Sigmund Freud

Born Sigismund Schlomo Freud on May 6, 1856, in Freiberg, Moravia (now Pribor, Czech Republic), to a Jewish wool merchant and his much younger third wife, Freud moved to Vienna at the age of four and remained there for nearly eight decades. He qualified as a doctor of medicine at the University of Vienna in 1881 and spent years in neurological research before opening a private practice in 1886. His collaboration with Josef Breuer on Studies on Hysteria (1895) introduced the "talking cure" that would become the foundation of psychoanalysis. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), published at the turn of the century to almost no notice, laid out his theory of the unconscious mind and the significance of dreams as wish fulfillment. He gathered a circle of followers, Jung, Adler, Ferenczi, most of whom eventually broke with him in bitter schisms. His concepts, the Oedipus complex, the id, ego, and superego, repression, transference, reshaped not only psychiatry but literature, art, and the way modern people understand themselves. Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) argued that human society rests on the suppression of instinct. Following the Nazi annexation of Austria in March 1938, he fled to London, aided by Princess Marie Bonaparte, who paid a ransom to the Gestapo for his release. He died on September 23, 1939, in Hampstead, after asking his physician to administer a fatal dose of morphine to end the suffering of his oral cancer.

On 23 October 1896, Freud's father died in Vienna. The night after the funeral, he dreamed of a barbershop sign that read, 'You are requested to close the eyes.' He began analyzing his own dreams night after night, work that grew into The Interpretation of Dreams.