Sigmund Freud
May 6, 1856 – September 23, 1939
Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis and shaped 20th-century ideas of the unconscious mind.
Biography
Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in Moravia, then part of the Austrian Empire, and grew up in Vienna, where he trained as a doctor and neurologist. Treating patients with hysteria led him to develop 'talking cures'.
He founded psychoanalysis, a theory and therapy based on the idea that unconscious desires and memories, often from childhood, shape behaviour. His books The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and later works on sexuality, the ego and the id had a wide influence on psychology, literature and culture, though many of his ideas are disputed.
After Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Freud, who was Jewish, emigrated to London, where he died in 1939.