Sigmund Freud: Life, Psychoanalysis, and Personality Theory

Biographical Sketch of Freud's Life

Sigmund Freud was born on May 6, 1856, in what is now the Czech Republic (then part of Austria). Freud was the first child born during his father's third marriage; his father had been widowed twice prior to his marriage to nineteen-year-old Amalia Nathanson. When Freud was four years old, the family moved to Vienna. Author Samuel Kahn explains that due to Freud's Jewish heritage, and the Nazis' obsessive drive to kill all Jews, Freud needed to flee Vienna in order to preserve his life and his library of research and writings. Kahn notes that a woman who had been analyzed by Freud in Austria — which the Nazis annexed early in their drive to dominate Europe — and who had access to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, "interceded" for Freud, allowing him to move to London in 1938, the last year of his life (Kahn, 1976, p. 1).

The Nazi scourge took a devastating toll on Freud's family. Author Giovanni Costigan writes that Freud was the oldest in a family of eight children. One brother died in infancy, another was the last child of Jakob and Amalia, and five daughters — Anna, Rosa, Mitzi, Dolfi, and Paula — were born in between. Years later, Rosa, Mitzi, and Paula were murdered in Hitler's gas chambers at Auschwitz (Costigan, 1965, p. 3).

As to his father's advice, Sigmund later told his own children what his father had told him: do not "submit meekly if attacked, but strike back at the aggressor." Throughout his life, in particular when anti-Semitism reared its ugly head, "Freud acted consistently on [his father's] advice" (Costigan, 4). Freud reportedly despised the Christian concept of "turning the other cheek" and had little patience with pacifism (Costigan, 4).

Freud attended an elementary school in Vienna and then went to Sperl Gymnasium — a secondary school that served as a college preparatory institution — between 1866 and 1873. Everything in his home was "sacrificed to the single end of his scholastic success," Costigan writes (6). Freud was provided with a small private room in the modest household where he could work "without interruption — with an oil lamp for late reading while the rest of the household used only candles" (Costigan, 6).

His school studies included Latin, mathematics, Greek, and history, and on his own he taught himself Italian and Spanish. He kept a personal diary at this time, writing it in Greek. He was reading and enjoying Shakespeare at the age of eight, and also read classic literature extensively, including works by John Milton, Goethe, and Cervantes (Costigan, 6). When seventeen-year-old Sigmund attended the Vienna World's Fair in 1873, it marked his first meaningful encounter with American culture. He was supremely impressed by the Gettysburg Address, the U.S. Constitution, and other American documents. He was so captivated by the Declaration of Independence that he hung a copy of it "above his bed in the hospital where he was an intern" (Costigan, 6).

Having passed his final examinations with high grades, Freud entered university at the age of seventeen (World of Sociology, 2001). In 1873 he enrolled in medical school, and seven years later he was awarded a Doctor of Medicine degree at the age of twenty-four. While he was fascinated with medicine and physical health, opportunities in academic medicine were limited, and as a Jew he faced additional obstacles rooted in the biases common to that era.

Anti-Semitism in Europe during Freud's formative years was stifling. Freud was eleven years old by the time Jews were granted "legal equality with their fellow citizens in Vienna" (Costigan, 8). It was surely "galling" to learn that his life would be "branded forever with the stigma of [cultural] inferiority," and Costigan asserts that being "set apart by race" had an enormous influence "in the development of Freud's personality" (Costigan, 9).

At the age of twenty-six he married Martha Bernays. Since he now had a wife to support and the stipends available to a young scientist were insufficient, he was drawn into psychiatry. He spent three years serving a residency at the Allgemeine Krankenhaus, the general hospital that served as Vienna's main medical center. Because of his intense interest in the workings of the human brain, he became deeply immersed in psychology, focusing on the treatment of patients with "hysteria" (World of Sociology).

Using hypnosis, Freud was able to demonstrate that the symptoms of hysteria could be traced to "highly emotional experiences, which had been 'repressed' from past conscious memories" (World of Sociology, p. 2). It was around this time that Freud became interested in self-analysis and dream study, and at the age of thirty-nine he first used the term "psychoanalysis."

Works Cited

Costigan, Giovanni. (1965). Sigmund Freud: A Short Biography. New York: The Macmillan Company.

Ewen, Robert B. (2003). An Introduction to Theories of Personality. East Sussex, UK: Psychology Press.

Grunbaum, Adolf. (1998). A Century of Psychoanalysis: Critical Retrospect and Prospect. In Freud: Conflict and Culture, Michael Roth, Ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 183–196.

Kahn, Samuel. (1976). Essays in Freudian Psychoanalysis. New York: Philosophical Library.

Kramer, Peter D. (1998). Freud: Current Projections. In Freud: Conflict and Culture, Michael Roth, Ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 196–206.

Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. (1985). The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

McGrath, William J. (1986). Freud's Discovery of Psychoanalysis: The Politics of Hysteria. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

World of Sociology. (2001). Sigmund Freud. Retrieved June 20, 2012, from Gale Biography.

Wallwork, Ernest. (1994). Psychoanalysis and Ethics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.