Sigmund Freud

Independent activity Austria Austrian Jewish 1856–1939 → Died in exile

Austrian physician who founded psychoanalysis on the theory of the unconscious and infantile sexuality

In the Nazi book burnings of 1933 his books were burned as “soul-destroying”; after the annexation of Austria in 1938 he fled to London, where he died the next year.

A physician and the founder of psychoanalysis, born into a Jewish family in Freiberg, Moravia, and raised in Vienna. He became a Privatdozent at Vienna University in 1885, studied under Charcot in Paris and opened his practice in 1886. With Breuer he wrote Studies on Hysteria (1895), and with The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) he founded his theory of the unconscious and infantile sexuality. The psychoanalytic movement grew from his Wednesday circle of 1902; Adler, Jung and Reich broke with him in turn. In his later work, with the death drive and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), he turned to culture. After the annexation of Austria in 1938 he fled to London, where he died in 1939.

Also known as: Sigismund Schlomo Freud

Activities and affiliations

From the birth of psychoanalysis to exile

He was born Sigismund Schlomo Freud to Jewish parents from Galicia in Freiberg, Moravia (today Příbor in the Czech Republic), and moved with his family to Vienna as a child. He studied medicine at Vienna University, became a Privatdozent there in September 1885 and immediately spent six months with Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière in Paris. Opening his practice in April 1886, he published Studies on Hysteria (1895) with Josef Breuer, who had treated hysteria with hypnosis, and laid the foundation of the study of the unconscious with The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). His Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) set out the idea that childhood sexual conflicts and traumas cause neuroses, and the medical profession long shunned him. The Wednesday Psychological Society that met in his flat from the autumn of 1902 began the worldwide psychoanalytic movement, but first Alfred Adler and then C. G. Jung, whom he had seen as his successor, broke away with doctrines of their own. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) he introduced the “repetition compulsion” and the “death drive”, and in The Ego and the Id (1923) the structural model of id, ego and superego. He criticised religion in The Future of an Illusion (1927), and in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) saw the sublimation of the sexual drive as the basis of modern civilisation. In 1932, at the League of Nations’ suggestion, he exchanged letters with Einstein on “Why War?”. Wilhelm Reich, who against Freud’s counsel of sublimation held that only orgasm truly satisfied and rejected the death drive, was expelled from the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1934. Answering a mother worried about her homosexual son in 1935, Freud wrote that homosexuality was no advantage but nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation and no illness, and that persecuting it as a crime was a great injustice and a cruelty. In the Nazi book burnings of May 1933 his books were burned as “soul-destroying”. After the annexation of Austria in March 1938 the Gestapo took his daughter Anna for questioning, and in June he fled to London. His four sisters, left in Vienna, could not get exit visas and were all murdered in Nazi camps. Suffering from the cancer of the palate he had had since 1923, he died in London on 23 September 1939 after his physician Max Schur administered morphine on 21 and 22 September.