The life of Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud was born in an Austrian town by the name of Freiburg on May 06, 1856. He was born into a Jewish family. He soon moved to the town of Vienna where he worked and lived for a majority of his life. In spite of doing brilliant medical and biological studies, Freud was forced to give up a career in academia because of his modest income and his Jewish origins. Instead, Freud opened a medical practice and become interested more and more in psychological disorders. Freud first directed his post-graduate interest towards neurology. After acquiring his Medical Degree in 1881, he became married to a woman by the name of Martha Freud and soon produced six children. Freud studied the minds of psychologically damaged patients and became fascinated with creating a treatment to empower his patients to recall traumatic experiences and bring them to consciousness, and in doing so, confront it both intellectually and emotionally. Soon after setting up his practice, Freud and his colleague Breuer published five known books, based on their theories of the mind. The death of Freud’s father in 1896 also accelerated the birth of psychoanalysis. For the first time Freud highlights the principle of repression. Indeed, affected by the death of his father, Freud decided to practice self-analysis and dedicated himself at the same time to the interpretation of his dreams. It is in fact in 1897 that Freud began researching dreams more deeply which led him to his most important discoveries: the existence of fantasy and the Oedipus complex. In spite of the controversies that Freud continued to raise, he benefited from a wide recognition and was rewarded greatly. However, a victim of cancer in the jaw in 1923 and discouraged by the Nazis who did not appreciate him, Freud fled to London in 1938 just before World War II and died there on September 23rd 1939, having committed suicide with the help of his doctor and his daughter Anna with a lethal dose of morphine.
I chose this abstract representation of Sigmund Freud because I feel that it represents the time in his life when people disgraced his work because of their own political theories about psychology. Even in his afterlife, psychoanalytical theories are proving and and disproving his work, which calls for a lot of misinterpretations and back lashes about his own theories. The cause of Freud's suicide was in fact due to the repercussions of both the Nazis and his own family's prejudices.