Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud invented psychoanalysis and made the unconscious a permanent part of how the West understands itself. Born in Freiberg in Moravia in 1856 into a Jewish wool merchant's family, he moved to Vienna at four and lived there for nearly eighty years. He trained in medicine, spent years on neurological research including work on the nervous systems of eels and lampreys, and published on cocaine before its dangers were understood. He studied under Charcot in Paris in 1885 and returned convinced that hysteria had psychological rather than organic causes. With Josef Breuer he found that symptoms eased when patients talked through the memories connected with them, and one of Breuer's patients called it the talking cure. He abandoned hypnosis for free association, and from that built the apparatus: the unconscious, repression, transference, the interpretation of dreams as wish fulfilment, slips of the tongue, infantile sexuality, the Oedipus complex, and later the division of the mind into id, ego and superego. The Interpretation of Dreams appeared in 1899 and sold about 350 copies in six years. He gathered a circle that became a movement, and lost Adler and Jung to doctrinal splits. His later work turned pessimistic: Civilization and Its Discontents argues that culture requires the suppression of instinct and therefore guarantees unhappiness. Whether any of it is science has been argued for a century, and its influence on literature, art and ordinary speech is beyond dispute. He fled Vienna in 1938 after the Anschluss, having been made to sign a statement that he had been well treated. He died in London in September 1939 of an assisted morphine overdose after sixteen years of jaw cancer.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history