35 Things Most People Don’t Know About Sigmund Freud

34. He Pioneered Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

Freud lived from 1856 to 1939, a time when psychology was only beginning to be developed as a science. Many people who had what we would now recognize as mental illnesses or personality disorders would simply be institutionalized for their entire lives. Freud helped change that by developing psychoanalysis and psychotherapy to treat those conditions.

33. He Specialized in Nervous Disorders

Freud studied medicine at the University of Vienna, though his interest turned to behavioral issues, something that had previously been relegated to philosophy and theology. He was fascinated by people who had uncontrollable impulses, often attributed to what we now understand to be PTSD or a mental illness like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

32. Freud Observed Another Doctor Treat Patients With Talk Therapy

Josef Breuer was a physician at Vienna General Hospital who treated a patient, known only as Anna O., who had bouts of hysteria. To help her, he encouraged her to talk freely about her past traumatic experiences and how they affected her today. The more she spoke, the more her symptoms subsided. Freud was fascinated and used Breuer’s methods in his own psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

31. Freud Used a Technique Called Free Association

He set up his private clinic in Vienna in 1886 to treat patients with “nervous disorders.” He used free association, which encourages patients to speak freely and without censorship of anything that is on their consciousness. In allowing his patients to talk uninhibited, he hoped to make connections between what they were saying about their pasts and the symptoms that they were currently experiencing.

30. He Introduced His Theory of Psychoanalysis in 1899

Freud wrote a book called The Interpretation of Dreams, in which he used his findings from his private practice to show that dreams were manifestations of what occurred in people’s subconscious minds. He proposed a set of symbols to interpret people’s dreams, which, in turn, would unlock their subconscious minds and reveal everything that lay inside.

29. Freud Introduced the Power of the Subconscious

Before Freud, psychology wasn’t even recognized as a legitimate endeavor. Sure, he got a lot of things wrong, but there is one thing he got right: we are very much influenced by mental processes that we are not aware of. The idea may seem common sense now, but to people at the turn of the twentieth century, it was paradigm-shattering. We weren’t as in control of our actions as we believed.

28. He Believed Mental Disorders Could Be Treated and Even Healed

Prior to Freud, people who were mentally ill usually spent their entire lives locked away in a sanatorium or, if they were wealthy enough, under the constant care of a private nurse who administered enough drugs to keep them in a zombie-like state. Freud introduced the idea that with therapy (usually involving psychoanalysis), people with mental illnesses could be treated and even healed. This was one of his most important contributions.

27. Freud Relied on Smoking to Stimulate His Thinking

Everyone has his or her own vices, and Freud’s main vice was smoking. He began relying on nicotine when he was 24 years old because he believed that it helped him to think better. This alleged muse led to his demise, as he developed jaw cancer later in life and underwent 30 painful operations. Still, he continued smoking.

26. Freud Also Had a Cocaine Addiction

As a young man in his twenties, trying to make a name for himself, Freud knew that he needed to go big or go home. Trying to stimulate his thinking, he turned to cocaine and was amazed at its effects. Freud touted it as a wonder drug and published a paper called “Uber Coca,” which was well-received by his colleagues. He believed cocaine was a wonder drug, but after developing health problems from abusing it for two years, he stopped talking about it.

25. The Legacy of Psychoanalysis is Psychodynamic Theories

Freud got a lot of things wrong, but he laid the groundwork for many later theories of human behavior. Psychodynamic approaches explain human personality and behavior mostly regarding invisible factors, such as unconscious beliefs and desires. They underlie modern therapy techniques, such as cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavioral therapy.

24. Freud Was a Dirty Old Man

Yes, most of Freud’s thought went down to his idea of penis envy. Infant boys were supposedly jealous of their fathers’ relationships with their mothers, resulting in the Oedipus complex. Young girls, who didn’t have penises, were supposedly jealous of boys, who did. According to Freud, all of these feelings created resentment and aggressive behaviors. Just about all of Freud’s ideas come back to the concept of penis envy.

23. He Developed the Idea of the Id, the Ego, and the Superego

Freud believed that the id, the ego, and the superego were the three components of human personality and determined their behavior. The concept has long since been proven false, but it lingers around in pop culture. And yes, it had a lot to do with his theory of penis envy.

22. Freud Believed Aggression Originated in the Id

He claimed that the id was the pleasure-seeking yet subconscious aspect of human personality, the most animalistic part that is fully present at birth. It explains why toddlers can throw violent temper tantrums when they don’t get their way. The id is another thing that Freud got severely wrong, but he was right about one thing: humans will go to any lengths to seek pleasure and avoid pain.

