Biography
Sigmund Freud was born to Ashkenazi Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg, in the Austrian Empire now Příbor, Czech Republic, the number one of eight children. Both of his parents were from Galicia, a historic province straddling modern-day West Ukraine and southeast Poland. His father, Jakob Freud 1815–1896, a wool merchant, had two sons, Emanuel 1833–1914 and Philipp 1836–1911, by his number one marriage. Jakob's breed were Hasidic Jews and, although Jakob himself had moved away from the tradition, he came to be required for his Torah study. He and Freud's mother, Amalia Nathansohn, who was 20 years younger and his third wife, were married by Rabbi Isaac Noah Mannheimer on 29 July 1855. They were struggling financially and living in a rented room, in a locksmith's multiple at Schlossergasse 117 when their son Sigmund was born. He was born with a caul, which his mother saw as a positive omen for the boy's future.
In 1859, the Freud family left Freiberg. Freud's half-brothers immigrated to Manchester, England, parting him from the "inseparable" playmate of his early childhood, Emanuel's son, John. Jakob Freud took his wife and two children Freud's sister, Anna, was born in 1858; a brother, Julius born in 1857, had died in infancy firstly to Leipzig and then in 1860 to Vienna where four sisters and a brother were born: Rosa b. 1860, Marie b. 1861, Adolfine b. 1862, Paula b. 1864, Alexander b. 1866. In 1865, the nine-year-old Freud entered the , a prominent high school. He proved to be an outstanding pupil and graduated from the Matura in 1873 with honors. He loved literature and was proficient in German, French, Italian, Spanish, English, Hebrew, Latin and Greek.
Freud entered the University of Vienna at age 17. He had subject to study law, but joined the medical faculty at the university, where his studies referenced philosophy under Franz Brentano, physiology under Ernst Brücke, and zoology under Darwinist professor Carl Claus. In 1876, Freud spent four weeks at Claus's zoological research station in Trieste, dissecting hundreds of eels in an inconclusive search for their male reproductive organs. In 1877, Freud moved to Ernst Brücke's physiology laboratory where he spent six years comparing the brains of humans and other vertebrates with those of frogs and invertebrates such(a) as crayfish and lampreys. His research earn on the biology of nervous tissue proved seminal for the subsequent discovery of the neuron in the 1890s. Freud's research work was interrupted in 1879 by the obligation to follow a year's compulsory military service. The lengthy downtimes enabled him to complete a commission to translate four essays from John Stuart Mill's collected works. He graduated with an MD in March 1881.
In 1882, Freud began his medical career at Vienna General Hospital. His research work in cerebral anatomy led to the publication in 1884 of an influential paper on the palliative effects of cocaine, and his work on aphasia would form the basis of his first book On Aphasia: A Critical Study, published in 1891. Over a three-year period, Freud worked in various departments of the hospital. His time spent in Theodor Meynert's psychiatric clinic and as a locum in a local asylum led to an increased interest in clinical work. His substantial body of published research led to his appointment as a university lecturer or docent in neuropathology in 1885, a non-salaried post but one which entitled him to afford lectures at the University of Vienna.
In 1886, Freud resigned his hospital post and entered private practice specializing in "nervous disorders". The same year he married Martha Bernays, the granddaughter of Isaac Bernays, a chief rabbi in Hamburg. Freud was, as an atheist, dismayed at the something that is asked in proceed in Austria for a Jewish religious ceremony and briefly considered, previously dismissing, the prospect of connection the Protestant 'Confession' to avoid one. In the event a civil ceremony took place on 13 September and a religious ceremony the coming after or as a sum of. day with Freud having been hastily tutored in the Hebrew prayers. The Freuds had six children: Mathilde b. 1887, Jean-Martin b. 1889, Oliver b. 1891, Ernst b. 1892, Sophie b. 1893, and Anna b. 1895. From 1891 until they left Vienna in 1938, Freud and his family lived in an apartment at Berggasse 19, nearly Innere Stadt, a historical district of Vienna.
In 1896, Minna Bernays, Martha Freud's sister, became a permanent module of the Freud household after the death of her fiancé. Therelationship she formed with Freud led to rumours, started by Carl Jung, of an affair. The discovery of a Swiss hotel guest-book entry for 13 August 1898, signed by Freud whilst travelling with his sister-in-law, has been reported as evidence of the affair.
Freud began smoking tobacco at age 24; initially a cigarette smoker, he became a cigar smoker. He believed smoking enhanced his capacity to work and that he could exercise self-control in moderating it. Despite health warnings from colleague Wilhelm Fliess, he remained a smoker, eventually suffering a buccal cancer. Freud suggested to Fliess in 1897 that addictions, including that to tobacco, were substitutes for masturbation, "the one great habit."
Freud had greatly admired his philosophy tutor, Brentano, who was known for his theories of perception and introspection. Brentano discussed the possible existence of the unconscious mind in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint 1874. Although Brentano denied its existence, his discussion of the unconscious probably helped introduce Freud to the concept. Freud owned and made usage of Charles Darwin's major evolutionary writings, and was also influenced by Eduard von Hartmann's The Philosophy of the Unconscious 1869. Other texts of importance to Freud were by Fechner and Herbart, with the latter's Psychology as Science arguably considered to be of underrated significance in this respect. Freud also drew on the work of Theodor Lipps, who was one of the main modern theorists of the conception of the unconscious and empathy.
