biography
pronunciation:
[froyd]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1856–1939)
|
| biography:
| Founder of psychoanalysis, born in Freiburg, Moravia (now Príbor, E Czech Republic), of Jewish parentage. He studied medicine at Vienna, then specialized in neurology, and later in psychopathology. Finding hypnosis inadequate, he substituted the method of ‘free association’, allowing the patient to express thoughts in a state of relaxed consciousness, and interpreting the data of childhood and dream recollections. He became convinced, despite his own puritan sensibilities, of the fact of infantile sexuality, a theory which isolated him from the medical profession. In 1900 he published his major work, Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams), arguing that dreams are disguised manifestations of repressed sexual wishes (in contrast with the widely-held modern view that dreams are simply a biological manifestation of the random firing of brain neurones during a particular state of consciousness). In 1902, he was appointed to a professorship in Vienna, despite previous academic anti-semitism, and began to gather disciples. Out of this grew the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society (1908) and the International Psychoanalytic Association (1910), which included Adler and Jung. It was not until 1930, when he was awarded the Goethe prize, that his work ceased to arouse active opposition from public bodies. In 1933 Hitler banned psychoanalysis, and after Austria had been overrun, Freud and his family were extricated from the hands of the Gestapo and allowed to emigrate. He settled in Hampstead, London, where he died. |
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