21. The Superego is the Moral Conscience

Throwing a temper tantrum because you want a snack may be okay when you are a toddler, but at some point, you have to grow up and learn to interact with a world that doesn’t care about what you want. Hence the superego develops as a person’s moral conscience. It is constantly battling with the id: seek immediate pleasure now (id) or have a meaningful role in society (superego).

20. The Ego Mediates Between the Id and the Superego

The ego is like a referee who keeps the aggressive id and the morally-superior ego from murdering each other. It filters the id’s desires in ways that are socially appropriate so that people can have their desires (usually sexual) fulfilled without acting out on aggressive impulses (those impulses deriving from penis envy). Yes, Freud really was a dirty old man.

19. Freud Got Human Personality Wrong

Modern psychology has long since disproved the notion of the id, the ego, and the superego. Things like infant sexuality (which coincides with the development of the id) have no place in modern theories of human personality. Though we are socialized to conform to certain norms and standards of behaviors (Freud’s idea of the ego), we now know that children are born with natural personalities that are primarily unchangeable.

18. But He Kind Of Got It Right

Freud recognized the human personality is vastly complex, and that our behaviors are more influenced by past experiences and beliefs about ourselves and the world around us than people previously thought. While modern psychology looks on his theory of the id, the ego, and the superego as primitive and incoherent at best, for his period, it was revolutionary. It changed the way that people understand the mind and human personality.

17. Mainstream Scientists Did Not Respect Freud

One of Freud’s contemporaries was Albert Einstein. Einstein worked more in the “hard” science of physics, and he disliked the idea of quantum physics, partially because he felt it was too “soft” and subjective (think of his famous quote “God does not play dice”). Psychology was considered a “soft” science that was less grounded in falsifiable theories than in Freud’s own ideas about how he thought people’s minds worked. And let’s face it, people didn’t like the idea of infant sexuality.

16. Freud Was Indirectly Responsible for the Scientific Method

Another important figure who was a contemporary of Freud was Karl Popper, an Austrian-born philosopher who was deeply troubled by the rise of what he called “pseudoscience.” He wanted to figure out a systematic means of weeding out Freud’s “pseudoscience” and distinguishing it from great minds like Einstein’s. He developed the scientific method, which laid out the need for generating testable hypotheses, doing research, and performing experiments that can be duplicated with similar results.

15. Freud’s Psychology Does Not Hold Up to the Scientific Method

In a lot of ways, Freud’s ideas tell us more about how he saw the world than about how human personality was believed to function at the turn of the twentieth century. He developed “theories” that were not falsifiable; in other words, everything that he looked at could be seen as evidence for his theories. His theory of “penis envy” was constructed in such a way that every single problem that girls face ultimately had to do with jealousy over the male sexual organ. The scientific method requires that you be able to prove your hypothesis wrong. Since Freud could not (really had no interest in) finding means to prove his ideas wrong, they are relegated to “pseudoscience.”

14. Modern Psychology is Not Pseudoscience

Sure, there are plenty of ways that cognitive biases of psychologists and researchers filter down into how they understand the human psyche. But today, thanks to the scientific method, psychology does require the formation of testable, falsifiable hypotheses. You have to be able to prove something through experiments with multiple subjects for the theory to be valid. Even though Freud was unable to accomplish this task, he laid the groundwork for it occurring as psychology moved from pseudoscience to hard science.

13. There Are Some Things Freud Got Right

For example, Freud was one of the first to realize that traumatic experiences, especially in early childhood, had a profound effect on the development of the person’s psyche and could lead to neurotic behaviors. Those traumatic events may become buried in the person’s subconscious, but they are still present, much like an app on your phone or tablet that is running in the background.

12. Freud Wanted To Better Understand The Relationship Between Childhood Experiences And Adult Behavior

Recognizing that there was a significant link between childhood experiences, particularly trauma, and the way that people acted as adults, Freud dedicated much of his life to better understanding this relationship and figuring out ways to treat it. Unfortunately, much of his knowledge had to do with so-called traumas related to infant sexuality and penis envy, things that are not only not traumatic but are nonexistent.

11. Freud Identified Defense Mechanisms

Defense mechanisms are basically ways that we prevent ourselves from having to engage with a painful part of the world that we experience or inhabit. Freud recognized defense mechanisms such as repression, denial, projection, displacement, regression, and sublimation. The idea of defense mechanisms is very much accepted by modern psychology, but again, they have nothing to do with infant sexuality.

