Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist whose 50-year medical career produced one of the foundational bodies of work in 20th-century psychology — the founding of psychoanalysis, the first comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding the unconscious mind. He was born Sigismund Schlomo Freud on May 6, 1856, in Freiberg, Austrian Empire (now Příbor, Czech Republic), into a Galician-Jewish wool-merchant family. His father Jacob Freud was a wool merchant and his mother Amalia Nathansohn was Jacob's third wife, 20 years his junior. The family relocated to Vienna in 1860, where Freud lived for the next 78 years.

His education at the University of Vienna (M.D. in medicine, 1881) launched his early-career path. His 1885 four-month research fellowship in Paris with neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital produced his interest in hypnosis and hysteria — the foundation of his later psychoanalytic theories. His 1886 Vienna private practice in nervous-system disorders launched his clinical career.

His 1895 publication of Studies on Hysteria with Josef Breuer — which introduced the "talking cure" method that became the foundation of psychoanalysis — and his 1900 publication of The Interpretation of Dreams launched his foundational psychoanalytic-theory career. His subsequent major works — The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Totem and Taboo (1913), The Ego and the Id (1923), and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) — produced one of the foundational bodies of 20th-century psychological theory.

His central concepts — the unconscious mind, the structural model of id-ego-superego, the Oedipus complex, the defense mechanisms, free association, and dream interpretation — shaped 20th-century Western intellectual culture across psychology, literature, art, and popular culture. The 1938 Nazi annexation of Austria forced his June 1938 emigration to London with his daughter Anna Freud. He died on September 23, 1939, at age 83, in London, of physician-assisted morphine overdose to end his suffering from oral cancer (which he had been diagnosed with in 1923 and which produced 33 surgical operations on his jaw across the next 16 years).

His name Sigmund derives from the Old Germanic root meaning "protection through victory." Sigmund has been a rare but enduring boys' name across German and Eastern European-tradition American naming.