About the lecture

In this lecture, we think about Sigmund Freud’s biography, focusing in particular on: (i) his place of birth and death in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (in a small village in what is now the Czech Republic/Czechia) and England, respectively; (ii) Freud’s educational background; (iii) Freud setting up as a practicing psychotherapist; (iv) Freud’s Jewish ethnicity resulting in him never being fully integrated into Austro-Hungarian society; (v) Freud’s academic background as a key contributor to his life’s work, inspired by great teachers like Theodor Meynert and Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke, who were both positivists; (vi) positivism as a philosophical system whereby only things which can be scientifically verified are recognised; (vii) Freud's move away from positivism, a move inspired by his work with Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris; (viii) Charcot’s use of hypnosis, which contrasted with the positivist focus on the brain taken by German-speaking scientists and which drew Freud's attention to the importance of the mind instead of the brain, a shift of perspective that was key to Freud's development of psychoanalysis.

About the lecturer

Henk de Berg is Professor of German in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sheffield. His expertise is in German and French cultural theory and in social and political thought. Professor de Berg is the author of four books, including Freud’s Theory and Its Use in Literary and Cultural Studies (2003; described by Peter Gay as “as good an introductory text as one can possibly hope for”), which received a Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award and has been translated into three European languages as well as Chinese. Among his eight co-edited volumes is Modern German Thought from Kant to Habermas: An Annotated German-Language Reader (2012); the editors’ general introduction has been described by Joachim Whaley as “probably the best short account of the development of modern German philosophy”. Henk de Berg’s most recent book, written for a larger audience, is Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying (2024).