By Freud Museum London
Freud Museum London
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was the founder of psychoanalysis, a theory of how the mind works and a method of helping people in mental distress.
Newspaper cutting on Moses and Monotheism (1939-06-03)Freud Museum London
Freud was one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century.
He developed a new vision of human existence.
Newspaper article headlined "His influence is dangerous" (1939-06-30) by Beatrice KingFreud Museum London
But in doing so he undermined deeply cherished cultural values and aroused immense hostility.
Sigmund Freud recording his voice for the BBC (1938-12-07)Freud Museum London
On 7 December 1938, Freud recorded a short summary of his career for a BBC broadcast.
EARLY LIFE
Sigmund Freud was born on 6 May 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia (today Příbor, Czech Republic). He was the first of eight children of Jacob and Amalia Freud.
Map of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, 19th centuryFreud Museum London
At the time, Freiberg was part of the vast Austro-Hungarian empire.
Shortly after Freud's birth, his father’s wool business collapsed and the family were forced to leave Freiberg.
In 1860, they moved to the bustling metropolis of Vienna.
Girl in Red Robe and Black Stockings (1911) by Egon SchieleThe Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Freud's Vienna was a cultural melting pot, the site of an explosion of ideas in art, music, literature and science.
Antisemitism simmered beneath the surface, but it was a time of great optimism.
Prominent Viennese included Gustav Mahler, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Arthur Schnitzler, Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele.
In Viennese society, sex was everywhere.
The ‘social repression’ of sexuality through excessive moralising only served to draw attention to it in all spheres of life.
"In its constant prudish anxiety, it was always sniffing out immorality […], with the result that it was in fact forced to keep dwelling on the immoral."
Stefan Zweig
THE YOUNG SCIENTIST
Long before he developed psychoanalysis, Freud had already distinguished himself as a scientific researcher and physician.
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Freud enrolled at the University of Vienna in 1873, taking classes in anatomy, chemistry, botany, physiology and physics.
Darwin, Charles PortraitsLIFE Photo Collection
He wanted to be a natural scientist. It was a time of enormous scientific progress, and he was a great admirer of Charles Darwin, whose discovery of evolutionary processes had revolutionised biology.
Drawing of spinal nerve cells (1878) by Sigmund FreudFreud Museum London
He soon became an expert in neuroanatomy. His work was at the forefront of neurological research, and he published several studies of the nervous systems of fish.
This is one of Freud's sketches of the spinal nerve cells of a sea lamprey.
He also wrote significant books on childhood cerebral palsy and aphasia (language disorders), as well as a monograph on the anaesthetic properties of cocaine.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
In 1882 Freud met Martha Bernays and immediately fell in love with her. They were engaged in secret two months later, but were not married until 1886. In order to support a family, he left his research post to train as a doctor.
Sigmund Freud's visiting card, 1891 (1891)Freud Museum London
Freud set up his private medical practice in 1886, specialising in nervous disorders.
This is his calling card from 1891.
A Clinical Lesson with Dr Charcot at the Salpêtrière hospital (1887) by E. PirodonFreud Museum London
During his medical training, Freud had won a scholarship to study in Paris under the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot.
Charcot was known for his theatrical demonstrations in which he would hypnotise hysterical patients before an audience and manipulate their symptoms through suggestion.
They led Freud to wonder if physical symptoms could have a psychological cause.
Josef BreuerFreud Museum London
One of Freud’s friends and mentors was the physician Josef Breuer. Breuer had told Freud about a patient, Bertha Pappenheim, who became ill while looking after her dying father.
He had found that each of Pappenheim’s symptoms seemed to be connected to a forgotten traumatic memory. Under hypnosis she could recover these memories, and this would cause the symptoms to disappear.
Breuer called this technique the cathartic method. Pappenheim called it the talking cure.
Freud's psychoanalytic couch (2015) by Photographer: Ardon Bar HamaFreud Museum London
Influenced by Charcot and Breuer, Freud started trying to use hypnosis therapeutically, but before long he developed a different technique.
