Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud was born to Ashkenazi Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg, in the Austrian Empire (now Příbor, Czech Republic), the first of eight children. Both of his parents were from Galicia. His father, Jakob Freud, a wool merchant, had two sons, Emanuel and Philipp, by his first marriage. Jakob's family were Hasidic Jews and, although Jakob himself had moved away from the tradition, he came to be known for his Torah study. He and Freud's mother, Amalia Nathansohn, who was 20 years younger and his third wife, were married by Rabbi Isaac Noah Mannheimer on 29 July 1855. They were struggling financially and living in a rented room, in a locksmith's house at Schlossergasse 117 when their son Sigmund was born. He was born with a caul, which his mother saw as a positive omen for the boy's future.

In 1859, the Freud family left Freiberg. Freud's half-brothers emigrated to Manchester, England, parting him from the "inseparable" playmate of his early childhood, Emanuel's son, John. Jakob Freud took his wife and two children (Freud's sister, Anna, was born in 1858; a brother, Julius, born in 1857, had died in infancy) firstly to Leipzig and then in 1860 to Vienna, where four sisters and a brother were born: Rosa (b. 1860), Marie (b. 1861), Adolfine (b. 1862), Paula (b. 1864), Alexander (b. 1866). In 1865 the family's standing was damaged when Jakob Freud's brother Josef was arrested on suspicion of dealing in counterfeit rubles; he was convicted the following year and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment. Police inquiries reportedly pointed towards Manchester, where Jakob's elder sons Emanuel and Philipp were living, although the two were not named in the proceedings. Freud later recalled that the affair caused his father's hair to turn grey within a few days. In 1865, the nine-year-old Freud entered the Leopoldstädter Kommunal-Realgymnasium, a prominent high school. He proved to be an outstanding pupil and graduated from the Matura in 1873 with honors. He loved literature and was proficient in German, French, Italian, Spanish, English, Hebrew, Latin and Greek.

Freud entered the University of Vienna at age 17. He had planned to study law, but joined the medical faculty at the university, where his studies included philosophy under Franz Brentano, physiology under Ernst Brücke, and zoology under Darwinist professor Carl Claus. …

Sigmund Freud began studying medicine at the University of Vienna in 1873. He took almost nine years to finish due to his interest in neurophysiological research, specifically the investigation of the sexual anatomy of eels and the physiology of the fish nervous system, and because of his interest in studying philosophy with Franz Brentano. He entered private practice in neurology for financial reasons, receiving his doctorate in medicine in 1881 at the age of 25. Amongst his principal concerns in the 1880s was the anatomy of the brain, specifically the medulla oblongata. He intervened in the important debates about aphasia in 1891 with his monograph Zur Auffassung der Aphasien, in which he coined the term agnosia and counselled against a too locationist view of the explanation of neurological deficits. Like his contemporary Eugen Bleuler, he emphasized brain function rather than brain structure.

Freud was also an early researcher in the field of cerebral palsy, which was then known as "cerebral paralysis". He published several medical papers on the topic and showed that the disease existed long before other researchers of the period began to study it. He suggested that William John Little, the man who first identified cerebral palsy, was wrong about the lack of oxygen during birth being a cause. Instead, he suggested that birth complications were a symptom.

The origins of Freud's early work in psychoanalysis can be traced to Josef Breuer. Freud credited Breuer with opening the way to the discovery of the psychoanalytical method through his treatment of Anna O., the first case study in Freud and Breuer's Studies on Hysteria (1895). In November 1880, Breuer was called in to treat a highly intelligent 21-year-old woman (Bertha Pappenheim) for a persistent cough and hallucinations that he diagnosed as hysterical. He found that while nursing her dying father, she had developed some transitory symptoms, including visual disorders and paralysis, and contractures of the limbs, which he also diagnosed as hysterical. Breuer began to see his patient almost every day as the symptoms increased and became more persistent, and observed that she entered states of absence. He found that when, with his encouragement, she told fantasy stories in her evening states of absence, her condition improved, and most of her symptoms had disappeared by April 1881. …

Freud's legacy, though controversial, has been assessed as "one of the strongest influences on twentieth-century thought, its impact comparable only to that of Darwinism and Marxism," with its range of influence permeating "all the fields of culture ... so far as to change our way of life and concept of man."

Freud's practice of helping patients through a "talking cure," as an early psychoanalytic patient described it, provided the basic format for all forms of later psychotherapy. While the wide variety of later psychotherapies have adopted different theories and techniques, all have followed Freud by attempting to achieve psychic and behavioral change through having patients talk about their difficulties. Psychoanalysis is not as influential as it once was in Europe and the United States, though in some parts of the world, notably Latin America, its influence in the later 20th century expanded substantially. Psychoanalysis also remains influential within many contemporary schools of psychotherapy and has led to innovative therapeutic work in schools and with families and groups. There is a substantial body of research that demonstrates the efficacy of the clinical methods of psychoanalysis and of related psychodynamic therapies in treating a wide range of psychological disorders.

The neo-Freudians, a group including Alfred Adler, Otto Rank, Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm, rejected Freud's theory of instinctual drive, emphasized interpersonal relations and self-assertiveness, and made modifications to therapeutic practice that reflected these theoretical shifts. Neo-Freudian analysis places more emphasis on the patient's relationship with the analyst and less on the exploration of the unconscious.

Jacques Lacan approached psychoanalysis through linguistics and literature. Lacan believed that most of Freud's essential work had been done before 1905, and that ego psychology and object relations theory were based upon misreadings of Freud's work. Lacan saw desire as more important than need.

Wilhelm Reich developed some of Freud's ideas, such as actual neurosis. Freud applied that idea both to infants and to adults. In the former case, seductions were seen as the cause of later neuroses, and in the latter, it was incomplete sexual release. …

The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated from the German under the general editorship of James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey, Alan Tyson, and Angela Richards. 24 volumes, London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953–1974.

A revised and newly annotated edition of the Standard Edition texts was published in 2024 under the editorship of Mark Solms.