Sigismund Solomon Freud was born into a Jewish family in Freiberg, Moravia, on May 6, 1856. His father, Jacob, was a wool merchant, and his mother, Amalie Nathansohn, was Jacob's second wife. When Sigmund was born, his father was forty and his mother only twenty. The family moved to Leipzig in 1859 and to Vienna a year later where Freud remained until a year before his death.

In 1873, Freud enrolled in the University of Vienna to study medicine. Upon completing his degree, he obtained a position as lecturer in neuro-pathology at the University of Vienna and set up a private medical practice in an office adjoining his home. In 1895, he co-published Studies in Hysteria with Joseph Breuer in which they described their new method of the "talking cure." In 1886, he married Martha Bernays with whom he had six children.

A watershed event in Freud's life was the death of...