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Sigmund Freud was born in May, 1856, to a lower-middle-class family, the son of wool merchants, in the Austrian town of Freiburg. When he was four his family moved to Vienna. His parents soon recognized and encouraged young Freud's intellectual capacities. After receiving his medical degree in 1881, he began to practice medicine; shortly afterward he met a young woman whom he eventually married.
Departing from the traditional academic setting of the psychological laboratory, he began to study mental disorders by clinical observation. Initially, Freud's theories shocked his highly conservative colleagues, most of whom either dismissed him entirely or countered him vehemently with caustic criticism. Freud refused to be discouraged by his adversaries, and continued his investigations with an almost obsessive fervor, gaining the support of only a handful of men who, like Jung and Adler, were themselves destined to make major contributions to psychoanalysis. Freud spent nearly all his life in Vienna, and, when Nazi storm troopers invaded the city in 1938, he was arrested in his home and held in captivity until his stock of unsold books could be retrieved and burned publicly. Upon his release a few weeks later, he moved to London, where he lived out the last months of his life. In September 1939 Freud died of cancer at the age of 83. |
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