ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud was born Sigismund Schlomo (Solomon) Freud in the Moravian (Czech) village of Freiberg in 1856. The son of a Jewish wool-merchant from the northern province of Galicia, Freud was only one generation away from the mediaeval culture of traditional, rural Jewry. Freud's work can only be properly understood and appreciated in the context of its rightful place in the history of ideas. Freud was a member of an international intellectual community that included psychologists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and philosophers. The forms of psychotherapy current in the nineteenth century included psychosocial interventions such as suggestion (Bernheim), environmental management (Charcot), and forms of psychological analysis (Feuchtersieben). The use of medication was an age-old approach to hysteria and was declining in popularity by the late nineteenth century. Doctors administered drugs that often complicated the original hysteria with a physician-induced addiction. Freud's earliest psychological work, which was done in collaboration with Josef Breuer, concerned the causes, dynamics, and treatment of hysteria.
