Abstract
Freud was born in 1856 in Freiberg, in what is now the Czech Republic. He was the first-born son of his father's second wife, who subsequently had five daughters and two other sons. His father — a wood merchant — moved the family to Vienna when Freud was four years old. Freud was successful at school and on leaving at the age of 17 he was faced with the standard career choice for Viennese Jews: medicine, law, industry or business. He made his decision upon hearing a reading by Professor Carl Bruhl of Goethe's essay on nature, and in 1873 enrolled at Vienna University to study medicine. In 1876 he began his career as a neurologist at Ernst Brucke's physiological laboratory, where he worked with short interruptions until 1882. He then joined the General Hospital of Vienna, where he began to study nervous diseases and was appointed lecturer in neuropathology. He also took and conducted research into the effects of cocaine. For years he had suffered from periodic depression, fatigue and apathy, neurotic symptoms that later were to take the form of anxiety attacks, which he treated by means of his own analysis. Cocaine eased these problems, but all his life he was to suffer from migraine, which defied any treatment. In October 1885 he went to Paris and studied at the Salpetriere hospital for nervous diseases under Charcot Jean Marting until February 1886. He was profoundly influenced by Charcot's work on hysteria, which confirmed the genuineness of hysterical phenomena, hysterical paralyses and contractures by hypnotic suggestion.
