Sigmund Freud was born in the small town of Freiberg in the Austrian Empire (now Příbor, Czech Republic). Trained as a neurologist in Vienna, he would go on to develop psychoanalysis, introducing concepts like the unconscious, repression, and the Oedipus complex that transformed psychology, literature, and Western culture's understanding of the self, even as many of his specific theories were later challenged or discarded.
Freud's family moved to Vienna when he was four, fleeing economic hardship, and he would spend nearly his entire life in that city until fleeing Nazi persecution in 1938. He trained as a physician specializing in neurology, and his early work involved unglamorous laboratory research on eel gonads and cocaine's physiological effects before he turned toward the treatment of hysteria and neurosis.
Working with patients like 'Anna O.' (treated by his colleague Josef Breuer) and developing his own technique of free association, Freud proposed that psychological symptoms often stemmed from repressed memories and unconscious conflicts, frequently sexual in origin. His books, including 'The Interpretation of Dreams' and 'The Ego and the Id,' introduced a vocabulary that seeped into everyday language: ego, id, superego, Freudian slip, denial.
Freud smoked twenty cigars a day and battled oral cancer for the last sixteen years of his life, undergoing more than thirty operations. He died in London in 1939, having escaped Vienna after the Nazi annexation of Austria, a Jewish intellectual whose books were burned by the regime he fled.
Key people: Sigmund Freud