ABSTRACT
In 1856 Sigismund Schlomo Freud was born to Jakob and Amalia (his third wife) in a small Moravian village (now part of the Czech Republic). Young Sigismund had two older half-brothers (who had grown and left home), five sisters, and a
younger brother. When he was a child, his family moved to Vienna when his father’s textile business began to fail. Later in school he shortened his name to “Sigmund.” An excellent student, Freud entered the University of Vienna where he first specialized in eels-yes, eels! His first research efforts were to dissect hundreds of eels trying to locate their testicles, something that no biologist had succeeded in doing. With no success in sight, he changed his interest to neurology. His training there stressed biological determinism, a view that attributes all human activity to physiological causes, and inspired him to conduct research on brain neurology. In 1881, Freud received his MD degree with a thesis on the “spinal cord of lower fish.”
