Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939)

            The father of psychoanalysis and one of the hallmark figures of the fields of Psychology and Neuroscience, Sigmund Freud, was born May 6, 1856, in the small town of Freiberg, Moravia; then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, today a part of Czechoslovakia. His father was a keen-minded wool merchant and his mother, Amalia, was an assertive, good-looking woman. Freud had two older half-brothers and six younger siblings. His own confusions, hatreds, loves and desires from this period appear to have had significant impact on his later work on development. The family settled in Vienna in 1860, when he was approximately four years old where he lived most of his life and then, as a Jew, could enjoy potential and respect.

Freud was a brilliant child, always excelling as the scholarly head of his class. He decided to go medical school and graduated a stronger atheist than he had entered; convinced of the strictly scientific nature of the world. Freud was very good at his research, concentrating on neurophysiology, even inventing a special cell-staining technique.  After spending a short time as a resident in neurology and director of a children's ward in Berlin, he came back to Vienna and married his fiancée of many years Martha Bernays. He then set up a practice in neuropsychiatry, with the help of Joseph Breuer, with whom he had made significant progress in mapping out and defining his own theory of the mind.

Freud's books and lectures brought him both fame and ostracism in the mainstream medical community. He drew around him many very bright associates who became the core of the psychoanalytic movement. Unfortunately, Freud had a tendency to rejecting people who did not totally agree with him. Some separated from him on friendly terms while others did not and went on to found competing schools of thought.

Freud emigrated to England just before World War II when Vienna became an increasing dangerous place for Jews, especially ones as famous as Freud. Soon afterward, he died of the cancer of the mouth and jaw that he had suffered from for the last 20 years of his life.

Freud's aim in life was to redefine the way people viewed the world and themselves. He succeeded in his goal, establishing a new field of psychology and creating a new, scientific conception of the individual. Today his legacy lives on in the common acceptance of some of his most fundamental theories like the id, the Oedipal complex and a Freudian slip?

His works over the years include The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, the Psychopathology of Everyday Life in 1901. Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920 and The Ego and the Id in 1923. The latter work contained a final formulation of his Structural Theory of Mind. He also wrote a series of papers on female sexuality, The Future of an Illusion in 1927, which debunked religion on scientific grounds, and the 1930 Civilization and its Discontents, a picture of modern civilization at the brink of catastrophe.

Freud rejected hypnosis as a clinical technique because of its fallibility and employed the technique of free association instead. Freud asked patients to relate anything which came into their mind, regardless of how apparently unimportant or potentially embarrassing the memory threatened to be. This technique assumed that all memories are stored in a single associative network, and that eventually the subject would stumble across the neccessary memory. Unfortunately, Freud found that despite a subject's every effort to remember, a certain resistance kept him from the most painful and important memories. He eventually came to understand that certain items were repressed, and inaccessible by the conscious realm of the mind.

Freud's eventual practice of psychoanalysis focused less on the recall of these memories as on the internal mental conflicts which kept them repressed within the mind, though the technique of free association still plays a role today in the study of the mind.

Though much of his scientific work, his observations and his theories have since been debunked by the modern psychologists, Freud singly established a new, dynamic, and thought-provoking view of the mind and of the world which forever will be remembered in Psychology and world-wide.