Sigmund Freud

Bio

Sigmund Freud planned to study law but switched to medicine at the University of Vienna. He spent six years comparing human brains with those of frogs, lampreys and crayfish. Freud later wrote that his secular Jewish identity made him a nonconformist thinker.

He moved from the lab to patients, opening a practice for "nervous disorders" in 1886. Freud read dreams as wish fulfillments, and they became his model for how symptoms form.

He carried his Jewish identity into psychoanalysis, which shares its concern with desire bounded by law. Freud became, in the poet W. H. Auden's words, "a whole climate of opinion."