98 Fun Facts About Sigmund Freud

Where did Freud sit while someone lay talking on his famous couch?

Behind them, out of sight: Freud said he could not put up with being stared at for eight hours a day. He also wanted his own expressions kept from steering what was said.

What are the three parts of the model of psychic structure Freud developed?

Id, ego and superego are his English translators' Latin. Freud wrote in plain German of das Es, das Ich and das Über-Ich: the It, the I and the Over-I.

What did Freud call the sexual energy he believed drives much of mental life?

Libido could be redirected, Freud argued: denied a sexual outlet, it is 'sublimated' into art, science and other work the world rewards.

Which complex did Freud arrive at by analysing his own childhood jealousy of his father?

The Oedipus complex came out of the self-analysis Freud began after his father died in 1896. He found love for his mother and jealousy of his father in himself, then judged them universal.

Freud is tied to Vienna, but his birthplace, the Moravian town of Freiberg, now lies in which country?

Czechia: Freiberg is now the Czech town of Příbor. Money trouble drove the family out when Freud was three, and by 1860 they were in Vienna, his home for the next 78 years.

What was Freud's given name at birth?

Sigismund Schlomo honoured his father's father, Schlomo, who had died shortly before the birth. Freud never used the Hebrew name and trimmed the first to Sigmund as a student in Vienna.

Which habit did Freud never give up, even through some thirty operations for cancer of the mouth?

Smoking cigars, often twenty a day. Diagnosed with cancer of the mouth in 1923, Freud sat through some thirty operations over sixteen years and carried on smoking until he died.

Which instrument did Freud's sister have to give up because her practising disturbed his studying?

Piano: he told his parents the noise broke his concentration, and the instrument went. However cramped the family flat, the favoured eldest son always had a room to himself.

Which animals did the student Freud dissect by the hundred, hunting for testes nobody had yet found?

Eels, at a marine station in Trieste in 1876. Aristotle had guessed eels sprang from mud because nobody could find a male, and Freud's four weeks of cutting settled nothing.

Whose essays did a bored Freud translate into German during his year of compulsory military service?

John Stuart Mill's essays, four of them, were a paid commission that filled the long idle hours of army service. Freud was still a medical student, a year short of his degree.

Which then-legal drug did the young Freud take himself and praise in print as a cure for low spirits?

Cocaine nearly made his name: while Freud was away visiting his fiancée, his colleague Carl Koller showed that it numbs the eye for surgery, and took the credit.

Whom did Freud marry in 1886, the granddaughter of a chief rabbi of Hamburg?

Martha Bernays waited through a four-year engagement, hidden at first because Freud had no money to support a wife. Love letters passed between them almost daily.

At what Vienna address did Freud and his family live from 1891 until 1938?

Berggasse 19 is now a museum, but its treatment room stands empty. The Freuds took their furniture with them in 1938, so the famous couch is in London.

Which of Freud's six children followed him into psychoanalysis?

Anna, the youngest, started out teaching primary school, and watching her pupils every day drew her to the work. She went on to pioneer child psychoanalysis.

Which Berlin ear, nose and throat doctor was Freud's closest confidant as he worked out his early theories?

Wilhelm Fliess believed the nose was linked to the sex organs. Odd as that sounds, Freud tried out his boldest ideas on him first, mostly by letter, for some fifteen years.

Which Paris neurologist did Freud study hypnosis and hysteria with on a fellowship in 1885?

Jean-Martin Charcot used hypnotic suggestion on patients with hysterical paralysis, which showed Freud that an illness could begin in the mind rather than the nerves. Freud later named a son after him.

Which patient of Josef Breuer's coined the phrase "talking cure"?

Anna O. was really Bertha Pappenheim. She recovered to found Germany's League of Jewish Women and became a pioneering social worker.

What did Freud call his method of having patients talk uncensored about whatever came to mind, after dropping hypnosis?

