Sigmund Freud Biography and List of Works

"The only unnatural sexual behaviour is none at all."

Austrian psychiatrist and founder of psychoanalysis, the most influential psychological theorist of the 20th-century. Freud's theories, including the formation of the Oedipus complex, have had an enormous influence on art, literature, and social thinking. Freud's fundamental idea was that all humans are endowed with an unconscious in which potent sexual and aggressive drives, and defences against them, struggle for supremacy. It is often asserted that Freud "discovered" the unconscious mind. However, the idea is found in the work of many thinkers and authors from the times of Homer.

Sigmund Freud was born of Jewish parentage in Freiburg, Moravia, Austria-Hungary. His mother Amalia Nathansohn was twenty years younger than his father, the wool merchant Jakob Freud. The family moved in 1860 to Vienna, where discriminating laws against the Jews had been cancelled during 1850s and 1860s. Freud studied medicine at the University of Vienna under Josef Bauer, a Viennese physician, who introduced Freud to the method of treating hysteria. In 1895 they co-authored Studies in Hysteria.

From 1882 to 1886 Freud worked at the General Hospital, and experimented among others with cocaine, also using it himself. He went to Paris in 1885 to study under Jean Martin Charcot at the Salpetrière Hospital. There the hypnotic treatment of women, who suffered from a medical state called "hysteria", led Freud to take an interest in psychiatry. Freud married Martha Bernays in 1886 and opened private practice on the same year. Their address from 1891 was Berggasse 19, where the family lived until 1938.

In 1900 Freud published his first major work, The Interpretation of Dreams, which established the importance of psychoanalytical movement. In 1902 he was appointed Ausserordentlicher Professor, and in 1905 appeared Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In 1909 he travelled with Carl Jung in the United States, lecturing and meeting among others American philosopher and psychologist William James (SEE UNDER his brother, writer Henry James).

By the beginning of the 1920s, Freud's writing had given rise to several associates of psychoanalysis. In spite of the recognition of his work Freud was never awarded with the Nobel Prize, but in 1928 an attempt was made for his nomination. This was supported by Alfred Döblin, Jacob Wassermann, Bertrand Russell, A.S. Neill, Lytton Strachey, Julian Huxley, Knut Hamsun, Thomas Mann. Albert Einstein didn't join the campaign, although he had been in correspondence with Freud.

After Hitler's seizure of power, psychoanalytic work came to an end in Germany, and Freud's books were burnt in Berlin. His views were also condemned in the USSR . When Nazis invaded Austria Freud fled to London. He died of throat cancer three weeks after the outbreak of WW II in 1939. He died on September 23, 1939 aided by euthanasia.

Anna Freud (1895-1982) Freud's daughter, who became a major force in British psychology, and specialized in the application of psychoanalysis to children. Among her best-known works is The Ego and the Mechanism of Defence (1936). Anna Freud never married, but devoted herself to defending and developing the theoretical principles of her father.

NOTE: Freud's favourite writers in 1907: Gottfried Keller, Conrad Fardinand Meyer, Anatole France, Émile Zola, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Macaulay, Dimitri Merezkovski, Eduard Douwes Dekker (Multatuli), Theodor Gomperz, Mark Twain. Freud also enjoyed Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers's mystery novels in later years. Other favorites: Goethe, Schiller, Heinrich Heine, Wilhelm Busch, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig. - Freud's theories were also largely mocked in literature. Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnar presented an idea, where a young man is happily married with his mother, but finds out that she is not really his mother and commits suicide. James Thurber and E.B. White published Is Sex Necessary? or, Why You Feel the Way You Do (1929), where they caricaturised psychoanalytical terms.

Glossary: Penis envy: women wish they had what men are born with; Freudian slip: a seemingly meaningless slip of the tongue that reveals an unconscious thought; Oedipus complex: children in their phallic phase (ages three to six) form an erotic attachment to the parent of the opposite sex, and concomitant hatred of the parent of the same sex; Castration anxiety: a boy's unconscious fear of losing his penis; Id: the part of mind from which primal needs and drives emerge; Superego: the part of mind where your parents' and society's rules reside; Ego: the minds mechanism for keeping in touch with reality, it referees the conflict between id and superego

For further reading: Sigmund Freud: Life and Work by E. Jones (1953-57); The Ability to Mourn: Eros and Civilization by Herbert Marcuse / (1974, paperback); Freud: The Mind of the Moralist by Phillip Rieff (1979, paperback); Dire Mastery: Discipleship from Freud to Lacan by Francois Roustang (1986, paperback); Disillusionment and the Social Origins of Psychoanalysis by Peter Homans (1989); Freud by Anthony Storr (1989 paperback); Freud and the Problem of God by Hans Kung (1990); The Cambridge Companion to Freud, ed. by Jerome Neu (1992, paperback); Freud and His Followers by Paul Roazen (1992, paperback); The Case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity at the Fin De Siecle by Sander L. Gilman (1994, paperback); Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities: Freud and Beyond by Nancy J. Chodorow (1994); Drawing the Dream of the Wolves: Homosexuality, Interpretation, and Freud's 'Wolf Man' by Whitney Davis (1995, paperback); Essays on the Pleasures of Death: From Freud to Lacan by Ellie Ragland Sullivan (1995, paperback); A Final Accounting: Philosophical and Empirical Issues in Freudian Psychology by Edward Erwin (1995); Back to Freud's Texts: Making Silent Documents Speak by Ilse Grubrich-Simitis (1996); Freud and the Passions, ed. by John O'Neill (1996, paperback); Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression by Jacques Derrida (1996); Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions by John Forrester (1997); The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1998, paperback); Freud: A Life for Our Time by Peter Gay (1998, paperback); Early Freud and Late Freud: Reading Anew Studies on Hysteria and Moses and Monotheism by Ilse Grubrich-Simitis (1998, paperback); Dr. Freud, a Life by Paul Ferris (1998); Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions by John Forrester (1997); Freud: From Youthful Dream to Mid-Life Crisis by Peter M. Newton (1999); Analytic Freud: Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, ed. by Michael P. Levine (2000)

NOTE: Hogarth Press, Freud's publisher in England, was owned by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. - NOTE: In Moses and Monotheism Freud claimed, that Shakespeare's works were written by Edward de Vere, and based his opinion on Thomas Looney's work Shakespeare Identified (1920) - SEE ALSO: Carl Jung, Freud's 'crown prince', who broke with Freud over the latter's emphasis on sexuality on as the dominant factor in unconscious motivation. - Other psychoanalysts: Marie Bonaparte, Sabina Spielrein, Alfred Adler - FOR FURTHER INFORMATION: Sigmund Freud - The Father of Psychoanalysis

ZUR AUFFASSUNG DER APHASIEN, (1891)