Penis envy. Repression. Libido. Ego. Few have left a legacy as enduring and pervasive as Sigmund Freud. Despite being dismissed long ago as pseudoscientific, Freudian concepts such as these not only permeate many aspects of popular culture, but also had an overarching influence on, and played an important role in the development of, modern psychology, leading TIME Magazine to name him as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century.
Before his rise to fame as the founding father of psychoanalysis, however, Freud trained and worked as a neurologist. He carried out pioneering neurobiological research, which was cited by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, and helped to establish neuroscience as a discipline.
The eldest of eight children, Freud was born on 6th May, 1856, in the Moravian town of Příbor, in what is now the Czech Republic. Four years later, Freud’s father Jakob, a wool merchant, moved the family to Austria in search of new business opportunities. Freud subsequently entered the university there, aged just 17, to study medicine and, in the second year of his degree, became preoccupied with scientific research. His early work was a harbinger of things to come – it focused on the sexual organs of the eel. The work was, by all accounts, satisfactory, but Freud was disappointed with his results and, perhaps dismayed by the prospect of dissecting more eels, moved to Ernst Brücke’s laboratory in 1877. There, he switched to studying the biology of nervous tissue, an endeavour that would last for 10 years.
Not just the father of psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud was also a pioneering neuroscientist | The Raw Story
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