Sigmund Freud was the founder of psychoanalysis and one of the most influential thinkers of the modern age, the man who transformed how human beings understand the mind, the self, and the hidden forces of the unconscious. Born in Freiberg, in what is now the Czech Republic, he moved as a child to Vienna, where he would live and work for most of his life, training as a physician and specializing in neurology.
Through his clinical work with patients suffering from hysteria and neurosis, Freud developed a revolutionary theory of the mind. He argued that much of mental life is unconscious, that childhood experiences and repressed sexual desires shape the adult personality, and that dreams are the "royal road" to understanding the hidden self. His treatment — the "talking cure" — invited patients to speak freely and unlock buried conflicts.
His many books, including The Interpretation of Dreams, introduced concepts that permeated twentieth-century thought: the ego, the id, repression, the Oedipus complex, the Freudian slip. Though controversial and fiercely contested from the start, his ideas reshaped psychology, medicine, art, and literature.
Freud gathered a circle of disciples — some, like Carl Jung, later broke with him to found rival schools. A Jew in an age of rising anti-Semitism, he was forced to flee Vienna after the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, escaping to London, where he died the following year of cancer, having changed forever the way humanity sees itself.