Free association took years to arrive. Freud first tried massage and pressing on patients' heads to draw memories out, and only later asked them simply to say whatever crossed their minds.

Which 1895 book, co-written with Josef Breuer, set out Freud's early clinical method and case histories?

Studies on Hysteria argued that hysterics 'suffer mainly from reminiscences'. The partnership did not last: Breuer could not accept how much weight Freud went on to put on sex.

Which breed was Jofi, the dog who sat in on Freud's sessions?

Chow chow: Jofi stayed at his side while patients talked. Freud said he never needed to check his watch, because she got up and yawned when the hour was over.

Which 1901 Freud book argued that slips of the tongue are never accidents?

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life opens with a lapse of Freud's own: he could not recall the painter Signorelli's name, and kept coming up with Botticelli instead.

What did Freud call a patient's habit of treating the analyst like a parent?

Transference struck Freud at first as mere resistance, a threat to the treatment. He came to see it as the heart of the cure, since old family dramas replayed in the consulting room could at last be examined.

By what pseudonym is Freud's Russian patient Sergei Pankejeff known in the case histories?

The Wolf Man got his name from a childhood nightmare of white wolves sitting in the tree outside his bedroom window. As an adult he painted the scene, and two of his versions hang in Freud's London house.

In Freud's scheme of childhood development, which stage comes first?

Oral comes first: Freud held that a newborn finds its keenest satisfaction through the mouth, which is why babies suck their thumbs and put every toy within reach into it.

What was the group of physicians who began meeting at Freud's apartment in 1902 called?

The Wednesday Society began as four doctors invited to Freud's flat, where one member read a paper each week and the rest argued it out. By 1908 it had become the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.

Which Swiss psychiatrist became the first president of the International Psychoanalytical Association?

Carl Gustav Jung was Freud's chosen "crown prince", picked partly so that psychoanalysis would not be written off as a purely Jewish affair. Within four years the two had fallen out and he resigned.

Freud called dream interpretation the "royal road" to what?

The unconscious, Freud argued, shows itself in sleep: every dream is a wish fulfilled, disguised so that the mind's own censor lets it through.

Which country did Freud visit only once, to give five lectures at Clark University in 1909?

The United States: Clark University's president invited him over for its twentieth anniversary, and the university sent him home with an honorary doctorate.

Which early follower quit Freud's circle in 1911 to build a rival psychology around feelings of inferiority?

Alfred Adler was president of the Vienna society when he walked out, taking nine members with him. He held that the urge to make up for weakness, not sex, drives people, and he and Freud never met again.

Otto Rank broke with Freud after his 1924 book traced all anxiety back to the trauma of what?

Birth: Rank's The Trauma of Birth put separation from the mother where Freud had put the father. Freud welcomed the book at first, then rejected it, and Rank left Vienna for Paris in 1926.

Who offered Freud $100,000 in 1925 for his advice on history's great love stories?

A Hollywood producer, Samuel Goldwyn, wanted the world-famous analyst to help put the great love stories on screen. Freud turned the money down.

Freud's nephew Edward Bernays drew on his uncle's ideas in America to pioneer which profession?

Public relations, which Bernays called the engineering of consent. He titled his 1928 book on the craft Propaganda, and was still promoting it in his 90s; he died at 103.

Which prize did the city of Frankfurt award Freud in 1930?

The Goethe Prize recognised the literary quality of Freud's writing. The Nobel committees never did: he was nominated more than 30 times, once for Literature, and never won.

With which physicist did Freud exchange the open correspondence published in 1933 as Why War?

Albert Einstein wrote first, asking whether there was any way to deliver mankind from the menace of war. The League of Nations had invited the exchange.

After the Nazis burned his books in 1933, Freud joked that which era would have burned him instead?

The Middle Ages: "What progress we are making," he remarked. For all the wit he misjudged the danger, and stayed in Vienna until the Nazis annexed Austria five years later.

