ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud’s parents, Jacob and Amalia, were Jewish. They came from Galicia, a Polish part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and were living in a single rented room above a blacksmith’s business in Freiburg, Moravia (now in the Czech Republic), when Sigmund was born on 6 May 1856. This chapter discusses the childhood and youth life of Sigmund Freud. During Freud’s years at secondary school, where he was top of his class for seven years in succession, the proportion of Jewish to other students increased from ‘44 to 73 percent of the total school population’. Freud registered as a student at Vienna University. Following a year’s compulsory military service in 1879 and 1880, and after completing his medical degree in 1881, Freud continued doing physiology research. Freud got work in Vienna’s general hospital. Here, while completing his medical training and qualification, he did research with the psychiatrist, neuropathologist, and anatomist Theodor Meynert.
