Apioneer in exploring the hidden workings of the human mind, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the founder of psychoanalysis, has been called the most influential thinker of the twentieth century. Born into a Jewish family in Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic), Freud moved with his family to Vienna, Austria, where he lived from early boyhood until shortly before his death. After an education in which he studied the Greek and Latin classics as well as French and German literature, Freud turned to medicine and eventually to the infant science of psychology. By the late 1890s Freud had built on the insights of several coworkers to found the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. Among other revolutionary ideas, psychoanalysis proposes that much human behavior is governed by unconscious motives and that in adults many of these motives stem from sexual impulses shaped by long-forgotten childhood experiences. At the turn of the century, Freud published his first major work, The Interpretation of Dreams, which won him slow but growing recognition in the European medical community. Shortly afterward, he summarized his findings for a general readership in On Dreams. The volume foreshadows important concepts that Freud would elaborate in later books, such as The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Three Essays on Sexuality (1905), and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).
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