Sigismund Schlomo Freud, known as Sigmund Freud, was born on May 6, 1856 in Freiberg (Příbor), in today's Czech Republic. Sigmund's father is Jacob Freud, a Galician Jew, and his mother is Amalie Nathanson, Jacob's third wife. . Freud's father is a secular Jew who does not pass on to his son an education that is religiously-fideistic or traditionalist. When Sigmund is just four years old, the family moves to Vienna for reasons related to the work of his father, who traded in wool.
Despite the paternal disinterestedness in the subject, Sigmund begins to become interested in the study of the biblical text from a young age, and the history and tradition of his people will play a not indifferent role in his later production (on the other, in a social context like that Viennese of creeping anti-Semitism). Sigmund graduated at seventeen in the "Sperl Gymnasium" higher institute, and proved his particular intellectual aptitude; in 1873 he enrolled at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Vienna, where he completed his studies in 1881, devoting himself in the meantime to psychotherapeutic research. After a stay in England, Freud found employment in the Viennese zoological institute of Carl Claus, but soon moved to the Institute of Physiology by Ernst Brücke, who became a decisive figure in the formation of the young Sigmund. Despite some success in the field of research, Freud decided to devote himself to clinical practice, a very lucrative profession that would allow him to become independent economically and to marry Martha Bernays, known in 1882. He worked for three years at the General Hospital of Vienna , taking care of the patients of the psychiatric ward, then, between 1885 and 1886 he collaborated with Charcot in Paris, and he approached hypnosis as a cure for hysteria, a clinical method that Freud wanted to spread on his return to Vienna. In the autumn of 1886 he opened his private office, and in the spring he married Martha, with whom he gave birth to six children.
In the meantime, Freud begins to apply the hypnotic method on hysterical patients, and to publish the first studies on this cathartic method (Studies on hysteria, 1895). However, Freud is already working on the major works; in 1900 he published a study, the result of the work of care on his patients and on himself, The interpretation of dreams, which fixes the stakes of future psychoanalysis. The appointment as a university professor in 1902 joins the development of the new theory, between interpretation of the unconscious world and therapeutic practice for psychoanalytic disorders; the Psychopathology of everyday life (1904) and the Three essays on sexual theory (1905) are flanked by the studies of famous "clinical cases". The foundation of the international psychoanalytic society dates back to 1910 and was joined by the "disciples" Jung and Adler. Other Freudian studies (which further develop the concepts of the Ego, Ego, Super-ego, the known "Oedipus complex" and the theory of sexuality) are Beyond the pleasure principle (1920), The Ego and the Ego (1922) and the discomfort of civilization (1930). However, the rise to power of Hitler's Nazism forces Freud, who has been suffering from cancer for years, to exile in London in 1938, where the psychoanalyst dies the following year.