Sigmund Freud
1856- 1939 Founder of psychoanalysis, born in Freiburg, Moravia (now Príbor, Czech Republic), of Jewish parentage. He studied medicine at Vienna, then specialized in neurology, and later in psychopathology. Finding hypnosis inadequate, he substituted the method of 'free association', allowing the patient to express thoughts in a state of relaxed consciousness, and interpreting the data of childhood and dream recollections. He became convinced, despite his own puritan sensibilities, of the fact of infantile sexuality, a theory which isolated him from the medical profession.
In 1900 he published his major work, Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams), arguing that dreams are disguised manifestations of repressed sexual wishes (in contrast with the widely-held modern view that dreams are simply a biological manifestation of the random firing of brain neurones during a particular state of consciousness).
In 1902, he was appointed to a professorship in Vienna, despite previous academic anti-semitism, and began to gather disciples. Out of this grew the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society (1908) and the International Psychoanalytic Association (1910), which included Adler and Jung.
It was not until 1930, when he was awarded the Goethe prize, that his work ceased to arouse active opposition from public bodies. In 1933 Hitler banned psychoanalysis, and after Austria had been overrun, Freud and his family were extricated from the hands of the Gestapo and allowed to emigrate. He settled in Hampstead, London, where he died.
Sigmund Schlomo Freud (May 6, 1856 - September 23, 1939) was an Austrian neurologist, who became interested in hypnotism and how it could be used to help the mentally ill. He later abandoned hypnotism in favor of free association and dream analysis in developing what is now known as "the talking cure." These became the core elements of psychoanalysis. Freud was especially interested in what was then called hysteria, and is now called conversion syndrome. Though his radical work inspired generations of scientists in all fields, Freud's theories are hotly debated by academics to this day, and some consider his theories to be pseudoscience.
Much less well-known is Freud's interest in neurology. He was an early researcher on the topic of Cerebral Palsy, then known as Cerebral Paralysis. He published several medical papers on the topic. He also showed that the disease existed far before other researchers in his day began to notice and study it. He also suggested that William Little, the man who first identified cerebral palsy, was wrong about lack of oxygen during the birth process being a cause. Instead, he suggested that complications in birth were only a symptom of the problem. It was not until the 1980s when his findings were confirmed by more modern research.