He would invite his patients to recline on his couch and say whatever came to mind, without holding back thoughts or memories that seemed unpleasant, trivial or ridiculous.
He called this technique free association.
Free Association by Freud Museum LondonFreud Museum London
Through free association, unexpected chains of thought began to unfold, often leading his patients from seemingly worthless fragments of everyday life to their innermost thoughts and longings.
Free association is central to psychoanalysis. In this video, psychoanalyst Astrid Gessert gives an example of its use.
Wolves sitting in a tree (1964) by Sergei PankejeffFreud Museum London
The method of free association led Freud to propose the existence of a dynamic unconscious, containing ideas that the mind actively struggles to keep at bay.
Freud discovered the return of these ideas in disguised forms such as slips of the tongue, little mistakes, the words we find ourselves using, and dreams.
He may have identified the workings of the unconscious in trivial occurrences, but Freud did not see the unconscious itself as trivial. He found it at work in the symptoms that tormented his patients.
One of Freud's most famous patients was Sergei Pankejeff. The childhood nightmare he recounted to Freud earned him the nickname 'Wolf Man'.
He later depicted it in this painting.
Its interpretation through free association opened up a hidden world of infantile desires and anxieties.
AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE MIND
Freud often compared psychoanalysis to archaeology. He himself was a passionate collector, amassing over 2,500 objects from ancient civilisations.
Freud’s print of Roman Forum (1890) by Luigi Kasimir and 1890Freud Museum London
“Imagine that an explorer arrives in a little-known region where his interest is aroused by an expanse of ruins.
He may have brought picks, shovels and spades with him, and he may set the inhabitants to work with these implements.
Together with them he may start upon the ruins, clear away the rubbish, and, beginning from the visible remains, uncover what is buried.”
Sigmund Freud
An Archaeologist of the Mind (2015) by Freud Museum LondonFreud Museum London
EXCAVATING THE UNCONSCIOUS
Freud's excavations into the unconscious unearthed some startling findings.
Freud uncovered complex emotional attitudes towards parents and siblings in his patients, leading him to view childhood as a time of intense feelings of love, hatred, envy and fear.
He described this early situation as the Oedipus complex, drawing on the Greek myth of Oedipus, who unwittingly kills his father and marries his mother.
One of Freud's most surprising findings was the significance of sexuality as a driving force in his patients' lives.
But he noticed that sexuality was linked not only to pleasure but also to themes of loss and anxiety.
Freud's account of sexuality was very different to traditional definitions.
He discovered components of sexuality throughout the body, and traced it back to much earlier in childhood than it was commonly thought to emerge.
A baby's first experience of satisfaction, he observed, is at its mother's breast.
Freud often referred to Eros, the Greek god of love, to give form to his theory of libido, which encompassed sexuality in a much broader sense than conventional definitions of a reproductive instinct.
"Language has carried out an entirely justifiable piece of unification in creating the word ‘love’ with its numerous uses."
Sigmund Freud
Freud came to refer to the cluster of drives pushing for satisfaction as the id. He compared the conscious ego's relation to the unconscious id to a rider and a horse:
"Only too often the situation between the ego and the id is far from ideal: the rider has no choice but to guide the horse in whichever direction it wants to go."
Sigmund Freud
Letter from Sigmund Freud to the mother of a homosexual man. (1935-04-09) by Sigmund FreudFreud Museum London
With his understanding of the fluidity of sexuality, Freud had very enlightened views on homosexuality.
His views are evidenced in this letter to the distressed mother of a homosexual man.
"Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function [...]. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them. [...] It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime – and a cruelty, too."
This letter is the property of the Kinsey Institute.
THE FINDINGS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
Psychoanalysis paints a troubling picture of human beings. It reveals a mind divided against itself, anxious, lacking self-knowledge, and governed by unruly instinctual impulses.
The Freudian Human Being by Freud Museum LondonFreud Museum London
LIFE Photo Collection
Because of their unsettling implications, Freud compared his discoveries to those of the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who first discovered that the sun did not rotate around the earth.
