ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the founder of psychoanalysis, was born into an assimilated, secular Jewish family in the Moravian town of Freiburg. However, the most formative place in Freud’s development was not Freiburg, but fin de siècle Vienna. He earned a medical degree at the University of Vienna in 1881. After winning a modest medical scholarship, proceeded to work with Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris from 1885 to 1886. Freud was intrigued by Charcot’s work on hysteria, which Charcot diagnosed as a disease and treated with hypnotism. In 1886, Freud began his practice as a physician in Vienna, where he focused on nervous disorders. Freud’s method differed from Charcot’s in that Freud abandoned hypnotism in favor of allowing his 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 (1900). In 1938, he fled to London to escape the advancing Nazis and he died there in 1939.
