Sigmund Freud

Their life

The Viennese neurologist who proposed that we are strangers to ourselves — dreams, slips, and symptoms as messages from an unconscious mind. Much of his system has been revised; the habit of listening for hidden motives changed civilization anyway.

Known for

• Founding psychoanalysis
• The unconscious mind
• The Interpretation of Dreams
• Id, ego, and superego
• Oedipus complex
• The 'talking cure'

The road they walked

Sigmund Freud was a Viennese physician who set out to map the parts of the mind we cannot see, and in doing so invented a whole method of listening: psychoanalysis. Trained as a neurologist, he spent his career arguing that dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue, and neurotic symptoms were not noise but disguised messages — the mind's compromises between desire and repression. He gave the modern world much of its vocabulary for inner life: the unconscious, repression, the ego, denial, projection, the Freudian slip.

He was born in Freiberg, Moravia, in the Austrian Empire, to a Jewish wool merchant's family that moved to Vienna when he was a child. Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century was a city of grand medical science and simmering anxiety, and Freud trained in its university's laboratories before a formative stint in Paris studying hysteria under Jean-Martin Charcot. Back in Vienna, working alongside Josef Breuer on the case of a patient known as Anna O., he became convinced that traumatic memories, kept out of conscious awareness, could surface as physical and psychological symptoms — and that talking through them, systematically, could bring relief.

From there the turning points came quickly: his own self-analysis after his father's death, the 1899 publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, and the founding of a movement that drew brilliant, contentious followers — Carl Jung and Alfred Adler among them — many of whom eventually broke from him over the scope and mechanics of his theories. Freud kept building anyway, extending his ideas from the clinical couch to civilization itself in works like Totem and Taboo and Civilization and Its Discontents. Much of the architecture he built has since been revised or discarded by science, but the underlying instinct he installed in modern culture — to suspect that our stated reasons are not our real ones — proved durable.

How their story ended

Freud spent his last sixteen years battling jaw and mouth cancer, almost certainly linked to his lifelong cigar habit, enduring more than thirty operations. In 1938, after Nazi Germany annexed Austria, he fled Vienna for London with help from friends and admirers, though several of his sisters later died in concentration camps. By September 1939 the cancer was untreatable and his suffering unbearable; at his request, his physician Max Schur administered a fatal dose of morphine. He died in London on September 23, 1939, in exile from the city that had shaped him.

In their words

We attribute every quotation to the person we believe said it, and cite the source where we can place it. If you spot a misattribution or a factual error, please tell us — we will check it and correct the record.

Tables where Sigmund sits

The Mind’s Table

For understanding yourself and why you do what you do.

From the Journal