Sigmund Freud's Life

Sigmund Freud grew up in Vienna, Austria and became a doctor of psychiatry. Early in his career he was interested in hypnosis as a cure for hysteria, believing that the symptoms were directly related to repressed psychological trauma. He started the practice of "free association," an effort to reveal unconscious emotions, and increasingly emphasized sexual development as the basis for psychological tension. Freud worked briefly with Carl Jung, was a professor in Vienna and co-founded the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society and the International Psychoanalytic Association. In 1938 he left Austria for England to escape Hitler's government. Freud battled mouth cancer the last several years of his life, but continued to smoke cigars, his trademark.

Freud was a brilliant student and always placed at the top of his class. In 1873, Freud entered the University of Vienna to initially study law. However, as Freud would put it later, his "greed for knowledge" made him change his major to medicine. Although Freud was more interested in studying the philosophical-scientific aspects of the mind. He especially became interested in neurology and physiology and finally graduated in 1881. Freud's research was based on close observations and scientific skepticism.

In 1896, Freud would first use the word "psychoanalysis". That same year his father would die. This loss would deeply affect Freud, and even his work to some extent. Freud then started working on his "Dream Book". He also abandoned the "seduction theory", a theory that Freud firmly believed in for some time. This theory stated that neurosis occurred in people who were somehow sexually abused when they were a child.

In 1920, Freud published his pessimistic beyond the pleasure Principle, which dealt with the human death drive. Three years later, Freud would come out with his Ego and the Id. In this book, Freud gave a structural model of the mind, separating into three parts, the ego, the id and the superego. For the next ten years, Freud continued to write more papers that introduced many new ideas and revised older ones. These papers all would help in building a compact theory that helped to explain the way the human mind works. In 1933, Hitler was nominated as the chancellor of Germany. This led to increased power of the Austrian Nazis, and a strong feeling of Anti-Semitism. Freud however refused to leave Vienna. In 1938, the Germans were welcomed into the city of Vienna. This was the last straw as Freud prepared to leave Austria. That June Freud would leave for Paris and then London so that he could die in freedom. On September 23, 1939, Freud asked his