Sigmund Freud's Biography

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

Professor Henk de Berg is Professor of German and Head of Germanic Studies in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sheffield. Professor de Berg’s research interests are in classical thinkers like Hegel and Freud, as well as contemporary thinkers and debates in German culture and literature. Some of Professor de Berg's recent books include ‘Freud’s theory and its use in literary and cultural studies’ (2003), which received a Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award and has been translated into multiple languages including Chinese, and ‘Trump and Hitler: A comparative study in lying’ (2024).