Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 at Freiberg in Moravia, in the Austrian Empire (now in the Czech Republic), into the family of a Jewish wool merchant. At four he moved with his family to Vienna, where he lived for nearly eighty years. He studied medicine at the University of Vienna and first worked in neuroanatomy, then went to Paris to study under the famous neurologist Charcot and became interested in hysteria. Working with Josef Breuer, he developed from the 'talking cure' the method of psychoanalysis: letting the patient associate freely, and seeking the repressed unconscious in dreams, slips of the tongue and forgetting. His theories were at first rejected by the medical world, but gradually spread across the globe. When the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938 and the Gestapo interrogated his daughter Anna, Freud, at eighty-two, was forced into exile in London, where he died the following year.