Contributor

Sigmund Freud

(1856 - 1949)

The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud published his first major work, The Interpretation of Dreams, in 1899 and his last, Moses and Monotheism, in 1938—the same year Adolf Hitler invaded Austria. Shortly before he published The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud sent a copy of it to his friend Wilhelm Fleiss, who suggested that the recounted dreams were too humorous. Six years later Freud published a work on humor, relating “joke work” to “dream work.” Freud died in London in 1939 at the age of eighty-three.

All Writing

Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.

—Sigmund Freud, 1930

Voices In Time

1899 | Vienna

Sibling Rivalry

Sigmund Freud observes a family feud.More

Miscellany

Carl Jung attributed his split with his mentor Sigmund Freud around 1910 in part to a generational divide. “Our descendants are our most dangerous enemies,” Jung argued, “for they will outlive us, and, therefore, without fail, will take the power from our enfeebled hands.”

Voices In Time

1917 | Vienna

Fears Founded and Unfounded

Sigmund Freud on real fear versus neurotic fear.More

Voices In Time

1908 | Vienna

Brown Gold

Freud on the obvious connection between money and defecation.More

Conversations

Plato & Sigmund Freud

Voices In Time

c. 1916 | Vienna

Making a Diagnosis

Sigmund Freud provides an introduction to psychoanalysis. More

The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.

—Sigmund Freud, 1912

The less a man knows about the past and the present, the more insecure must prove to be his judgment of the future.

—Sigmund Freud, 1927

Voices In Time

1899 | Vienna

Setting the Record Straight

Sigmund Freud explains the Oedipus complex.More

Miscellany

“Woe to you, my princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are forward you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn’t eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body,” wrote Sigmund Freud to his future wife, Martha Bernays, on June 2, 1884. On February 2, 1886, toward the end of another letter to Bernays, Freud wrote, “Here I am, making silly confessions to you, my sweet darling, and really without any reason whatever unless it is the cocaine that makes me talk so much.” The two married later that year.

Miscellany

“It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death,” Sigmund Freud wrote in 1915, “and whenever we attempt to do so, we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators. Hence the psychoanalytic school could venture on the assertion that, at bottom, no one believes in his own death, or to put the same thing another way, that, in the unconscious, every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.”