ABSTRACT
Sigismund Freud was born in Freiberg, a small town in the Austro-Hungarian province of Moravia. The Freud home consisted then of one room on the upper floor of Schlossergasse 117. For the first three years of his life, young Sigismund slept, ate, and played, in the immediate presence of his parents. Non-observant, his Jewish parents were liberal enough to employ a Catholic nanny, Resi Wittek, who liked taking the little boy to the local churches. He saw Moses sitting under the richly decorated ceiling of Freiberg’s St. Valentine’s church and pointing to the second commandment. He brought the Christian faith to Eastern Europe and produced an entirely new—Cyrillic—alphabet. He is also well known for his detailed, horrifying descriptions of hell written to inspire “holy fear”.
