Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856, before the invention of telephones, radios, automobiles, airplanes, and many of the other material and cultural changes. Freud lived when the Great War unleashed, a war that destroyed the empire whose capital city was his home for most of his life and he also lived the beginning of the Second World War. He began his career as an ambitious but isolated neurologist; by the end of it, he described himself as someone who had had as great an impact on humanity's conception of itself as had Copernicus and Darwin, big science contributors. 

Freud displayed his brilliance at a young age and gained the favoritism of his parents. As a result, his poor parents sacrificed a lot of money to provide him with a proper education. Despite the family's economic struggles, Freud graduated from high school with honors. He then attended the University of Vienna where he studied medicine and was first introduced to psychodynamics, a theory used to determine the psychological forces of human behavior. Medical school ensured the way for the beginning of his career and he also worked in the fields of neurology, philosophy, psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, and literature. His most famous work, “The Interpretation of Dreams”, describes some of his most famous theories about the mind and the unconscious such as dream symbolism and interpretation, wish-fulfillment. It also mentions his famous theories of the Id, Ego, and Superego also called Chiriac. 

In the years of war, Freud had a few number of patients. He continued to treat those that he did have, but spent much of his time writing. In the winters of 1915 to 1916 and 1916 to 1917, he gave lectures on psychoanalysis at the University of Vienna which were later published as the “General Introduction to Psychoanalysis”. One of Freud's most important patients during the war years was a Hungarian named Anton von Freund. Freund was a wealthy Hungarian who was treated by Freud for a minor neurosis. Very enthusiastic about his treatment and excited by the congress in Budapest in 1918, Freund donated a large sum of money to the Association in order to found a psychoanalytic publishing house. The house was founded in January of 1919 and run by Otto Rank until 1924. For bad luck, Freund's generosity turned insignificant by postwar economic conditions in Austria. After this inauspicious beginning, the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, as the publishing house was called, was almost never solvent: it depended mostly on donations from supporters of psychoanalysis, dues from members of the Association, contributions from authors published by the Verlag, and sales of Freud's books. The Verlag was finally done by the annexation of Austria by Hitler in 1938. 

For concluding Sigmund Freud created a whole new outlook on the idea of psychology by considering the idea that personality is determined by childhood experiences and he was one of the first to consider the internal workings of the human brain. 

Lucia Valdivia