ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the founder of psychoanalysis as an academic discipline, was born into an assimilated, secular Jewish family in the Moravian town of Freiburg, Germany. However, the most formative place in Freud’s development was in fin de siecle Vienna where he took a medical degree at the University of Vienna in 1881. After winning a modest medical scholarship, he proceeded to work with Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris from 1885 to 1886. Freud was influenced by Charcot’s work on hysteria, which he diagnosed as a disease and treated with hypnotism. When Freud began his practice as a physician in Vienna in 1886, he focused on nervous disorders. Freud distinguished his method from Charcot’s by abandoning hypnotism in favor of encouraging patients to freely narrate their experiences. It was in Vienna that he initially proposed and refined his psychoanalytic discourse, presented in the landmark publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. Freud fled to London in 1938 to escape the advancing Nazis and died there in 1939.
