Before psychoanalysis, Freud spent weeks hunting for the sex organs of eels
The founder of psychoanalysis started out as a lab scientist. At Trieste in 1876 the young Freud dissected hundreds of eels searching for male reproductive organs and found nothing conclusive; six more years comparing nervous tissue in frogs, lampreys and crayfish fed into the later discovery of the neuron.
Freud was born on 6 May 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia, now Příbor in the Czech Republic, the first of eight children of a struggling Jewish wool merchant and his much younger third wife. The family moved to Vienna in 1860. He entered the university at 17 meaning to study law, switched to medicine, and heard philosophy from Franz Brentano, whose discussion of the unconscious, even though Brentano rejected it, probably planted the idea.
At Vienna General Hospital from 1882 he published a much-cited 1884 paper on cocaine's palliative effects and later a book on aphasia. In 1886 he opened a private practice for nervous disorders and married Martha Bernays; an atheist, he had to be hastily coached in Hebrew prayers for the religious ceremony. The couple raised six children, including Anna, and lived at Berggasse 19 from 1891 until they left Vienna in 1938.
From clinical work came free association, dream interpretation as wish fulfilment, transference, the Oedipus complex, and the model of id, ego and superego. He read Shakespeare in English and was so struck by Nietzsche that he avoided studying him, feeling the overlap with his own ideas was too close. Contested claims, pressed by writers such as Peter Swales and Frederick Crews, hold that he had an affair with his sister-in-law Minna.
A cigar smoker who believed tobacco sharpened his work, he ignored warnings from his friend Wilhelm Fliess and developed cancer of the mouth. He died on 23 September 1939. Psychoanalysis is used less in diagnosis today, and its scientific status and therapeutic value remain disputed, but W. H. Auden's 1940 tribute called Freud a whole climate of opinion.
Source: Sigmund Freud
