Sigmund Freud was born in Moravia and moved to Vienna where he spent most of his career. He developed theories on the unconscious, repression, and psychoanalysis. He also focused on sex and gender development, including the Oedipus complex and “penis envy”. He emigrated to England to avoid anti-Jewish sentiment and died in 1939.
Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in Moravia, an area located in today’s Czech Republic. When he was just a boy, his family moved to Vienna, where he grew up, studied and spent most of his career. Late in life, Freud emigrated to England to avoid the growing hostilities against Jews in Vienna. He died shortly after, in 1939.
Freud started out in medical school, but psychology was in his blood and he was constantly trying to make a connection between physiology and psychology. In his early years, these efforts were expressed by his adherence to the reductionist theories popular at the time: the attempt to reduce all mental function to neurology or physiological responses. One might consider his later theories, those which linked practically everything in human psychology to sexual impulses and instincts, to be considered in the same vein.
He is best known for his theory of the unconscious. Freud theorized that the conscious mind—the part of the mind that people are aware of—constituted only a tiny part of the mind. Far more important was the unconscious mind, which determines people’s feelings and actions without them being aware of it. Although the idea was brand new, Freud was able to popularize it.
Freud theorized that many of the psychological problems people face were related to memories or experiences that have been repressed from the unconscious. Because people are not even aware of the unconscious, they are unable to deal with what the unconscious has repressed, and they are unaware of how the repressed memories and experiences are harming their psychological health. Freud developed psychoanalysis as a way to deal with the unconscious. He theorized that a mixture of hypnosis and talking about repressed memories could help the conscious mind come to terms with it, and thus relieve the patient of his psychological difficulties.
The psychologist is also known for his developmental theories and their focus on sex. Freud was very interested in how men and women develop masculine and feminine identities. In the most famous part of his theater theory, the Oedipus complex, he theorized that, during early childhood, boys fall in love with their mothers, but develop masculine personalities by modeling themselves on their fathers out of fear of castration.
Likewise, he has developed some very famous and very persistent theories about women. He theorized that women develop feminine personalities because they believe they have been castrated; for what he called “penis envy”, they imitate their mothers to win over a man and the power that his penis represents.
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