Whose arrest by the Gestapo in March 1938 finally convinced Freud to leave Vienna?

His daughter's arrest came on 22 March, when the Gestapo raided the family home and took her in for questioning. Until then Freud, 81, had insisted on staying in Vienna.

Which official read Freud's books, grew sympathetic and quietly eased his 1938 escape from Vienna?

The Nazi managing his assets, Anton Sauerwald, held evidence that could have blocked the escape and kept it to himself. The Freuds later said they owed him their lives and freedom.

Which follower paid the Nazi charges that let Freud and his family leave Vienna in 1938?

Marie Bonaparte, a great-grandniece of Napoleon, had first come to Freud as a patient. She also took the fleeing family in at her home in Paris on their way to London.

In which London district is the house where Freud spent his final year, now the Freud Museum?

Hampstead: the Freuds were able to bring their furniture out of Vienna, so his study at 20 Maresfield Gardens, original couch included, is preserved as he left it.

Which Surrealist artist visited the exiled Freud in London in 1938 and sketched his portrait?

Salvador Dalí, like his fellow Surrealists, revered Freud, and sketched him during the visit. Freud, who had written the Surrealists off as fools, admitted that this young man made him think again.

In The Future of an Illusion, Freud traced what back to a child's longing for a protective father?

Religion, Freud argued, springs from the helplessness we first feel as children: God is a more powerful father, one who can be clung to for a whole lifetime.

Dying of cancer in 1939, Freud asked his doctor to end his suffering with heavy doses of which drug?

Morphine. Years earlier Freud had made his doctor, Max Schur, promise not to let him be tormented unnecessarily at the end, and in September 1939 he held him to it.

What did Freud collect so avidly that his desk and study overflowed with them?

Antiquities: he owned some 2,000 ancient statues, vases and other pieces. After his cremation, his ashes were placed inside one of them, an urn more than 2,000 years old.

In which 1920 work did Freud first infer the existence of a death drive?

Beyond the Pleasure Principle began with a puzzle from the First World War: shell-shocked soldiers relived their worst moments in nightmares, night after night, which no wish for pleasure could explain.

Which poet mourned Freud in 1940 as 'a whole climate of opinion'?

W. H. Auden's elegy 'In Memory of Sigmund Freud' grants that he was often wrong and at times absurd, yet says he had become the weather everyone lives under.

Which philosopher argued that Freud's psychoanalytic theories were unfalsifiable?

Karl Popper held that a real science must risk being proved wrong. Freud's theory, he said, could account for any behaviour at all, so no observation could ever count against it.

Which psychoanalyst answered Freud's theory of penis envy by arguing that men suffer from womb envy?

Karen Horney argued that what women envy is men's power in a male-run world, not their anatomy. Men, she added, envy pregnancy and motherhood, and chase success elsewhere to make up for it.

Which London department store acted as funeral director for Freud's cremation in 1939?

Harrods of Knightsbridge took charge of the funeral on the instructions of Freud's son. Ernest Jones and the writer Stefan Zweig were among those who gave the eulogies.

Freud came to doubt that which playwright wrote his own plays, crediting the Earl of Oxford instead?

William Shakespeare was, Freud decided, a front for Edward de Vere, a theory launched by J. Thomas Looney's 1920 book Shakespeare Identified. Academic scholars mostly ignored the idea.

Which screen duo kidnap Freud for a school history report in a 1989 film comedy?

Bill and Ted grab Freud along with Beethoven, Joan of Arc, Genghis Khan and Abraham Lincoln in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. Rod Loomis played the bewildered Viennese doctor.

The surname Freud is one letter short of the common German word Freude, which means what in English?

Joy is what Freude means: it is the word in the title of Schiller's An die Freude, the Ode to Joy that Beethoven set in the finale of his Ninth Symphony.

On which famous luxury train did Freud escape Vienna for Paris in June 1938?

The Orient Express took Freud out of Vienna on 4 June 1938, with his housekeeper and a doctor in the party. Two days later he stepped off at London's Victoria station.

