132 Facts About Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies seen as originating from conflicts in the psyche, through dialogue between patient and psychoanalyst, and the distinctive theory of mind and human agency derived from it.

Sigmund Freud lived and worked in Vienna having set up his clinical practice there in 1886.

Sigmund Freud died in exile in the United Kingdom in 1939.

On this basis Sigmund Freud elaborated his theory of the unconscious and went on to develop a model of psychic structure comprising id, ego and super-ego.

Nonetheless, Sigmund Freud's work has suffused contemporary Western thought and popular culture.

Sigmund Freud was born to Ashkenazi Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg, in the Austrian Empire, the first of eight children.

Sigmund Freud was born with a caul, which his mother saw as a positive omen for the boy's future.

Sigmund Freud's half-brothers immigrated to Manchester, England, parting him from the "inseparable" playmate of his early childhood, Emanuel's son, John.

In 1865, the nine-year-old Sigmund Freud entered the, a prominent high school.

Sigmund Freud proved to be an outstanding pupil and graduated from the Matura in 1873 with honors.

Sigmund Freud loved literature and was proficient in German, French, Italian, Spanish, English, Hebrew, Latin and Greek.

Sigmund Freud had planned to study law, but joined the medical faculty at the university, where his studies included philosophy under Franz Brentano, physiology under Ernst Brucke, and zoology under Darwinist professor Carl Claus.

In 1876, Sigmund 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, Sigmund Freud moved to Ernst Brucke's physiology laboratory where he spent six years comparing the brains of humans and other vertebrates with those of frogs and invertebrates such as crayfish and lampreys.

In 1882, Sigmund Freud began his medical career at Vienna General Hospital.

Over a three-year period, Sigmund Freud worked in various departments of the hospital.

Sigmund Freud's time spent in Theodor Meynert's psychiatric clinic and as a locum in a local asylum led to an increased interest in clinical work.

In 1886, Sigmund Freud resigned his hospital post and entered private practice specializing in "nervous disorders".

In 1896, Minna Bernays, Martha Sigmund Freud's sister, became a permanent member of the Sigmund Freud household after the death of her fiance.

The close relationship she formed with Sigmund 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 Sigmund Freud whilst travelling with his sister-in-law, has been presented as evidence of the affair.

Sigmund Freud began smoking tobacco at age 24; initially a cigarette smoker, he became a cigar smoker.

Sigmund Freud believed smoking enhanced his capacity to work and that he could exercise self-control in moderating it.

Sigmund Freud had greatly admired his philosophy tutor, Brentano, who was known for his theories of perception and introspection.

Sigmund Freud owned and made use of Charles Darwin's major evolutionary writings, and was influenced by Eduard von Hartmann's The Philosophy of the Unconscious.

Sigmund Freud drew on the work of Theodor Lipps, who was one of the main contemporary theorists of the concepts of the unconscious and empathy.

In 1908, Sigmund Freud said that he occasionally read Nietzsche, and was strongly fascinated by his writings, but did not study him, because he found Nietzsche's "intuitive insights" resembled too much his own work at the time, and because he was overwhelmed by the "wealth of ideas" he encountered when he read Nietzsche.

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.

Sigmund Freud had Fliess repeatedly operate on his nose and sinuses to treat "nasal reflex neurosis", and subsequently referred his patient Emma Eckstein to him.

At first, though aware of Fliess's culpability and regarding the remedial surgery in horror, Sigmund 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.

Sigmund Freud was restored to full mobility and went on to practice psychoanalysis herself.

Sigmund 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 behind his loyalty to his Jewish friend and his consequent overestimation of both his theoretical and clinical work.

In October 1885, Sigmund 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.

Sigmund Freud 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.

Once he had set up in private practice back in Vienna in 1886, Sigmund Freud began using hypnosis in his clinical work.

Sigmund Freud 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 use suggestion.

In conjunction with this procedure, which he called "free association", Sigmund Freud found that patients' dreams could be fruitfully analyzed to reveal the complex structuring of unconscious material and to demonstrate the psychic action of repression which, he had concluded, underlay symptom formation.

Sigmund Freud described the evolution of his clinical method and set out his theory of the psychogenetic origins of hysteria, demonstrated in several case histories, in Studies on Hysteria published in 1895.