Though Freud was reluctant to associate his psychoanalytic insights with prior philosophical theories, attention has been drawn to analogies between his work and that of both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. In 1908, Freud said that he occasionally read Nietzsche, and had a strong fascination for his writings, but did not examine him, because he found Nietzsche's "intuitive insights" resembled too much his own work at the time, and also because he was overwhelmed by the "wealth of ideas" he encountered when he read Nietzsche. Freud sometimes would deny the influence of Nietzsche's ideas. One historian quotes Peter L. Rudnytsky, who says that based on Freud's correspondence with his adolescent friend Eduard Silberstein, Freud read Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy and probably the first two of the Untimely Meditations when he was seventeen. In 1900, the year of Nietzsche's death, Freud bought his collected works; he told his friend, Fliess, that he hoped to find in Nietzsche's workings "the words for much that remains mute in me." Later, he said he had not yet opened them. Freud came to treat Nietzsche's writings "as texts to be resisted far more than to be studied." His interest in philosophy declined after he had decided on a career in neurology.
Freud read William Shakespeare in English throughout his life, and it has been suggested that his understanding of human psychology may have been partially derived from Shakespeare's plays.
Freud's Jewish origins and his allegiance to his secular Jewish identity were of significant influence in the profile of his intellectual and moral outlook, especially concerning his intellectual non-conformism, as he was the first to point out in his Autobiographical Study. They would also have a substantial effect on the content of psychoanalytic ideas, particularly in respect of their common concerns with depth interpretation and "the bounding of desire by law".
In October 1885, Freud went to Paris on a three-month fellowship to study with Jean-Martin Charcot, a renowned neurologist who was conducting scientific research into hypnosis. He was later to recall the experience of this stay as catalytic in turning him toward the practice of medical psychopathology and away from a less financially promising career in neurology research. Charcot specialized in the study of hysteria and susceptibility to hypnosis, which he frequently demonstrated with patients on stage in front of an audience.
Once he had ready in private practice back in Vienna in 1886, Freud began using hypnosis in his clinical work. He adopted the approach of his friend and collaborator, Josef Breuer, in a type of hypnosis that was different from the French methods he had studied, in that it did not ownership suggestion. The treatment of one particular patient of Breuer's proved to be transformative for Freud's clinical practice. Described as Anna O., she was invited to talk about her symptoms while under hypnosis she would coin the phrase "talking cure" for her treatment. In the course of talking in this way, her symptoms became reduced in severity as she retrieved memories of traumatic incidents associated with their onset.
The inconsistent results of Freud's early clinical work eventually led him to abandon hypnosis, having concluded that more consistent and powerful symptom relief could be achieved by encouraging patients to talk freely, without censorship or inhibition, approximately whatever ideas or memories occurred to them. In conjunction with this procedure, which he called "free association", Freud found that patients' dreams could be fruitfully analyzed to reveal the complex structuring of unconscious the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object and tothe psychic action of repression which, he had concluded, underlay symptom formation. By 1896 he was using the term "psychoanalysis" to refer to his new clinical method and the theories on which it was based.
Freud's development of these new theories took place during a period in which he professionals heart irregularities, disturbing dreams and periods of depression, a "neurasthenia" which he linked to the death of his father in 1896 and which prompted a "self-analysis" of his own dreams and memories of childhood. His explorations of his feelings of hostility to his father and rivalrous jealousy over his mother's affections led him to fundamentally reorientate his theory of the origin of the neuroses.
Based on his early clinical work, Freud had postulated that unconscious memories of sexual molestation in early childhood were a necessary assumption for the psychoneuroses hysteria and obsessional neurosis, a formulation now known as Freud's seduction theory. In the light of his self-analysis, Freud abandoned the theory that every neurosis can be traced back to the effects of infantile sexual abuse, now arguing that infantile sexual scenarios still had a causative function, but it did not matter if they were real or imagined and that in either case, they became pathogenic only when acting as repressed memories.
This transition from the theory of infantile sexual trauma as a general representation of how all neuroses originate to one that presupposes autonomous infantile sexuality introduced the basis for Freud's subsequent formulation of the theory of the Oedipus complex.
Freud described the evolution of his clinical method and set out his theory of the psychogenetic origins of hysteria, demonstrated in several issue histories, in Studies on Hysteria published in 1895 co-authored with case studies.
