Not just the father of psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud was also a pioneering neuroscientist | The Raw Story

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

Urn containing Sigmund Freud's ashes smashed during theft attempt | Books | theguardian.com

An attempt has been made to steal the remains of Sigmund Freud – or more plausibly, the ancient Greek urn in which the ashes of the father of psychoanalysis, and those of his wife, Martha Bernays, were interred at a crematorium in north London.

Staff at the crematorium in Golders Green discovered broken pieces of the urn, which dates from around 300BC and came from Freud's collection of antiquities, lying on the floor on New Year's Day, after thieves apparently broke in overnight and smashed it in the attempt to steal it.

The urn had been on public display since Freud was cremated at Golders Green in 1939, after his death aged 83. When his widow died in 1951, aged 90, her ashes were added.

The urn – like the famous couch in his consulting room – was a gift from one of his many aristocratic patients. Knowing of Freud's interest in the art of ancient Greece, it was a gift from Princess Marie Bonaparte, great grandniece of Napoleon, who herself became a psychoanalyst, and who helped the Freud family escape from Vienna in 1938 as the Nazi grip tightened.

Urn containing Sigmund Freud's ashes smashed during theft attempt | Books | theguardian.com