Sigmund Freud

Formative Years

Sigmund Schlomo Freud was born in May 6, 1856 in the small town of Freiberg, now part of the Czech Republic. In 1860 the family moved to Vienna where Sigmund, as he will be called an education with an emphasis on classical literature and philosophy – an education that would serve him in developing his theories, and offer a wider audience. The bubbling cultural, ethnic tensions and conflicts of class at the end of the century Vienna were part of daily life of Freud.The city is a hotbed for radical innovations in politics, philosophy, art and science. Freud chose to start to focus research in neurology, a field in which the frontiers of knowledge developed dramatically. Financial worries, led to further clinical work with patients. His analysis of patients and was even the main source of professional writing.

Religion and the “Godless Jew”

Sigmund Schlomo Freud - Birth certificate, May 6, 1856

Many have studied the role of religion in the thinking of Freud speculated. Born into a Jewish family, whose religious roots, living a secular life, Sigmund Freud, while continuing to identify themselves as Jewish. Jacob Freud, Sigmund’s father has put a copy of the family Bible to her adult son, with an inscription in Hebrew, called “memorial” and a sign of love. ”

In my youth I felt an overpowering need to understand something of the riddles of the world in which we live and perhaps even to contribute something to their solution.

– Sigmund Freud, 1927

Freud Family

Freud’s mother, Amalia, is perhaps the third wife of his father, and twenty years younger. Sigmund’s half-brother, Manuel, was older than her mother and had her own children, when Sigmund was born. Thus was born, an uncle Sigmund – a year younger than his first playmate, his nephew.

The Jacob Freud family, Vienna,
ca. 1878
Copyprint
Freud Museum, London (7)

(left to right standing) Pauline, Anna, unidentified girl, Sigmund, possibly Rosa’s fiancé, Rosa, Marie, and Simon Nathanson [Amalia's cousin]; (sitting) Adolfine, Amalia, unidentified boy, Alexander, and Jacob

Freud became a liberal because the liberal world view was congenial to him and because, as the saying goes, it was good for the Jews.

– Peter Gay, 1988

Vienna

At the turn of the century Vienna is a city that seemed both to resist and to encourage experimentation in politics and culture. Having done much of Freud’s work in the city, took his concern and approach to problems in the field of intellectual traditions and medical advances of a pan-European framework. Married after one to four years of commitments, Martha Bernays Freud in Vienna and in the home for all but the last sixteen months of their life together. This collage of family photos, a young Sigmund and Martha and their six children.

Engagement album photographs of Martha Bernays
in 1880 and of Freud and Martha in 1886
Sigmund Freud Collection

Unpleasure remains the sole means of education.

– Sigmund Freud, 1895

Early work in neuroscience

Initial training in neurology Freud left him with the ambition to find the biological basis – all psychological conditions. The brief was for him at the intersection of biological diversity and the psychological. When we remember we are recoding the first neurological signs. He described his research in his letters to Martha Bernays, his future wife.

In any event, [Freud's] researches in this field prove an extraordinary gift and capacity for guiding scientific investigation into new channels.

– R. von Krafft-Ebing, 1888

Ambitions of cocaine

Freud believed that what was then little known drugs can be very useful to combat melancholy morphine and cocaine. Around the same time, a colleague, Carl Koller, successfully experimented with drugs as a local anesthetic, especially for eye surgery. Freud received a coveted recognition Koller experimented with the drug itself and the other insists, before realizing that it could become addictive.

Many, if not most of Freud’s fundamental conceptions were biological by inspiration as well as by implication.

-- Frank Sulloway, 1979

The transition to medicine

Although dedicated to research in early Freud, financial considerations have led to a doctor. He has experience in the Vienna General Hospital, before founding his own practice at home, the most famous 19 in the Berggasse His patient was a main source of his research and writing.