In 1899, he published The Interpretation of Dreams in which, following a critical review of existing theory, Sigmund Freud gives detailed interpretations of his own and his patients' dreams in terms of wish-fulfillments made subject to the repression and censorship of the "dream-work".

In works that would win him a more general readership, Sigmund Freud applied his theories outside the clinical setting in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious.

In other of his early case studies Sigmund Freud set out to describe the symptomatology of obsessional neurosis in the case of the Rat man, and phobia in the case of Little Hans.

Sigmund Freud founded this discussion group at the suggestion of the physician Wilhelm Stekel.

The other three original members whom Sigmund Freud invited to attend, Alfred Adler, Max Kahane, and Rudolf Reitler, were physicians and all five were Jewish by birth.

In 1901, Kahane, who first introduced Stekel to Sigmund Freud's work, had opened an out-patient psychotherapy institute of which he was the director in Bauernmarkt, in Vienna.

Kahane broke with Sigmund Freud and left the Wednesday Psychological Society in 1907 for unknown reasons and in 1923 committed suicide.

Adler, regarded as the most formidable intellect among the early Sigmund Freud circle, was a socialist who in 1898 had written a health manual for the tailoring trade.

Sigmund Freud was particularly interested in the potential social impact of psychiatry.

Sigmund Freud himself was its new prophet who made the heretofore prevailing methods of psychological investigation appear superficial.

In March 1907, Jung and Ludwig Binswanger, a Swiss psychiatrist, travelled to Vienna to visit Sigmund Freud and attend the discussion group.

Sigmund Freud turned to Brill and Jones to further his ambition to spread the psychoanalytic cause in the English-speaking world.

Jones's advocacy prepared the way for Sigmund Freud's visit to the United States, accompanied by Jung and Ferenczi, in September 1909 at the invitation of Stanley Hall, president of Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, where he gave five lectures on psychoanalysis.

The event, at which Sigmund Freud was awarded an Honorary Doctorate, marked the first public recognition of Sigmund Freud's work and attracted widespread media interest.

Sigmund Freud's audience included the distinguished neurologist and psychiatrist James Jackson Putnam, Professor of Diseases of the Nervous System at Harvard, who invited Sigmund Freud to his country retreat where they held extensive discussions over a period of four days.

Putnam's subsequent public endorsement of Sigmund Freud's work represented a significant breakthrough for the psychoanalytic cause in the United States.

Later the same year, Sigmund Freud published a paper entitled "The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement", the German original being first published in the Jahrbuch, giving his view on the birth and evolution of the psychoanalytic movement and the withdrawal of Adler and Jung from it.

Sigmund Freud organised a fund to help finance its activities and his architect son, Ernst, was commissioned to refurbish the building.

Sigmund Freud kept abreast of developments through regular correspondence with his principal followers and via the circular letters and meetings of the Secret Committee which he continued to attend.

Sigmund Freud set out his case in favour in 1926 in his The Question of Lay Analysis.

Sigmund Freud was resolutely opposed by the American societies who expressed concerns over professional standards and the risk of litigation.

In 1930, Sigmund Freud received the Goethe Prize in recognition of his contributions to psychology and German literary culture.

In February 1923, Sigmund Freud detected a leukoplakia, a benign growth associated with heavy smoking, on his mouth.

Sigmund Freud initially kept this secret, but in April 1923 he informed Ernest Jones, telling him that the growth had been removed.

Sigmund Freud consulted the dermatologist Maximilian Steiner, who advised him to quit smoking but lied about the growth's seriousness, minimizing its importance.

Sigmund Freud later saw Felix Deutsch, who saw that the growth was cancerous; he identified it to Sigmund Freud using the euphemism "a bad leukoplakia" instead of the technical diagnosis epithelioma.

Deutsch advised Sigmund Freud to stop smoking and have the growth excised.

Sigmund Freud was treated by Marcus Hajek, a rhinologist whose competence he had previously questioned.

Deutsch saw that further surgery would be required, but did not tell Sigmund Freud he had cancer because he was worried that Sigmund Freud might wish to commit suicide.

In January 1933, the Nazi Party took control of Germany, and Sigmund Freud's books were prominent among those they burned and destroyed.

Sigmund Freud had support from American diplomats, notably his ex-patient and American ambassador to France, William Bullitt.

