Sigmund Freud

He married Martha Bernays in 1886 and the couple had six children. Anna, one of his daughters, went on to become one of his greatest supporters who helped him carry out his research in his later years. She also became a prominent psychologist, following her father’s footsteps.

He discovered that he had cancer of the jaw in 1923, which is believed to have been caused by his ‘love for cigars’. He had to endure 33 painful surgeries in an attempt to remove the cancer.

He was an early user of cocaine and believed that it abated mental and physical problems. He frequently suffered from bouts of depression, migraine and nasal inflammation which he combatted by consuming cocaine.

Sigmund Schlomo Freud was the first of the eight children born to Jewish Galician parents in Pribor, a small town in the Czech Republic. The family was not very well-off and his initial years were a struggle. Due to the Panic of 1857—a financial crisis trigerred in the U.S.— his father lost his business and the family moved to Vienna.

In 1865, he was enrolled to the ‘Leopoldstadter Kommunal-Realgymnasium’, a renowned school in the region. He proved his mettle as an outstanding student and graduated from high school, in 1873.

As a young boy, he was passionate about literature and was proficient in a number of languages such as German, French, Italian, Hebrew, Greek and Latin. He was also an avid reader of Shakespeare’s works, whose works apparently, helped him understand human psychology.

He studied at the University of Vienna, where he joined the medical faculty and graduated with an MD in 1881. He enjoyed science but found the idea of practicing medicine unexciting. He wanted to pursue neurophysiological research but could not, owing to financial constraints.

In October 1885, he travelled to Paris on a fellowship to study with Jean-Martin Charcot, a prominent neurologist. He was inspired by his practice of medical psychopathology, which made him realize that neurology was not to his taste and that he was made for something bigger and more exciting.

He started his private practice in 1886 and adopted the use of ‘hypnosis’ for his clinical work, inspired by his friend and collaborator, Josef Breuer. The treatment of one particular patient, ‘Anna O’, proved to be transformative to Freud’s clinical career.

He inferred that a patient could be cured of psychological problems while being engaged in an uninhibited discourse about his/her traumatic experiences in a hypnotized state, the practice which he later called ‘free association’.

In addition to this practice, he also discovered that a patient’s dreams could be analyzed and the psychic repression of an individual could also be studied and cured. By 1896, he carried out extensive research on a new subject, which he coined as ‘psychoanalysis’.

He also concluded that repressed childhood memories of sexual molestation or assault were prerequisites to understand a certain psychological condition called ‘neuroses’. In order to further his research on the same, he developed the ‘seduction theory’, which threw light on how horrifying childhood memories related to sexual abuse or other gruesome physical encounters can become causative factors for the afore mentioned condition.

By 1906, the members of the ‘Wednesday Psychological Society’ grew manifold and on April 27, 1908, they had their first official international meeting called ‘The International Psychoanalytical Congress’ at Hotel Bristol, Salzburg. Over 40 members were present at this conference and news of Freud’s psychoanalytical developments began to spread, so much so that, it attracted a wide audience even from across the Atlantic.

He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Clark University in Massachusetts, which attracted widespread media attention and the interest of one prominent personality, James Jackson Putnam, a renowned American psychiatrist.

After a couple of discussions with Freud, Putnam was convinced that his work represented a significant breakthrough in the world of psychology in the United States.

As a result of his mass popularity, when the ‘American Psychoanalytical Society’ was founded in 1911, he was elected as its president. However, after fallout with a couple of members of the ‘American Psychoanalytical Society’, he initiated the formation of a new psychoanalytical group in 1912.

The same year he published a paper entitled, ‘The History of the Psychoanalytical Movement’, which shed light on the evolution of the psychoanalytical movement.