| Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), physiologist, medical doctor, psychologist and father of psychoanalysis, was born in Frieberg, Moravia. When he was four years old his family moved to Vienna, and he spent most of the rest of his life in that city. In 1937 when the Nazis annexed Austria, Freud, who was Jewish, was forced to leave Vienna. Freud's major contributions to the field of psychology included the theory that the mind is a complex energy-system; articulating and refining the concepts of the unconscious, of infantile sexuality, and of repression; proposing a tri-partite account of the mind's structure (id, ego, and super-ego); and interpreting human actions, dreams, and cultural artifacts as invariably possessing implicit symbolic significance. |