Which English novelist co-founded the Hogarth Press, long the publisher of Freud's works in English?

Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard set up the press in their dining room in 1917, and it issued the 24-volume standard English Freud. The couple called on him in London after he fled Vienna.

Which animals terrified Little Hans, the five-year-old Viennese boy in Freud's 1909 case study?

Horses scared Hans after he saw one collapse in the street while pulling a heavy load. The boy grew up to be Herbert Graf, who staged operas at New York's Metropolitan for 24 years.

Which fictional detective does Freud treat for addiction in the novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution?

Sherlock Holmes is lured to Vienna by Watson and his brother Mycroft, and Freud uses hypnosis to break his habit. Alan Arkin played Freud in the 1976 film.

Which biblical leader did Freud claim was an Egyptian nobleman, in a book published the year he died?

Moses, Freud argued in Moses and Monotheism, was a follower of the pharaoh Akhenaten who was killed by the very people he led to freedom.

Which actor plays Freud debating God with C. S. Lewis in the 2023 film Freud's Last Session?

Anthony Hopkins plays the dying Freud in the 2023 film, set two days after war broke out in 1939. Thirty years earlier he had played C. S. Lewis himself in Shadowlands.

Which Renaissance artist's childhood memory of a bird, mistranslated as a vulture, did Freud analyse in 1910?

Leonardo da Vinci wrote of a kite, a small hawk, but the German text Freud read said vulture, and he built a theory on Egyptian vulture myths. He still called the essay the only beautiful thing he had written.

Freud's grandson Lucian became one of twentieth-century Britain's most celebrated names in which art?

Painting made Lucian Freud, a son of Sigmund's architect son Ernst, one of the foremost English portraitists of his century. His sombre canvases are thick with heavily worked paint.

Which member of Freud's household was long rumoured to be his lover, a claim revived by an 1898 hotel guest book?

His sister-in-law Minna joined the household in 1896, and a Swiss guest book for August 1898 shows Freud signing the pair in as Dr and wife. Biographers still argue over what that proves.

Which disease killed Freud's fifth child, his daughter Sophie, in 1920?

Influenza killed Sophie in the epidemic that followed the war. She left two young sons, one of whom, Ernst, later took the Freud name and trained as an analyst himself.

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud argued that every dream is the disguised fulfilment of what?

A wish, usually one the sleeper would not admit to when awake, hides inside every dream on this theory, distorted by an inner censor. Freud later conceded that some dreams do not seem to fit the rule.

Which figure of Greek myth lent his name to the title concept of a 1914 Freud essay?

Narcissus, who in Ovid's telling spurns the nymph Echo and is captivated by his own reflection, is the origin of the word narcissism, which Freud put in the title of his essay.

Before founding psychoanalysis, Freud set up a private practice in Vienna in which medical specialty?

Neurology was Freud's field: after six years in a laboratory comparing human brains with those of frogs, lampreys and crayfish, he went into private practice in 1886 because he needed the income.

In a 1935 letter to a worried mother, Freud called which trait of her son nothing to be ashamed of?

Homosexuality, Freud told her, was no vice and could not be classed as an illness, and he called it a great injustice to persecute it as a crime. The letter later became famous.

What became of four of Freud's elderly sisters, who stayed behind in Vienna when he fled in 1938?

They died in concentration camps: one at Treblinka, one of starvation at Theresienstadt and two after being deported onward from there. Attempts to get the four women exit visas had failed.

Which Star Wars actor plays the ghost of Freud opposite Dudley Moore in the 1983 comedy Lovesick?

Alec Guinness, best known to filmgoers as Obi-Wan Kenobi, appears as a spectral Freud looking over the shoulder of an analyst who is falling for one of his own clients.

The teenage Freud signed letters to a friend as Cipión, which kind of talking animal in a Cervantes tale?