10. Freud Developed the Oedipus Complex

The Oedipus complex is based on the ancient Greek Play Oedipus Rex, in which a fortune teller told a young Oedipus that he would kill his father and marry his mother. He didn’t know who his parents were, and one day, he shot a stranger on the road and later married the stranger’s widow. Unbeknownst to him, that widow was his mother. Freud believed that this explained the heart of childhood trauma in boys: they are jealous of their fathers and want to engage in sexual behavior with their mothers.

9. The Oedipus Complex Also Explained Religion

Believe it or not, Freud was so convinced that his Oedipus complex explained every aspect of the world that he even applied it to the study of religion. He was a nonpracticing Jew himself and developed the idea that his own son killed Moses in the Hebrew Bible (Torah) as killed by his people, just like Oedipus’ father. He elaborated this theory in his book Totem and Taboo.

8. We Live In A Freudian World

Have you ever heard the term “Freudian slip?” It refers to accidentally saying or misusing a word or phrase other than how you meant to use it or how it is supposed to be used. The idea came from Freud, who believed that such slips of the tongue were revealing about our inner anxieties, which lay within our subconscious and were continually trying to break free.

7. Subliminal Messaging Is Also From Freud

Freud developed the idea of sublimation, which is today used in what you may know of as subliminal messaging or subliminal advertising. It is a sneaky way that companies try to get us to buy a product by introducing it at a level that is beyond our conscious minds. For example, if Beyonce is wearing a milk mustache, we subliminally come to associate milk with Beyonce. Since everyone (supposedly) wants to be like Beyonce, we realize that we should buy milk.

6. Charles Darwin Influenced Freud

Charles Darwin lived at about the same time as Freud, and he developed the idea of evolution via natural selection. His theory became particularly important to European academia at the turn of the twentieth century, and the concept of natural selection influenced thinkers who didn’t work in biology. You can see it in some of Freud’s ideas about how the strong survive (and of course, he was referring to infant sexuality).

5. Freud Had To Flee The Nazis

Austria in the 1930s was a dangerous place to be Jewish, even if, like Freud, one was not a practicing Jew. In 1938, he fled Austria for the United Kingdom. Much of his family had already fled by this time, and he was unable to leave because of significant legal challenges and extortion because he was a Jew in a Nazi-occupied land.

4. He Died Of Jaw Cancer

Freud was already in his eighties when he fled Nazi-occupied Austria, and he had been a lifelong smoker. He had cancer of the jaw and had already undergone multiple painful operations, but at the time, the relationship between smoking and cancer was not yet recognized. He died the year after he arrived in London, in 1939.

3. Freud Underwent Voluntary Euthanasia

The pain caused by Freud’s cancer was so severe that he turned to his doctor, Max Schur, who was also a refugee from the Nazis and pleaded with him to help him end his life. Because his disease was known to be terminal and he was in constant pain, Dr. Schur agreed. He administered lethal doses of morphine on September 21 and 22, 1939, and Freud died on September 23.

2. Freud’s Ashes Are On Display

Three days after his death, Freud’s body was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium in the northern part of London. His son, Ernst, who was also in London as a refugee from the Nazi regime, designed a plinth to hold the ashes on display for anyone who might wish to visit them. They are still on display today, for any of his fans who might want to visit.

1. His Legacy Is Extensive

Freud got a lot of things wrong. In fact, he got just about everything wrong. But the thing about Freud is that even though he got a lot of things wrong, he helped develop the modern field of psychology by showing the critical ways that human behavior is connected to personality and childhood experiences, as well as other unconscious or subconscious mechanisms. For these contributions, psychology will always owe him a debt.

Where did we find this stuff? Here are our sources:

“Introduction to Psychology,” by Crash Course. (video)

“Karl Popper, Science, and Pseudoscience: Crash Course Philosophy #8,” by Crash Course. (video)

“The Interpretation of Dreams.” Wikipedia.

“Sigmund Freud.” BBC.

“Sigmund Freud.” Wikipedia.

“Psychodynamic Theory.” Chegg Study.

“How a Young Sigmund Freud Researched & Got Addicted to Cocaine, the New ‘Miracle Drug,’ in 1894.” Open Culture. April 3, 2014.

“Sigmund Freud,” by the editors of biography.com. Biography.com. January 15, 2019.