Sigmund Freud Trivia
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98 free Sigmund Freud trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Sigmund Freud dissected hundreds of eels looking for their testes, championed cocaine, abandoned hypnosis for the "talking cure", and built from his patients' dreams and his own self-analysis a theory of the mind that reshaped the 20th century. He collected antiquities and disciples, lost Jung and Adler, smoked twenty cigars a day through thirty operations on his jaw, and fled the Nazis to London with the help of a princess. This quiz covers the man, the movement and the ideas. Easy questions ask what he founded, which book interpreted dreams and what the three parts of his model of the mind are called. Harder ones want his birthplace, the number of languages he spoke, the friend he called "the Kepler of biology", the patient who coined "talking cure", the meeting that became the first psychoanalytic congress, the producer he refused to meet, the man who saved his assets from the Gestapo, the last book he read and what holds his ashes. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's biography of Sigmund Freud, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Made for psychology teachers, students and quiz hosts. Related quizzes: Psychology, Famous Scientists and Vienna.
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Q 01Where did Freud sit while someone lay talking on his famous couch?
Behind them, out of sight
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.
Q 02What are the three parts of the model of psychic structure Freud developed?
Id, ego and superego
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.
Q 03What did Freud call the sexual energy he believed drives much of mental life?
Libido
Libido could be redirected, Freud argued: denied a sexual outlet, it is 'sublimated' into art, science and other work the world rewards.
Q 04Which complex did Freud arrive at by analysing his own childhood jealousy of his father?
The Oedipus complex
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.
Q 05Freud is tied to Vienna, but his birthplace, the Moravian town of Freiberg, now lies in which country?
Czechia
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.
Q 06What was Freud's given name at birth?
Sigismund Schlomo
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.
Q 07Which habit did Freud never give up, even through some thirty operations for cancer of the mouth?
Smoking cigars
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.
Q 08Which instrument did Freud's sister have to give up because her practising disturbed his studying?
Piano
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.
Q 09Which animals did the student Freud dissect by the hundred, hunting for testes nobody had yet found?
Eels
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.
Q 10Whose essays did a bored Freud translate into German during his year of compulsory military service?
John Stuart Mill's
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.
Q 11Which then-legal drug did the young Freud take himself and praise in print as a cure for low spirits?
Cocaine
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.
Q 12Whom did Freud marry in 1886, the granddaughter of a chief rabbi of Hamburg?
Martha Bernays
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.
Q 13At what Vienna address did Freud and his family live from 1891 until 1938?
Berggasse 19
Q 21Which 1901 Freud book argued that slips of the tongue are never accidents?
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
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.
Q 22What did Freud call a patient's habit of treating the analyst like a parent?
Transference
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.
Q 23By what pseudonym is Freud's Russian patient Sergei Pankejeff known in the case histories?
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.
Q 14Which of Freud's six children followed him into psychoanalysis?
Anna
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.
Q 15Which Berlin ear, nose and throat doctor was Freud's closest confidant as he worked out his early theories?
Wilhelm Fliess
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.
Q 16Which Paris neurologist did Freud study hypnosis and hysteria with on a fellowship in 1885?
Jean-Martin Charcot
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.
Q 17Which patient of Josef Breuer's coined the phrase "talking cure"?
Anna O.
Anna O. was really Bertha Pappenheim. She recovered to found Germany's League of Jewish Women and became a pioneering social worker.
Q 18What did Freud call his method of having patients talk uncensored about whatever came to mind, after dropping hypnosis?
Free association
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.
Q 19Which 1895 book, co-written with Josef Breuer, set out Freud's early clinical method and case histories?
Studies on Hysteria
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.
Q 20Which breed was Jofi, the dog who sat in on Freud's sessions?
Chow chow
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.
The Wolf Man
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.
Q 24In Freud's scheme of childhood development, which stage comes first?
Oral
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.
Q 25What was the group of physicians who began meeting at Freud's apartment in 1902 called?
The Wednesday Society
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.
Q 26Which Swiss psychiatrist became the first president of the International Psychoanalytical Association?
Carl Gustav Jung
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.
Q 27Freud called dream interpretation the "royal road" to what?
The unconscious
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.
Q 28Which country did Freud visit only once, to give five lectures at Clark University in 1909?
The United States
The United States: Clark University's president invited him over for its twentieth anniversary, and the university sent him home with an honorary doctorate.
Q 29Which early follower quit Freud's circle in 1911 to build a rival psychology around feelings of inferiority?
Alfred Adler
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.
Q 30Otto Rank broke with Freud after his 1924 book traced all anxiety back to the trauma of what?
Birth
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.