A dog: Cipión and Berganza are the two hounds who swap life stories in The Dialogue of the Dogs. Freud and his friend Eduard Silberstein took a name each, and Freud said he learnt Spanish to read Cervantes.

Which Lord of the Rings star played Freud in David Cronenberg's 2011 film A Dangerous Method?

Viggo Mortensen stepped in after Christoph Waltz, first cast as Freud, dropped out over a scheduling conflict. It was his third Cronenberg film, after A History of Violence and Eastern Promises.

Which French existentialist wrote an eight-hour screenplay for John Huston's 1962 Freud film, then withdrew his name?

Jean-Paul Sartre answered Huston's plea to cut a five-hour script by handing in an even longer one. The two quarrelled, though much of his plotting survives in the finished film.

Which streaming giant released the 2020 thriller series Freud, which recasts the young doctor as a crime-solver?

Netflix released the eight-part series days after its debut on the Austrian broadcaster ORF. Its young Freud joins a Hungarian medium to unravel a conspiracy in the Vienna of 1886.

Which scientific academy carried its charter book to Freud's London home so he could sign as a member?

The Royal Society had elected Freud a Foreign Member in 1936. When he reached London two years later, its representatives called on the 82-year-old with the charter book instead of summoning him.

Freud never won a Nobel Prize, but the novelist Romain Rolland nominated him in 1936 in which category?

Literature was Rolland's choice, the only one of Freud's 33 nominations made outside the medical prize. Rolland knew the award well, having won it himself in 1915.

What did Freud's father Jakob trade in, a business so shaky that the family rented a single room?

Wool was Jakob Freud's trade, and money was short: Sigmund arrived in a rented room in a locksmith's house. The family moved on to Leipzig and then Vienna before he was five.

Who gave Freud the famous couch used in his consulting room, as a present around 1890?

One of his patients, a Madame Benvenisti, gave Freud the couch, and it went with him into exile. It is now the star exhibit of the Freud Museum in London.

Which composer, shaken by his wife's affair with the architect Walter Gropius, sought Freud's advice in 1910?

Gustav Mahler took some comfort from his single long consultation with Freud, who told him that making Alma give up her own composing had done much damage.

Freud advised on the 1930 breakdown of Princess Alice of Battenberg, the mother of which royal consort?

Prince Philip's mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia and committed to a Swiss sanatorium. Freud put her delusions down to frustrated desire and proposed X-raying her ovaries.

Which animals haunted the fantasies of Ernst Lanzer, the young lawyer in Freud's 1909 obsessional case history?

Rats earned Lanzer his case-book nickname, the Rat Man, after a fellow army officer's tale of a torture using the animals lodged in his mind. He was killed in the First World War.

In which 1913 book did Freud imagine prehistoric brothers banding together to kill and eat their tyrant father?

Totem and Taboo traced the first moral rules back to the sons' guilt after that primal crime. Freud built the scene on a speculation of Darwin's about early human bands ruled by a single dominant male.

In a 1917 essay, Freud contrasted the illness he called melancholia with which healthy response to loss?

Mourning, on Freud's account, is grief for a loss the sufferer can name and gradually work through. The melancholic cannot fully identify what has been lost, which is why Freud counted that state as an illness.

Which 1919 Freud essay explores why dolls, waxworks and familiar things turned strange give people the creeps?

The Uncanny leans on E. T. A. Hoffmann's tale The Sandman, with its lifelike doll Olympia. Freud's answer was that the creepiest things are old, familiar ones that were repressed and have come back.

Which Russian novelist's epilepsy and ruinous gambling did Freud analyse in a 1928 essay on father-murder?

Fyodor Dostoevsky was the subject because the essay introduced a scholarly volume on The Brothers Karamazov. Freud read the gambler's compulsion to lose as self-punishment driven by guilt.

Which president was the subject of a psychological study Freud co-wrote with the diplomat William Bullitt?

