extraordinarily fruitful, and has had massive implications for a wide variety of fields including psychology, anthropology, semiotics, and artistic creativity and appreciation. However, Freud’s most important and frequently re-iterated claim, that with psychoanalysis he had invented a successful science of the mind, remains the subject of much critical debate and controversy.

Freud was born in Frieberg, Moravia in 1856, but when he was four years old his family moved to Vienna where he lived and worked until the last years of his life. In 1937, the Nazis invaded Austria, and Freud, who was Jewish, was allowed to leave for England. The base of Freud’s interests, and of his professional training, was very broad. He always considered himself first and foremost a scientist, endeavoring to extend the compass of human knowledge, and because of this he enrolled at the medical school at the University of Vienna in 1873. He concentrated initially on biology, doing research in physiology for six years under the great German scientist Ernst Brücke, who was director of the Physiology Laboratory at the...