Sigmund Freud

Sigismund Schlomo Freud was born in 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia (now Príbor, Czech Republic), to a Jewish wool merchant and his wife. The family moved to Vienna when Freud was four, and it was there that he would spend most of his life. A brilliant student, he graduated summa cum laude from the University of Vienna medical school in 1881.

Working initially as a neurologist, Freud became fascinated by cases of 'hysteria' -patients with physical symptoms that had no apparent organic cause. Collaborating with Josef Breuer, he developed the 'talking cure,' a method of treating neurosis through conversation. This evolved into psychoanalysis: a theory of the mind and a therapeutic practice centered on the unconscious, dream interpretation, and free association.

Freud's major works -including 'The Interpretation of Dreams' (1900), 'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality' (1905), and 'Civilization and Its Discontents' (1930) -introduced concepts that transformed how we think about the human mind: the unconscious, repression, the Oedipus complex, ego and id, and the role of sexuality in mental life. Whether embraced or rejected, his ideas permeated twentieth-century culture.

After the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, Freud -by then suffering from advanced oral cancer -was permitted to emigrate to London, where he died in 1939. His influence on psychology, literature, film, and popular culture is incalculable, even as many of his specific theories have been revised or abandoned by contemporary science.