Sigmund Freud intervened by phone call during the Gestapo interrogation of Anna Freud.

Sigmund Freud was allocated to Dr Anton Sauerwald, who had studied chemistry at Vienna University under Professor Josef Herzig, an old friend of Sigmund Freud's.

Unable to access his own accounts, Sigmund Freud turned to Princess Marie Bonaparte, the most eminent and wealthy of his French followers, who had travelled to Vienna to offer her support, and it was she who made the necessary funds available.

Representatives of the Royal Society called with the Society's Charter for Sigmund Freud, who had been elected a Foreign Member in 1936, to sign himself into membership.

Sigmund Freud was tried and imprisoned in 1945 by an Austrian court for his activities as a Nazi Party official.

Sigmund Freud's intervention helped secure his release from jail in 1947.

The study and library areas were arranged to create the atmosphere and visual impression of Sigmund Freud's Vienna consulting rooms.

Sigmund Freud continued to see patients there until the terminal stages of his illness.

Sigmund Freud worked on his last books, Moses and Monotheism, published in German in 1938 and in English the following year and the uncompleted An Outline of Psychoanalysis, which was published posthumously.

Three days after his death, Sigmund Freud's body was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium in North London, with Harrods acting as funeral directors, on the instructions of his son, Ernst.

Sigmund Freud's ashes were later placed in the crematorium's Ernest George Columbarium.

Sigmund Freud began his study of medicine at the University of Vienna in 1873.

Sigmund Freud intervened in the important debates about aphasia with his monograph of 1891, Zur Auffassung der Aphasien, in which he coined the term agnosia and counselled against a too locationist view of the explanation of neurological deficits.

Sigmund Freud was an early researcher in the field of cerebral palsy, which was then known as "cerebral paralysis".

Sigmund Freud published several medical papers on the topic and showed that the disease existed long before other researchers of the period began to notice and study it.

Sigmund Freud suggested that William John Little, the man who first identified cerebral palsy, was wrong about lack of oxygen during birth being a cause.

Sigmund Freud credited Breuer with opening the way to the discovery of the psychoanalytical method by his treatment of the case of Anna O In November 1880, Breuer was called in to treat a highly intelligent 21-year-old woman for a persistent cough and hallucinations that he diagnosed as hysterical.

Sigmund Freud found that while nursing her dying father, she had developed some transitory symptoms, including visual disorders and paralysis and contractures of limbs, which he diagnosed as hysterical.

Sigmund Freud found that when, with his encouragement, she told fantasy stories in her evening states of absence her condition improved, and most of her symptoms had disappeared by April 1881.

Sigmund Freud believed these accounts, which he used as the basis for his seduction theory, but then he came to believe that they were fantasies.

Sigmund Freud subsequently showed inconsistency as to whether his seduction theory was still compatible with his later findings.

Sigmund Freud believed that cocaine was a cure for many mental and physical problems, and in his 1884 paper "On Coca" he extolled its virtues.

Sigmund Freud narrowly missed out on obtaining scientific priority for discovering its anesthetic properties of which he was aware but had mentioned only in passing.

Sigmund Freud believed that while poets and thinkers had long known of the existence of the unconscious, he had ensured that it received scientific recognition in the field of psychology.

Sigmund Freud postulated a cycle in which ideas are repressed, but remain in the mind, removed from consciousness yet operative, then reappear in consciousness under certain circumstances.

Sigmund Freud believed the function of dreams is to preserve sleep by representing as fulfilled wishes that which would otherwise awaken the dreamer.

Sigmund Freud argued that neurosis and perversion could be explained in terms of fixation or regression to these phases whereas adult character and cultural creativity could achieve a sublimation of their perverse residue.

Sigmund Freud hoped to prove that his model was universally valid and turned to ancient mythology and contemporary ethnography for comparative material arguing that totemism reflected a ritualized enactment of a tribal Oedipal conflict.

Sigmund Freud proposed that the human psyche could be divided into three parts: Id, ego, and super-ego.

Sigmund Freud acknowledged that his use of the term Id derives from the writings of Georg Groddeck.

Sigmund Freud compared the relationship between the ego and the id to that between a charioteer and his horses: the horses provide the energy and drive, while the charioteer provides direction.

Sigmund Freud believed that the human psyche is subject to two conflicting drives: the life drive or libido and the death drive.

