Austrian doctor, psychoanalyst and writer Sigmund Freud was BOTD in 1856. Born in Freiburg in Moravia, then part of the Austrian Empire (now Příbor in the Czech Republic) to a wealthy Jewish industrialist family, his family moved to Vienna in 1860, where Sigmund was raised and educated. He studied medicine at the University of Vienna and qualified as a neurologist, working in psychiatric hospitals and lecturing in neuropathology. His advocacy for the pharmaceutical benefits of cocaine (at the time a legal drug) backfired spectacularly when many of his patients became addicted, damaged his reputation. In 1885, he worked at the Salpêtrière clinic in Paris, where he began developing his theories of human psychology, concluding that hysteria was psychological rather than biological in origin. Returning to Vienna, he established his own private practice, developing his “talking cure” to help diagnose his patients’ pathologies. He published his theories in a series of books and case studies, causing a revolution in social and medical thought. His ideas challenged Enlightenment ideas of rational behaviour, arguing that humans were in the grip of unconscious desires and that physical and mental illnesses were the result of repressed trauma and unresolved psychosexual dynamics. His proposals that the subconscious could be accessed via talk therapy, free association and dream interpretation became the cornerstones of the emerging practice of psychoanalysis. By 1908, he was a medical celebrity, training (and often disagreeing with) his students Sándor Ferenczi, Carl Jung and Otto Rank. As the Nazis came to power in Europe, Freud and his family moved to London where he continued his practice with his daughter Anna Freud. In later years, he developed Sabina Spielrein’s theory of the “death drive”, describing human existence as a conflict between Eros (survival, sex, reproduction, creativity) and Thanatos (aggression, compulsion and self-destructiveness). He died in 1939 of complications from oral cancer, aged 83. Now considered one of the 20th century’s most influential thinkers, his ideas have profoundly influenced medicine, psychology, sociology, sexology, literature and metaphysics, and many of his key concepts (ego, libido, repression, neurosis, displacement, projection, “Freudian” slips, phallic symbols) have entered the public lexicon. His theories of sexuality continue to be controversial, and have been critiqued by Existentialist, feminist and queer thinkers, notably Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millett, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. His view of male homosexuality as a disorder caused by defective parental attachment arguably contributed to 20th century views of homosexuality as an illness, despite his warnings that same-sex attraction was unlikely to be “cured” by therapy.

work continues to incite debate and criticism.