Sigmund Freud, in origin Sigismund, was born in Freiberg (now Check Republic) on May 6th, 1856, into a Jewish family who soon had to move to Vienna (Austria) because his father’s business broke and considered as the founder of psychoanalysis.
He ended high school in 1873 and decided to study medicine at college, orienting his specialization to biological research as a part of the Ernst von Brücke lab team, in which he stayed from 1876 to 1882.
That year he met his future wife, Martha Bernays, daughter of a rich Jewish family, a fact that encouraged him to begin a more profitable career as a doctor in the main hospital of Vienna where he finally oriented his service to neuropathology; this specialty led him to begin teaching at Vienna’s University in 1885.
His proficiency granted him a trainee in Paris (France) at the Salpêtrière Hospital, where he worked half a year in the neurology department and lived his first experience on the by then revolutionary hypnosis and suggestion treatment of hysteria.
Back in Vienna in 1886, he started investigating by himself what he had learned in Paris. With the help of a longtime friend and also doctor, Josef Breuer, he began his work on the psychoanalysis theory and its effects on an old Breuer’s patient.
The results were published in 1895 and they represented the first steps on the psychoanalysis conception. But Freud remained alone in the process because Breuer rejected the publication and even broke their friendship, disaffected with Freud.
On his own, Freud kept investigating and in 1900 he published “The interpretation of dreams”, followed by one of his masterworks “Three contributions to the sexual theory” in 1905.
In the spring of 1908, with the help of Gustav Jung, he headed the first Psychoanalysis Congress in Salzburg and soon after, both traveled to pronounce a conference in the USA where they discovered that Freud’s conceptions were very well received.
His fame and influence started growing, increasing its ranges of influence. So, in 1910 the International Society of Psychoanalysis was founded in Nuremberg (Germany).
His next step led Freud to what has been acclaimed as his masterwork, “Introduction to psychoanalysis”, published in 1916 that converted him in a main figure in science forever.
But he couldn’t enjoy his success for long, because in 1923 he became seriously ill and never get fully recovered till his death, although he never stopped his researches.
In 1938, because of the Nazis occupation of Austria, he had to leave and exile in London (England), where he finally died on September 23rd, 1939.