Psychoanalysis
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50 free Psychoanalysis trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Psychoanalysis began in a Vienna consulting room in the 1890s and went on to change how people talk about themselves. Phrases that started as technical terms in Sigmund Freud's papers are now part of everyday speech, and arguments about whether his ideas count as science have never stopped. This quiz covers the whole story. There are questions on the core theory of the mind, on dreams and slips of the tongue, on the defence mechanisms, and on the famous case histories. Others follow Freud's own life, from his early laboratory work to his last months in exile, and the heirs and rivals who took his ideas in new directions. It suits psychology students revising for a test, readers curious about where terms they use every day came from, and anyone who enjoys a good argument about the mind. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which drug did the young Sigmund Freud praise in an 1884 paper and recommend as a cure for morphine addiction?
Cocaine
Cocaine backfired badly: the friend Freud gave it to as a cure developed a psychosis and went back to morphine.
Q 02Which fish did the student Sigmund Freud dissect by the hundred in Trieste, searching for male sex organs?
Eels
Eels defeated him: Freud spent four weeks at a zoological station in 1876 cutting open hundreds of them, and the search ended inconclusively.
Q 03Which mythical king of Thebes, who unknowingly killed his father, gave his name to Freud's most famous complex?
Oedipus
Oedipus reached Freud through the theatre: the tragedy Sophocles wrote about him was a huge success on the stages of Paris and Vienna in the 1880s and 1890s.
Q 04In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud argued that every dream is the disguised fulfilment of what?
A wish
A wish drives every dream, Freud claimed, though the book that said so took eight years to sell its first 600 copies.
Q 05Which Swiss psychiatrist, once Freud's chosen heir, went on to popularise the terms introvert and extravert?
Carl Jung
Carl Jung went on to found a rival school, analytical psychology, built around archetypes and the collective unconscious.
Q 06Which of Freud's psychosexual stages gave English an everyday insult, paired with 'retentive', for fussy people?
Anal
Anal is the stage Freud placed between about eighteen months and three years, and being stuck in it was said to produce frugality, obstinacy and orderliness.
Q 07The British painter Lucian Freud, famed for unflinching nude portraits, was related to Sigmund Freud in which way?
Grandson
Grandson is the link: Lucian's father was Freud's architect son Ernst, who moved the family from Berlin to Britain in 1933 to escape Nazism.
Q 08Which habit did Sigmund Freud refuse to give up, even after it caused a jaw cancer that needed repeated surgery?
Smoking cigars
Smoking cigars sharpened his capacity to work, Freud believed, and he at first kept his symptoms secret rather than be told to stop.
Q 09To which city did Sigmund Freud escape from the Nazis in 1938, moving into a house that is now a museum?
London
London was his home for only the last fifteen months of his life, and the couch his patients lay on in Vienna is still on show in the house.
Q 10Which Renaissance artist did Sigmund Freud analyse in a 1910 essay built around a childhood memory of a bird?
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci wrote of a kite at his cradle, but Freud relied on a German translation that made it a vulture and built his theory on the wrong bird.
Q 11In Sigmund Freud's model of the mind, which part is present from birth and demands instant gratification?
The id
The id is simply Latin for 'it': Freud wrote the plain German 'das Es', and the Latin was the choice of his English translators.
Q 12Which mythical youth who fell in love with his own reflection gave his name to a trait Freud analysed in 1914?
Narcissus
Narcissus, in Ovid's telling, was punished after spurning the nymph Echo, who could only repeat what others said.
Q 13Which 1945 Hitchcock thriller, set among psychoanalysts, features a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí?
Spellbound
Spellbound kept only about two minutes of Dalí's dream, though its star Ingrid Bergman recalled that the original sequence ran to twenty.
Q 21Which nephew of Sigmund Freud used his uncle's ideas in advertising and was called the father of public relations?
Edward Bernays
Edward Bernays used his uncle's theories to help convince Americans that bacon and eggs was the true all-American breakfast.
