Sigmund Freud 1856-1939

Early Life

Sigmund Freud was born on May 6, 1856, in the small Moravian town of Freiberg, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in Czechoslovakia. He was brought up much as a country child until 1859 when the family moved, first and briefly to Leipzip, then to Vienna.

Early Career

The Life of Sigmund Freud says, in the 1870s and 1880s, Freud decided he much preferred science to religion. Freud was influenced by Darwin's 1859 Origin of Species, lab work with physiologist Ernst Brucke, and a study of hysterics with Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris, Sigmund Freud became convinced that the human mind and body, could be rationally explained through the scientific method of observation and analysis. This theory was bolstered by his continued experiments with patients who were suffering from hysterias, or physical symptoms that had no ostensible physical cause. Sigmund Freud let his patients speak freely in hopes of unlocking their previously repressed thoughts, a process which led him to conclude that stifled sexual feelings were at the root of these illnesses.

Freud believed that our unconscious was deeply related to the events that took place during childhood. Sigmund Freud grouped these events into various developmental stages stemming from relationships with parents and drives of desire and pleasure where children focus "...on different parts of the body...starting with the mouth...shifting to the oral, anal, and phallic phases..." (Richter 1015). These stages reflect base levels of desire, but they also involve fear of loss (loss of genitals, loss of affection from parents, loss of life) and repression: "...the expunging from consciousness of these unhappy psychological events" (Tyson 15).

Accomplishments

Following four years of analyzing his and others' dreams, Freud published his first major work, The Interpretation of Dreams, in 1900. This book was based off of both a self-analysis of his own dream and his interpretations of what they may mean, as well as the idea that children feel sexual attraction toward their opposite-sex parents, and rivalry toward their same-sex parents, a theory now commonly known as the Oedipus Complex. This idea then laid the foundation for two of Freud's best-known claims — that the sex drive is the main catalyst of all human behavior, and that beliefs in paternalistic religious figures are merely projections of human fears and desires.

Death

Though Freud died by suicide in 1939 by a lethal dose of morphine, his influence continued to spread as the field of psychology evolved. By the time of his death, there were dozens of psychoanalytic societies throughout the world, modeled after one formed in Vienna by early supporters such as Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, and Otto Rank.