Sigmund Freud (born Sigismund Schlomo Freud) was born on May 6, 1856, in the village of Freiberg, Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic) into a Jewish merchant family. When he was four years old, his family moved to Vienna, where Freud remained until the Nazi invasion and occupation in 1938.
The ethnic tensions, class conflicts, and intellectual energy in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century informed Freud's daily life. At the time, the city was a laboratory for radical innovations in politics, philosophy, art, and science. A well-educated and ambitious young man immersed in classical literature and philosophy, Freud began his education in 1873 at the University of Vienna. Freud...