Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud ( German; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst.


Biography：
Freud was born to Galician Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg, in the Austrian Empire. He qualified as a doctor of medicine in 1881 at the University of Vienna.[5][6] Upon completing his habilitation in 1885, he was appointed a docent in neuropathology and became an affiliated professor in 1902.[7] Freud lived and worked in Vienna, having set up his clinical practice there in 1886. In 1938 Freud left Austria to escape the Nazis. He died in exile in the United Kingdom in 1939.

Main contributions：
①Seduction theory
In the early 1890s, Freud used a form of treatment based on the one that Breuer had described to him, modified by what he called his "pressure technique" and his newly developed analytic technique of interpretation and reconstruction. According to Freud's later accounts of this period, as a result of his use of this procedure most of his patients in the mid-1890s reported early childhood sexual abuse. He believed these stories, which he used as the basis for his seduction theory, but then he came to believe that they were fantasies. He explained these at first as having the function of "fending off" memories of infantile masturbation, but in later years he wrote that they represented Oedipal fantasies, stemming from innate drives that are sexual and destructive in nature

②Life and death drives
Freud believed that the human psyche is subject to two conflicting drives: the life drive or libido and the death drive. The life drive was also termed "Eros" and the death drive "Thanatos", although Freud did not use the latter term; "Thanatos" was introduced in this context by Paul Federn.[157][158] Freud hypothesized that libido is a form of mental energy with which processes, structures and object-representations are invested.


Selected works by Sigmund Freud：
1891 On Aphasia
1895 Studies on Hysteria (co-authored with Josef Breuer)
1899 The Interpretation of Dreams
1901 On Dreams (abridged version of The Interpretation of Dreams)
1904 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
1905 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
1905 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
1907 Delusion and Dream in Jensen's Gradiva


Reference
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud