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Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)

Freud founded psychoanalysis — at once a theory of mind, a method for investigating it, and a technique for treating its disorders. Its founding claim is that mental life is governed by a dynamic unconscious: wishes, conflicts, and memories of which a person is unaware but which press for expression and shape thought, feeling, and conduct. Nothing in mental life is accidental; slips, dreams, and symptoms have causes, and those causes can be read.

Sigmund Freud was born in Freiberg, Moravia, and raised in Vienna, where he spent almost his entire life. He trained in medicine and specialised in neurology, doing early research on aphasia and nerve cells and a now-notorious episode of advocacy for cocaine. A study trip to Paris (1885–86), where he watched Jean-Martin Charcot use hypnosis on hysterical patients, turned him toward the psychological roots of nervous symptoms. Back in Vienna he worked with Josef Breuer on the “cathartic method” — having patients relive and discharge traumatic memories — published as Studies on Hysteria (1895). After his father’s death in 1896 he undertook a sustained self-analysis, mostly of his own dreams, out of which the theory took shape. He gathered a circle around him from 1902 (the Wednesday society, later the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society), saw the movement spread internationally, and watched it fracture in his own lifetime. After the Nazi annexation of Austria he emigrated to London in 1938 and died there in 1939.

Key concepts

The dynamic unconscious and psychic determinism. The unconscious is not a passive store of forgotten material but an active force, pressing toward expression. Psychic determinism is the companion claim: mental events are caused, not random — which is why a slip or a dream can be interpreted rather than dismissed.

The topographic and structural models. Freud first divided the mind into unconscious (repressed or never-conscious material), preconscious (reachable with effort), and conscious (present awareness). In The Ego and the Id (1923) he recast this as three agencies: the id, the reservoir of drives seeking immediate satisfaction (the pleasure principle); the ego, the reality-oriented mediator managing the id’s demands against the world; and the superego, the internalised voice of parental and cultural authority — conscience and ideal — formed through identification.

Repression and the defences. Repression is the primary operation that pushes unacceptable impulses and memories out of consciousness; it costs energy to maintain. Around it Freud described a repertoire of unconscious defence mechanisms — displacement, projection, rationalisation, denial, reaction formation, and sublimation — by which the ego wards off anxiety.

Drive theory. Mental life is powered by drives (Trieb), innate forces seeking satisfaction. The primary one is libido, a broadly sexual energy present from infancy. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), pressed by the repetition of trauma and the compulsion to repeat, Freud added a second: a death drive set against Eros. The move was speculative, and most of his followers declined to take it up — ego psychology largely set it aside, and it was chiefly Melanie Klein’s line that carried it forward, as the root of innate aggression. It remained one of the most contested elements of his own theory.

Infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) made the scandalous claim that sexuality begins in infancy, diffuse and not yet genital. The libido passes through psychosexual stages — oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital — and at the phallic stage the Oedipus complex emerges: the child’s desire for the opposite-sex parent and rivalry with the same-sex parent, whose resolution through identification forms the superego.

Dreams. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) Freud called the dream the “royal road to the unconscious.” Its remembered surface — the manifest content — disguises an underlying wish, the latent content; the dream-work of condensation, displacement, and symbolisation effects the disguise. Dreams, he held, are wish-fulfilments, even when distorted past recognition.

The clinical method. Hypnosis gave way to free association — the patient says whatever comes, uncensored. The analyst attends to resistance (the patient’s unconscious opposition to insight) and to transference (the patient’s redirection onto the analyst of feelings first attached to parental figures), which becomes the central lever of the cure. The frame — the couch, the analyst’s reticence, the regular session — sustains these dynamics.

Parapraxes and jokes. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) argued that slips of the tongue, forgettings, and small accidents are not chance but expressions of repressed wishes — the “Freudian slip.” Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) read humour as the disguised release of forbidden impulse.

The cultural works. Freud extended psychoanalysis well beyond the clinic: Totem and Taboo (1913) on the primal origins of religion and law; The Future of an Illusion (1927) treating religion as a collective neurosis; Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) on the standing tension between drive and the renunciations civilisation demands; and the late, speculative Moses and Monotheism (1939).

Freud and philosophy

Freud trained as a neurologist, not a philosopher, and was guarded about his philosophical debts — yet his thought reshaped twentieth-century philosophy. He read Schopenhauer on the unconscious will and Nietzsche on drives and the critique of reason, while tending to downplay how far they anticipated him; both reinforced his conviction that conscious reason is not master in its own house. Ricoeur grouped him with Marx and Nietzsche as the “masters of suspicion” — thinkers for whom self-understanding conceals a deeper truth to be decoded, in Freud’s case unconscious desire — and devoted Freud and Philosophy (1965) to reading psychoanalysis as an interpretive hermeneutics. The Frankfurt School (Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer) fused Freud with Marx, arguing that repression is social as well as intrapsychic. Sartre rejected the Freudian unconscious as incompatible with radical freedom — recasting much of it as “bad faith” — yet engaged it closely. The drives’ biological cast sat less easily with later structuralist and post-structuralist readings, which took up the symbolic and linguistic side of his account.

Lifetime conflicts

The movement fractured while Freud led it. The collaboration with Breuer ended around 1896, in part over Freud’s growing insistence on sexuality. Alfred Adler broke away in 1911, putting inferiority and social striving where Freud put sexuality. The more wounding rupture was with Carl Jung, whom Freud had treated as his heir and installed as first president of the International Psychoanalytic Association (1910); Jung’s split, formalised in 1913, rejected the sexual theory of the libido for a wider notion of psychic energy and a collective unconscious. Freud held firm authority over the movement — a secret “Committee” was formed to guard orthodoxy — and tended to read theoretical departure as personal betrayal. The schools that grew from and against his work belong to the wider history of psychoanalysis rather than to his own.

Contested questions

Freud’s published cases — Dora, Little Hans, the Rat Man, the Wolf Man, the Schreber analysis — are canonical, and all have drawn later scrutiny: his pressing of interpretation in the Dora case, the conduct of Little Hans’s analysis through the boy’s father, the editing of material to fit theory. From the 1980s the so-called “Freud Wars” sharpened this. Jeffrey Masson argued that Freud’s abandonment of the early “seduction theory” — the view that neuroses trace to real childhood abuse — suppressed evidence of actual abuse rather than marking theoretical progress; Frederick Crews pressed the charge of selective and reconstructed reporting; Frank Sulloway argued that Freud’s biological ambitions were disguised rather than resolved. Karl Popper’s older objection — that psychoanalysis is unfalsifiable, able to absorb any outcome as confirmation — remains the standard challenge to its scientific standing. The early cocaine episode, which Freud later regretted, is part of the record too. Defenders reply that some of these criticisms conflate Freud’s particular claims with the broader notions of unconscious motivation and the talking cure.

Key works

See also: Psychoanalysis · Jung · Nietzsche · Schopenhauer · Ricoeur · Marcuse