Sigmund Freud
Austrian neurologist (1856–1939), born in Freiberg, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today Příbor, in the Czech Republic), into a Jewish family, trained in medicine and neurology in Vienna, where he practised for most of his professional life, and founder of psychoanalysis — both a theory of the mind and a therapeutic method whose cultural influence has scarcely been matched by any other twentieth-century thinker, extending far beyond the strictly clinical or scientific realm. Building on his clinical work with hysterical patients in Vienna, initially in collaboration with Josef Breuer, Freud developed the central hypothesis of his work: that much of human psychic life is governed by unconscious processes — repressed desires, memories and drives, often sexual in nature, unacceptable to consciousness — which manifest in disguised form in dreams, slips of the tongue, neurotic symptoms and parapraxes. The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), a work he himself considered his most important, presents dreams as the 'royal road' to the unconscious and introduces fundamental concepts such as psychic censorship and the dream-work of condensation and displacement. Throughout his career he elaborated a structural model of the mind articulated into three agencies — the ego, the superego and the id — developed the theory of the Oedipus complex as the core of infantile psychosexual development, and postulated, late in life in works such as Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the existence of a death drive (Thanatos) in tension with the life drive (Eros). In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), his most influential culturalist reflection, he analysed the irresolvable conflict between the individual's instinctual demands and the restrictions imposed by life in society, an inevitable source of unhappiness and collective neurosis. Jewish and an open critic of Nazism, he was forced into exile in London in 1938 after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, where he died the following year of jaw cancer he had suffered from for over a decade.