FREUD, SIGMUND. – Born in Freiberg (Przibor), Moravia, on 6 May 1856, to a Jewish family of merchants.
Having obtained his medical degree in Vienna in 1881, where he had pursued his studies, he attended the Institute of Physiology directed by the celebrated Brücke; subsequently, as an assistant at the general hospital, in 1885 he obtained the qualification for university teaching in neuropathology. Having received a scholarship to go to Paris, he took a particular interest at the Salpêtrière in J. M. Charcot’s lectures on hysterics and the effects of hypnosis.
On returning to Vienna (1886), he was entrusted by M. Krasowitz with the direction of a children’s ward for nervous diseases, and at this time he went to Nancy to attend H. Bernheim’s hypnotic experiments. Having settled in his homeland, he took an interest in and collaborated with the research and the particular method of treatment applied by the Viennese physician Giuseppe Breuer, since 1881, to a hysterical woman, by means of a method (so-called “cathartic”) of recollection under hypnosis. From this therapeutic technique, subsequently applied by him to the same patient and crowned by the cure of the hysterical manifestations, F. derived the first germs of the psychoanalysis (v.). In 1893, together with Breuer, he published studies on the psychic mechanism of hysterical phenomena, supporting Charcot’s thesis that neuroses originate in psychic traumas, traumas which F. held to be exclusively sexual in nature. Having definitively separated from his colleague, he resolutely pursued his psychoanalytic path, replacing, however, the method of recalling the incriminated psychological complexes under hypnosis with one he considered less fallible: that of free and spontaneous associations. On this
FREUD SIGMUND - FREYCINET LOUIS-CHARLES DE SAULCES
Along this path, in 1906, he was followed by a small group of pupils, which rapidly grew, captivated by the novelty of the approach to the study and treatment of psychoneurotic disorders and by F.’s brilliant exposition; thus the first psychoanalytic school came into being. Already appointed extraordinary professor in 1902, he was granted the title of ordinary professor in 1920, a sign of his victory and of the recognition of his doctrine by the official scientific circles that had until then been hostile; in 1930 his glorious ascent was crowned by the award of the Goethe Prize of the city of Frankfurt. He came to Italy several times, taking an interest in archaeology, art, and the history of the Renaissance, and seeking to draw from these fields as well facts and arguments in support of his theories.
At the height of his fame, and at the moment when his theory, crossing the borders of his homeland, was rapidly spreading beyond the limits of medicine into literature, pedagogy, practical life, and the religious and social spheres, he was swept up by the anti-Jewish persecution unleashed by Nazism and, after the Anschluss, in June 1938, was forced to leave Vienna, taking refuge with his wife and children in London. There, while the world was beginning to be engulfed by the world war, he d. on 23 September 1939 at the age of eighty-three.
His theories are developed in numerous works, for which V. PSICANALISI.