Q 22Which biblical leader did Sigmund Freud claim, in a book published in 1939, was really an Egyptian nobleman?
Moses
Moses, in Freud's telling, followed the monotheist pharaoh Akhenaten and was later murdered by his own rebellious people.
Q 23Where did Sigmund Freud sit while a patient lay on the couch, so that his expressions could not sway what was said?
Behind them
Behind them and out of sight was the rule, in a dimly lit room, and the couch itself was a gift from a patient around 1890.
Q 14Which art movement, launched by André Breton's 1924 manifesto, drew on Freud's ideas about the unconscious?
Surrealism
Surrealism had a medical start: during the First World War its founder André Breton used Freud's methods on shell-shocked soldiers.
Q 15Which basic technique of psychoanalysis asks patients to say whatever comes to mind without censoring it?
Free association
Free association replaced hypnosis in Freud's practice, because he wanted patients to recover crucial memories while fully conscious.
Q 16Which physicist exchanged open letters with Sigmund Freud in 1932 about the causes of war and how to prevent it?
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein wrote at the invitation of a League of Nations institute, and the letters appeared in 1933 under the title Why War?
Q 17As a specialist in which branch of medicine did Sigmund Freud open his private practice in Vienna in 1886?
Neurology
Neurology gave Freud his first reputation: he wrote a book on aphasia and was an early researcher on cerebral palsy before he turned to the unconscious.
Q 18Which defence mechanism turns 'I hate them' into 'they hate me' by pinning a person's own feelings on others?
Projection
Projection first turns up in Freud's letters to his friend Wilhelm Fliess, and his daughter Anna later refined the idea.
Q 19Which defence mechanism, pushing painful memories out of awareness, did Freud call the cornerstone of psychoanalysis?
Repression
Repression was not Freud's coinage: the psychologist Johann Friedrich Herbart had used the term in 1824 for ideas competing to enter consciousness.
Q 20Which term did Sigmund Freud give to the instinctual energy of sexual desire, now an everyday word for sex drive?
Libido
Libido began as purely sexual energy in Freud's writing, but he later widened it into a universal desire that covers every kind of love.
Q 24Which animals terrified 'Little Hans', the five-year-old boy at the centre of Freud's 1909 case study of a phobia?
Horses
Horses became the boy's fear after a cart horse pulling a heavy load collapsed in front of him; he grew up to be the opera producer Herbert Graf.
Q 25Which breed was Jofi, the dog Sigmund Freud kept in his consulting room because she seemed to calm his patients?
Chow Chow
Chow Chow Jofi was also said to keep time, yawning and stretching to signal that a patient's hour was up.
Q 26Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in the Moravian town of Freiberg, which now lies in which modern country?
Czechia
Czechia now calls the town Příbor, a name that happens to mean 'cutlery' in modern Czech, and the house where Freud was born opened to the public in 2006.
Q 27Which eerie quality, the subject of a 1919 Freud essay, now names the 'valley' where almost-human robots unsettle us?
The uncanny
The uncanny, for Freud, lay in the strangeness of the ordinary: his German word unheimlich is the opposite of heimlich, meaning homely.
Q 28Which Viennese doctor, an early ally who broke with Freud in 1911, introduced the idea of the 'inferiority complex'?
Alfred Adler
Alfred Adler had been president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society; he was the first of the great dissenters and named his own school individual psychology.
Q 29Which Viennese physician's treatment of the patient known as Anna O. led Freud towards the 'talking cure'?
Josef Breuer
Josef Breuer did not invent the phrase talking cure: it came from the patient herself, who also joked that the sessions were chimney sweeping.
Q 30Which diagnosis, named from the Greek word for uterus, was the subject of an 1895 book that Sigmund Freud co-wrote?
Hysteria
Hysteria owes its name to the ancient belief that a woman's uterus could wander about her body and disturb her behaviour.