Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in Moravia; between the ages of four
and eighty-two his home was in Vienna: in 1938 Hitler's invasion of
Austria forced him to seek asylum in London, where he died in the
following year.
His career began with several years of brilliant work on the
anatomy and physiology of the nervous system. He was almost thirty
when, after a period of study under Charcot in Paris, his interests
first turned to psychology, and another ten years of clinical work
in Vienna(at first in collaboration with Breuer, an older
colleague) saw the birth of his creation, psychoanalysis. This
began simply as a method of treating neurotic patients by
investigating their minds, but it quickly grew into an accumulation
of knowledge about the workings of the mind in general, whether
sick or healthy. Freud was thus able to demonstrate the normal
development of the sexual instinct in childhood and, largely on the
basis of an examination of dreams, arrived at his fundamental
discovery of the unconscious forces that influence our everyday
thoughts and actions. Freud's life was uneventful, but his ideas
have shaped not only many specialist disciplines, but the whole
intellectual climate of the last half-century
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