Just as Copernicus showed that man is not at the centre of the universe, Freud showed that we are not even at home in our own minds.
"The ego is not master in its own house"
Sigmund Freud
EXILE
In 1933, the Nazis rose to power in Germany. The Nazis found psychoanalysis repugnant, not least because Freud was a Jew.
Book Burning (1933-05-10) by KeystoneGetty Images
“Against the soul-destroying glorification of the instinctual life, for the nobility of the human soul! I consign to the flames the writings of the school of Sigmund Freud.”
Declamation at the burning of Freud’s works
Book Burning (1933-05-10) by KeystoneGetty Images
“What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burnt me; nowadays they are content with burning my books.”
Sigmund Freud
Exterior of Berggasse 19, Vienna, 1938 (1938) by Photographer: Edmund EngelmanFreud Museum London
When the Nazis entered Austria in 1938, Freud and his family were forced to flee.
This photograph shows a swastika hanging above the front door to Freud's apartment, where he lived and worked for over 40 years (now the Freud Museum Vienna).
Reichsfluchtsteuerberscheid, the refugee tax payment certificate (1938)Freud Museum London
The Nazis made it extremely difficult for Jews to leave.
One obstacle was a 'Refugee Tax' on people fleeing. Freud was charged 31,329 Reichsmarks, roughly the equivalent of £150,000 today.
The tax was paid by Freud's wealthy friend and colleague, Princess Marie Bonaparte.
Sigmund and Anna Freud on the Orient Express, 1938 (1938-06-04)Freud Museum London
After nearly three months' struggle to obtain their papers, Freud and his family finally left for London by the Orient Express on 4 June 1938.
Four of his sisters weren't so lucky. Denied exit visas, Pauline, Adolfine, Marie and Rosa Freud were trapped in Vienna. They later died in Nazi concentration camps.
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Freud spent the last year of his life at 20 Maresfield Gardens, London, now the Freud Museum London.
DEATH
A heavy smoker, Freud had been diagnosed with cancer of the jaw and mouth in 1923. He spent the last 16 years of his life suffering from the condition. Part of his jaw was removed, and he was forced to wear a painful prosthesis.
Sigmund Freud, 1938 (1938)Freud Museum London
On 23 September 1939, three weeks into the Second World War, Sigmund Freud died in his home at 20 Maresfield Gardens, London.
“At bottom, no one believes in his own death, or, to put it another way, in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality. Towards the actual person who has died we adopt a special attitude - something almost like admiration for someone who has accomplished a very difficult task.”
Sigmund Freud, 'Thoughts for the Times on War and Death'
LEGACY
Sigmund Freud’s library, collection and world-famous psychoanalytic couch are still in his final home at 20 Maresfield Gardens, London, but psychoanalysis is far from being a museum piece.
Freud is routinely declared ‘dead’, but his legacy continues to haunt us.
Today, what began in Freud's consulting room is practiced by thousands of clinicians around the globe.
Freud’s legacy extends far beyond the couch. His ideas continue to affect the way we understand ourselves, providing a vital tool to make sense of a changing and troubled world.
Portrait of Sigmund Freud (1935)Freud Museum London
“Sigmund Freud shaped the twentieth century idea of what a person is; we would not recognise ourselves without him.
His influence reverberates in Henry James and Virginia Woolf, Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch, the art of the Surrealists and the lure of advertisements.
Freud's stories have become our stories, his map our map, his questions our questions.”
Marina Warner
"to us he is no more a person
but a whole climate of opinion
under whom we conduct our different lives."
W. H. Auden, from the poem 'In Memory Of Sigmund Freud'
Curated by the Freud Museum London.
Curator: Stefan Marianski
To continue our work, we need your help. Please consider making a donation to help secure the future of the Freud Museum London.
Freud spent most of his working life at Berggasse 19, Vienna, now the Freud Museum Vienna.
Freud's birthplace is now the Freud's Birthplace Museum in Příbor, Czech Republic.
Freud's 'Letter to the mother of a homosexual man' generously provided by the Kinsey Institute.
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