Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis, both a theory of the mind and a method of treating mental distress by talking. His ideas about the unconscious, repression, dreams, childhood sexuality and the divided self spread far beyond medicine into literature, art and everyday speech, making him one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. They have also been sharply criticised, and their scientific standing remains disputed.

Freud was born Sigismund Schlomo Freud on 6 May 1856 in Freiberg (now Příbor), a small town in Moravia, then in the Austrian Empire and today in the Czech Republic. His father, Jakob, was a Jewish wool merchant; his mother, Amalia, was Jakob's third wife and twenty years younger. After the business failed, the family moved in 1860 to Vienna, where Freud lived for the next seventy-eight years. He was an outstanding pupil, and in 1873 entered the University of Vienna. He was drawn to science partly by reading Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution shaped his view of humans as animals driven by instincts.

At university he worked for six years in the physiology laboratory of Ernst Brücke, studying the nervous systems of fish and crayfish, and qualified as a doctor in 1881. Needing a better income in order to marry, he trained at Vienna General Hospital. In 1884 he published a paper praising cocaine, then little known; he urged it on his friend Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow to cure his morphine addiction, but Fleischl became dependent on cocaine instead, an episode that damaged Freud's reputation. In 1885 and 1886 he spent several months in Paris with the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who was using hypnosis to study hysteria, a condition with physical symptoms that had no detectable physical cause. Back in Vienna in 1886, Freud opened a private practice for nervous disorders and married Martha Bernays. They had six children; the youngest, Anna, became a leading psychoanalyst herself.

Freud's older colleague Josef Breuer had treated a young woman, known in the literature as Anna O. and later identified as Bertha Pappenheim, whose symptoms seemed to ease when she talked under hypnosis about painful past experiences; she called it the talking cure. Freud and Breuer published Studies on Hysteria in 1895, arguing that hysterical symptoms came from forgotten, emotionally charged memories. Historians have since questioned how far Anna O. was actually cured.

Freud gradually replaced hypnosis with free association, asking patients lying on a couch to say whatever came into their minds without censoring it. At first he believed that hysteria was caused by sexual abuse in childhood, the so-called seduction theory. By 1897 he had abandoned it as a general explanation, concluding that many such memories reflected the child's own wishes and fantasies. Critics have argued ever since about whether this change led analysts to disbelieve real abuse. During the same years, after his father's death in 1896, he analysed his own dreams and memories, discussing them in letters with his friend Wilhelm Fliess, a Berlin physician.

The Interpretation of Dreams, published in November 1899 but dated 1900, set out his central claim: that much of mental life is unconscious, and that unacceptable wishes, pushed out of awareness by repression, still find their way out in disguised forms. A dream, he argued, is the disguised fulfilment of a wish. Its obvious story, the manifest content, conceals a hidden meaning, the latent content, which can be uncovered by following the dreamer's associations. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) he applied the same idea to forgetting and slips of the tongue, the so-called Freudian slip.

In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) he argued that sexuality begins in infancy and develops in stages. Central to this was the Oedipus complex, named after the Greek king who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother: the young child's desire for one parent and rivalry with the other, which, he held, must be resolved for healthy development. In therapy he stressed transference, the patient's tendency to direct feelings about parents and other important figures on to the analyst.

After World War I, shaken by the war and by the persistence of trauma in soldiers, he revised his theory. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) proposed a death drive, an urge towards destruction and repetition, alongside the life instincts. The Ego and the Id (1923) divided the mind into three parts: the id, the source of instinctual drives; the superego, the internalised voice of parents and society; and the ego, which mediates between them and the outside world. In later works such as The Future of an Illusion (1927), which treated religion as a comforting illusion, and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), he argued that civilisation requires people to restrain their instincts at the cost of guilt and unhappiness.

From 1902 a group of followers met at Freud's flat at Berggasse 19 every Wednesday, and in 1908 the first international psychoanalytic congress was held in Salzburg. In 1909 he lectured at Clark University in Massachusetts, his only visit to the United States, which helped psychoanalysis take hold there. He hoped the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung would lead the movement, but Jung rejected Freud's emphasis on sexuality, and their friendship ended in 1913. Alfred Adler had already left in 1911. These divisions, and Freud's demand for loyalty, gave the movement a reputation for behaving like a sect.

In 1923 Freud was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw and palate, linked to his heavy cigar smoking. He underwent more than thirty operations and lived for sixteen years in pain, wearing a prosthesis in his mouth. In 1932 he and Albert Einstein exchanged open letters on the causes of war, published as Why War?

When the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, his books were among those publicly burned. In March 1938 Nazi Germany annexed Austria. After the Gestapo detained and questioned his daughter Anna, Freud, then 82, agreed to leave. With help from friends, including Ernest Jones and Princess Marie Bonaparte, who helped pay the costs of emigration, he left Vienna on 4 June 1938 and reached London two days later, settling at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead. Four of his elderly sisters, who had stayed behind, were later murdered in the Holocaust. In London he completed Moses and Monotheism, a controversial reading of Jewish origins. As his cancer became unbearable, his doctor, Max Schur, gave him doses of morphine at his request, and he died on 23 September 1939, three weeks after the outbreak of World War II.

Freud's influence on twentieth-century culture is hard to overstate. Concepts such as the unconscious, repression, denial and the ego entered ordinary language, and the idea of treating mental suffering through conversation underlies much of modern psychotherapy. Writers, artists and film-makers, especially the Surrealists, drew on his ideas.

His scientific reputation is far weaker. The philosopher Karl Popper argued that psychoanalysis could explain any outcome and so could never be proved wrong, which made it unscientific. Later critics questioned the accuracy of his case histories and his claimed cures, and feminist writers attacked his account of women, including the notion of penis envy. Psychiatry largely moved away from psychoanalysis after the 1970s in favour of medication and other therapies, though some of his ideas, such as the importance of unconscious processes and early experience, are accepted in modified forms. His London home is now the Freud Museum.