1856-1939

"The beginning of religion, morals, society and art all converge in the Oedipus complex."

Birthplace

Freiberg, Moravia (now Czech Republic)

Education

University of Vienna (medicine; PhD, philosophy and physiology); worked with neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who encouraged an interest in nervous ailments and hysteria.

Did you know?

In 1925 Samuel Goldwyn offered Freud $100,000 to collaborate on a love story about Anthony and Cleopatra. Though he refused, a "psychoanalytical" film showing the process of therapy, Secrets of a Soul: A Psychoanalytical Drama, was made in 1926, with two Berlin analysts acting as advisers. Though film, Freud commented, seemed "as unavoidable as page-boy haircuts", "I won't have myself trimmed that way.

Critical verdict

Though 'Anna O' was already using the term "talking cure" to describe her therapy with Josef Breuer, with whom he wrote Studies on Hysteria, Freud is the undisputed father of psychoanalysis - as Germaine Greer says, "It had no mother" - and granddaddy of all its second-generation branches. "You can be Lacanians," Jacques Lacan pronounced; "As for me, I'm a Freudian." Freud's detractors multiplied as quickly as his disciples, and sometimes changed sides. Feminists objected to his view that "anatomy is destiny", DH Lawrence represented the cold-shower pragmatists ("It all seems to me an inducement to hysteria") and Jean-Paul Sartre found a philosophical oxymoron ("How can we conceive of a knowledge which is ignorant of itself?"). WH Auden summed it up: "If often he was wrong and, at times, absurd, to us he is no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion." It is Freud's talent as a writer and interest in such literary subjects as wit, jokes and dreams that make his works readable today, while his influence has extended into literary criticism, with concepts such as Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence", in which an author stands in Oedipal relationship to his most revered literary father figure.

Recommended works

The Interpretation of Dreams and his work on jokes is accessible and illuminating.

Influences

From reading Shakespeare at eight, it was a lecture by Goethe that apparently changed his ambitions from law to medicine.

Now read on

Freud has been a rich literary inspiration: one narrative thread of Anthony Burgess's The End of the World News follows the thoughts of the dying, cancer-ridden old man; Terry Johnson's play Hysteria explores his neuroses.

Recommended biography

The Diary of Sigmund Freud 1929-1939: A Record of the Final Decade (transl Michael Molnar, 1992); his letters are also available.

Criticism

The Freud title is the best of the "Introducing..." series.

Useful links and work online

Work online

· Full text: The Interpretation of Dreams

Background

· Freud Museum, London

· Sex, Lies and Letters: the Freud-Jung relationship

· Web resources on Sigmund Freud