Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud was the creator of psychoanalytic theory, and one of the twentieth-century’s most influential thinkers in the fields of psychology and sociology. Born in Austria to Galician Jewish parents in 1856, Freud trained to be a doctor at the University of Vienna, graduating in 1881. Freud studied the brain, including cerebral palsy and aphasia, before developing methods of treating psychological ailments through what he called “the talking cure,” which consisted of a combination of “dream analysis,” “free association,” and intensive questioning into the patient’s familial relations. Freud married Martha Bernays in 1886 and with her had six children. There were rumors as well that, after 1896, Freud had an ongoing affair with Martha’s sister, Minna Bernays. Meanwhile, Freud’s career flourished, in both private practice and as a professor. Freud’s ideas proved to be enormously influential, including his notions of repression and the unconscious, and his concepts of “the Oedipus complex” (describing a son’s desire to kill his father and wed his mother); “anal retentiveness” (regarding obsessive organization in early childhood) and the “ego,” “id,” and “superego”—which Freud described as the three components of the mind. Freud fled Austria in 1938 to escape the Nazis, and died a year later in England. His ideas remain important in psychology and many other fields, such as literary studies. Many of his students, including Carl Jung, also went on to influential careers in psychology, though many of their ideas diverged from their former teacher’s over time and they developed their own schools of thought.