Woodrow Wilson, the co-authors argued, was in flight from fact when he negotiated the peace of 1919. Bullitt, whom Freud had analysed in 1926, saw the book into print only in 1967, long after his co-author's death.

By what pseudonym did Freud publish the case of Ida Bauer, the teenager who quit his treatment after eleven weeks?

Dora walked out after Freud pressed her to admit an attraction to the family friend who had made a pass at her. He recorded the case, bitterly, as a therapeutic failure.

Before psychoanalysis made his name, Freud published early research on which condition affecting children?

Cerebral palsy, then known as cerebral paralysis, was one of Freud's first research fields. He disputed the accepted view that a lack of oxygen during delivery was what caused it.

What is the usual name for Freud's early claim, dropped in the late 1890s, that childhood abuse caused neuroses?

The seduction theory rested on eighteen early patients in whom Freud claimed to have uncovered buried memories of abuse. He came to believe that some of their stories were fantasies.

Which ordinary social habit did Freud dissect in a 1905 book, comparing its techniques to those of dreams?

Telling jokes, Freud argued, lets a speaker get round inhibitions, and the enjoyment comes from the mental effort saved. One of his examples was the blended word famillionaire.

What name, borrowed from a Greek god, did Freud give the life instinct he set against the death drive?

Eros stood for the drives that preserve and bind life together. Its opponent is often called Thanatos, a name found nowhere in Freud's writings; other analysts brought it into use.

Where in north London do Freud's ashes rest, in an ancient Greek urn that thieves smashed in a failed theft?

Golders Green Crematorium keeps the urn, a vase painted with scenes of Dionysus, on a plinth designed by his architect son Ernst. His wife's ashes joined his there in 1951.

To which English industrial city did Freud's two much older half-brothers emigrate when he was a small boy?

Manchester took Emanuel and Philipp, the sons of his father's first marriage, and with them Emanuel's son John, the inseparable playmate of Freud's earliest years.

Which Bloomsbury figure, analysed by Freud in Vienna, edited the standard English edition of his works?

James Strachey, younger brother of the biographer Lytton, made the translation his life's work with his wife Alix. Freud called the couple his excellent English translators.

Which Russian-born writer, earlier close to Nietzsche and Rilke, became a friend of Freud and an analyst herself?

Lou Andreas-Salomé met Freud at the Weimar congress of 1911, when she was fifty. He later described her as both muse and attentive mother to the poet Rilke.

Which bestselling Austrian author, himself an exile in England, gave an oration at Freud's funeral in 1939?

Stefan Zweig spoke alongside Freud's British colleague Ernest Jones. Zweig had left Austria for England in 1934, and he remarried in Bath in the very month of the funeral.

Whose memoirs of his own madness did Freud analyse in a 1911 study of paranoia, without ever meeting the author?

Daniel Paul Schreber, a senior German judge, set down his delusions in Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Freud's reading of it is what made the book a landmark in the history of psychiatry.

Which Vienna coffee house, founded on the Ringstrasse in 1873, was Freud's preferred haunt?

Café Landtmann, near the university and the Burgtheater, was also the regular choice of the operetta composer Emmerich Kálmán and of Felix Salten, the author of Bambi.

In which Austrian city did Freud's followers first meet formally, at the Hotel Bristol in 1908?

Salzburg hosted what was later counted as the first International Psychoanalytic Congress. The gathering was called at the suggestion of Ernest Jones, a young doctor then based in London.

Which Jewish fraternal order's Vienna lodge did Freud join in 1897, finding an early audience for his ideas?

B'nai B'rith kept Freud's loyalty for the rest of his life. He never forgot the lodge brothers who had listened to him, weighed his ideas and argued them through.

What pseudonym did Freud give the patient in the 1895 dream of an injection that launched his dream theory?

Irma was the name, and the dream came to him at Schloss Bellevue outside Vienna. He joked in a letter that a marble tablet there might one day say the secret of dreams had been revealed to him.