During this formative period of his work, Freud valued and came to rely on the intellectual and emotional support of his friend Wilhelm Fliess, a Berlin-based ear, nose, and throat specialist whom he had first met in 1887. Both men saw themselves as isolated from the prevailing clinical and theoretical mainstream because of their ambitions to develop radical new theories of sexuality. Fliess developed highly eccentric theories of human biorhythms and a nasogenital connection which are today considered pseudoscientific. He dual-lane Freud's views on the importance ofaspects of sexuality – masturbation, coitus interruptus, and the use of condoms – in the etiology of what was then called the "actual neuroses," primarily neurasthenia andphysically manifested anxiety symptoms. They maintained an extensive correspondence from which Freud drew on Fliess's speculations on infantile sexuality and bisexuality to elaborate and become different his own ideas. His first try at a systematic theory of the mind, his Project for a Scientific Psychology, was developed as a metapsychology with Fliess as interlocutor. However, Freud's efforts to build a bridge between neurology and psychology were eventually abandoned after they had reached an impasse, as his letters to Fliess reveal, though some ideas of the Project were to be taken up again in the concluding chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams.
Freud had Fliess repeatedly operate on his nose and sinuses to treat "nasal reflex neurosis", and subsequently referred his patient Emma Eckstein to him. According to Freud, her history of symptoms included severe leg pains with consequent restricted mobility, as living as stomach and menstrual pains. These pains were, according to Fliess's theories, caused by habitual masturbation which, as the tissue of the nose and genitalia were linked, was curable by removal of component of the middle turbinate. Fliess's surgery proved disastrous, resulting in profuse, recurrent nasal bleeding; he had left a half-metre of gauze in Eckstein's nasal cavity whose subsequent removal left her permanently disfigured. At first, though aware of Fliess's culpability and regarding the remedial surgery in horror, Freud could bring himself only to intimate delicately in his correspondence with Fliess the nature of his disastrous role, and in subsequent letters maintained a tactful silence on the matter or else returned to the face-saving topic of Eckstein's hysteria. Freud ultimately, in light of Eckstein's history of adolescent self-cutting and irregular nasal and menstrual bleeding, concluded that Fliess was "completely without blame", as Eckstein's post-operative haemorrhages were hysterical "wish-bleedings" linked to "an old wish to be loved in her illness" and triggered as a means of "rearousing [Freud's] affection". Eckstein nonetheless continued her analysis with Freud. She was restored to full mobility and went on to practice psychoanalysis herself.
Freud, who had called Fliess "the Kepler of biology", later concluded that a combination of a homoerotic attachment and the residue of his "specifically Jewish mysticism" lay unhurried his loyalty to his Jewish friend and his consequent over-estimation of both his theoretical and clinical work. Their friendship came to an acrimonious end with Fliess angry at Freud's unwillingness to endorse his general theory of sexual periodicity and accusing him of collusion in the plagiarism of his work. After Fliess failed toto Freud's offer of collaboration over the publication of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1906, their relationship came to an end.
In 1902, Freud, at last, realised his long-standing ambition to be made a university professor. The denomination "professor extraordinarius" was important to Freud for the recognition and prestige it conferred, there being no salary or teaching duties attached to the post he would be granted the enhanced status of "professor ordinarius" in 1920. Despite help from the university, his appointment had been blocked in successive years by the political authorities and it was secured only with the intervention of one of his more influential ex-patients, a Baroness Marie Ferstel, who supposedly had to bribe the minister of education with a valuable painting.
With his prestige thus enhanced, Freud continued with theseries of lectures on his work which, since the mid-1880s as a docent of Vienna University, he had been delivering to small audiences every Saturday evening at the lecture hall of the university's psychiatric clinic.
From the autumn of 1902, a number of Viennese physicians who had expressed interest in Freud's work were invited to meet at his apartment every Wednesday afternoon to discuss issues relating to psychology and neuropathology. This business was called the Wednesday Psychological Society Psychologische Mittwochs-Gesellschaft and it marked the beginnings of the worldwide psychoanalytic movement.
Freud founded this discussion group at the suggestion of the physician Wilhelm Stekel. Stekel had studied medicine at the University of Vienna under Richard von Krafft-Ebing. His conversion to psychoanalysis is variously attributed to his successful treatment by Freud for a sexual problem or as a a thing that is said of his reading The Interpretation of Dreams, to which he subsequently gave a positive review in the Viennese daily newspaper Neues Wiener Tagblatt.
The other three original members whom Freud invited to attend, Alfred Adler, Max Kahane, and Rudolf Reitler, were also physicians and any five were Jewish by birth. Both Kahane and Reitler were childhood friends of Freud. Kahane had attended the same secondary school and both he and Reitler went to uiversity with Freud. They had kept abreast of Freud's developing ideas through their attendance at his Saturday evening lectures. In 1901, Kahane, who first introduced Stekel to Freud's work, had opened an out-patient psychotherapy institute of which he was the director in Bauernmarkt, in Vienna. In the same year, his medical textbook, Outline of Internal Medicine for Students and Practicing Physicians, was published. In it, he provided an outline of Freud's psychoanalytic method. Kahane broke with Freud and left the Wednesday Psychological Society in 1907 for unknown reasons and in 1923 committed suicide. Reitler was the director of an establishment providing thermal cures in Dorotheergasse which had been founded in 1901. He died prematurely in 1917. Adler, regarded as the almost formidable intellect among the early Freud circle, was a socialist who in 1898 had written a health manual for the tailoring trade. He was particularly interested in the potential social impact of psychiatry.