Sigmund Freud — The Father of Modern Psychoanalysis
How a nervous Austrian man became the foundation of an entire field.
Sigmund Freud was born on May 6, 1856, to a Jewish merchant family in Freiberg, a small town in the Austrian empire in what is now the Czech Republic.
He was apparently a playful, curious, happy child, though his family was unusually structured. His father was married once before and brought children near in age to his new wife into the second marriage. Freud apparently always looked back on his early childhood with a great amount of fondness, being his mother’s first child and her apparent favorite.
“I recall an anecdote I often heard repeated in my childhood. At the time of my birth an old peasant-woman had prophesied to my proud mother that with her first-born child she brought a great man into the world.”
Because of his father’s failing business, Freud’s family was forced to move when he was only four. They moved to the city of Vienna, where he would spend…