Sigmund Freud hypothesized that libido is a form of mental energy with which processes, structures, and object-representations are invested.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud inferred the existence of a death drive.

Sigmund Freud had been obliged to abandon that definition, since it proved adequate only to the most rudimentary kinds of mental functioning, and replaced the idea that the apparatus tends toward a level of zero tension with the idea that it tends toward a minimum level of tension.

Sigmund Freud asserted that on certain occasions the mind acts as though it could eliminate tension, or in effect to reduce itself to a state of extinction; his key evidence for this was the existence of the compulsion to repeat.

Sigmund Freud claimed that, in normal mourning, the ego was responsible for narcissistically detaching the libido from the lost one as a means of self-preservation, but that in "melancholia", prior ambivalence towards the lost one prevents this from occurring.

Suicide, Sigmund Freud hypothesized, could result in extreme cases, when unconscious feelings of conflict became directed against the mourner's own ego.

Sigmund Freud regarded the monotheistic God as an illusion based upon the infantile emotional need for a powerful, supernatural pater familias.

Sigmund Freud argues that the belief in a supernatural protector serves as a buffer against man's "fear of nature", just as the belief in an afterlife serves as a buffer against man's fear of death.

Sigmund Freud notes that he has no experience of this feeling himself, and suggests that it is a regression into the state of consciousness that precedes the ego's differentiation of itself from the world of objects and others.

Sigmund Freud's objective was to allow people to experience the split-off aspects of themselves, such as the anima, the animus, or the shadow, and thereby attain wisdom.

Wilhelm Reich developed ideas that Sigmund Freud had developed at the beginning of his psychoanalytic investigation but then superseded but never finally discarded.

Sigmund Freud applied that idea both to infants and to adults.

Richard Webster, in Why Sigmund Freud Was Wrong, described psychoanalysis as perhaps the most complex and successful pseudoscience in history.

The philosopher Adolf Grunbaum argues in The Foundations of Psychoanalysis that Popper was mistaken and that many of Sigmund Freud's theories are empirically testable, a position with which others such as Eysenck agree.

Sigmund Freud's theories influenced the Frankfurt School and critical theory as a whole.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty considers Freud to be one of the anticipators of phenomenology, while Theodor W Adorno considers Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, to be Freud's philosophical opposite, writing that Husserl's polemic against psychologism could have been directed against psychoanalysis.

Jean-Francois Lyotard developed a theory of the unconscious that reverses Sigmund Freud's account of the dream-work: for Lyotard, the unconscious is a force whose intensity is manifest via disfiguration rather than condensation.

Jacques Derrida finds Sigmund Freud to be both a late figure in the history of western metaphysics and, with Nietzsche and Heidegger, a precursor of his own brand of radicalism.

Ernest Gellner argues that Sigmund Freud's theories are an inversion of Plato's.

Whereas Plato saw a hierarchy inherent in the nature of reality and relied upon it to validate norms, Sigmund Freud was a naturalist who could not follow such an approach.

The poem "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" was published by British poet W H Auden in his 1940 collection Another Time.

The decline in Sigmund Freud's reputation has been attributed partly to the revival of feminism.

Sigmund Freud's recommended cure for a frigid woman was psychiatric care.

Sigmund Freud was suffering from failure to mentally adjust to her 'natural' role as a woman.

Gallop compliments Mitchell for her criticism of feminist discussions of Sigmund Freud but finds her treatment of Lacanian theory lacking.

Some French feminists, among them Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, have been influenced by Sigmund Freud as interpreted by Lacan.

Sigmund Freud is the subject of three major films or TV series, the first of which was 1962's Freud: The Secret Passion starring Montgomery Clift as Freud, directed by John Huston from a revision of a script by an uncredited Jean-Paul Sartre.

Similarly, the 2020 Austrian-German series Sigmund Freud involves a young Sigmund Freud solving murder mysteries.

The series has been criticized for having Sigmund Freud be helped by a medium with real paranormal powers, when in reality Sigmund Freud was quite skeptical of the paranormal.

Sigmund Freud helps to solve a murder case in the 2006 novel The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld.

Sigmund Freud is employed to more comic effect in the 1983 film Lovesick in which Alec Guinness plays Sigmund Freud's ghost who gives love advice to a modern psychiatrist played by Dudley Moore.