Essay --

Sigmund Freud was born May 6, 1856 in the Moravian town of Přà ­bor in the Austrian Empire, which is now part of the Czech Republic. His parents’ names were Jacob and Amaila Freud; they both were Jewish. Despite their poverty, Sigmund Freud’s parents supported his education. The Panic of 1857 was the world's first world-wide economic crisis causing the family to relocate to Leipzig and eventually settle in Vienna. In 1865 Freud entered high school at the age of nine. He was a very intelligent student and graduated from the Matura, a high school exit exam with honors. Freud was accepted into the University of Vienna at age seventeen studying within the medical field. In 1882 Freud began his medical career in the psychiatric clinic at the Vienna General Hospital. He decided to enter a private practice in 1886 and specialize in nervous disorders. Sigmund Freud was one of the most influential and interesting men in the field of psychology. He was one of the first majo r social scientists to develop a theory to help explain and understand human behavior. Freud established ideas about how the human mind works and how unconscious desires control behavior. Though his work was great, others were uncertain about how unusual his ideas were. Freud’s work was based on personal perceptions. Freud is best known as the father of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis focuses on the unconscious characteristics of behavior. Freud believed that the conscious level of the mind was comparable to the tip of the iceberg which could be seen, but the unconscious mind was hidden. The unconscious mind contains aspects of the personality of which a person is unaware. When conscious the being is fully aware. One of Freud’s earliest works was Die Traumdeutung, German f... ...culine and feminine characteristics." During Sigmund Freud’s greatest years of scientific discovery, he endured thirty-three operations to his mouth due to a cancerous growth. Throughout this short, sixteen year period in his life he had published the importance of sexual motivations in Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920; organized data concerning the structure of the mind in The Ego and the Id in 1923 and other great works as well. Sigmund Freud died on September 23, 1939. His discoveries in the field of psychology have influenced the modern culture we live in today. Freud is most known for his theories about his theories of the libido, dreams, the mind and the unconscious. Freud’s work recognized the first efficient way of explaining the internal forces that determine human behavior. Psychoanalysis has become a dominant theory in how modern psychology works.