The biography

Sigmund Freud is one of the most influential intellectuals in modern life. He was scorned and insulted for his revolutionary ideas on the role of sex in human development, but the reality is that nobody can understand today's psychology without his enormous contribution to human knowledge. At the beginning of this documentary, we hear in Freud's own voice what was the central idea in all his research:

I started my professional activity trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients. I discovered some important new facts about the conscience. People did not believe in my facts and thought my theories unsavory. In the end, I succeeded but the struggle is not yet over.

Needless to say, to explain that people thought his ideas "unsavory" is an understatement. He was considered a pervert by quite a few people until well into the 20th century, and his books were burnt by the Nazis as soon as they arrived to power in the 1930s. On the other extreme of the political spectrum, many Communists also regarded him as one more example of the decadence of capitalism. It was not until after the 1960s, and all the deep social changes that decade brought about, that Sigmund Freud was finally accepted in the pantheon of greatest intellectual figures of the Western civilization.

Sigmund Freud was born in the Freiberg, Moravia (at that time part of the Austrian Empire) in 1856 to a father who was 20 years older than his mother. They lived in a small one-room house that they shared with two half-brothers until they moved to Vienna by the time the young Sigmund was 10 years old. The Austrian capital provided them with an environment where the Jewish community was thriving and significantly larger than in the little town they came from. However, anti-Semitism was nevertheless a permanent threat to their daily lifes. There he became a doctor, and studied the therapeutic applications of cocaine, completely unaware of its addictive properties. Actually, he was taking it himself and was so naive and enthusiastic about it that he prescribed it to friends who fell addicted to it.

In the late 19th century, Freud specialized in neuronal diseases, which at the time included all types of mental illnesses. Back then people assumed that the cause of hysteria was a physical disorder of some type, but after he saw hypnosis applied to people in order to produce some physical symptoms Freud thought that hysteria's cause might also be in the mind. This is the origin of the famous freudian couch: he started his independent medical career applying hypnosis.

At the beginning of Freud's career, a close friend told him about a very special patient whose symptoms disappear when she talks about them. In time, this would become the seminal case of Anna O. that prompted the birth of psychoanalisis. The talking treatment is born here, leading Freud to realize that most patients end up talking about sex in one way or another. As a matter of fact, Freud noticed that female patients even developed some form of romantic attraction to the doctor (i.e., himself). Studying this peculiar behavior, he concluded that his patients were transferring their feelings towards their parents onto him, the doctor.

Freud's father died in the 1890s, and the feelings he experiences as a consequence of this death lead him to perform self-analysis. This practice is quite unique and definitely not recommended in modern practice, requiring a high level of discipline and skill that nevertheless he appeared to have. He studied his own dreams, inventing the concept of free association of ideas that would later become so popular. The first year of self-analysis, his symptoms became much worse as he undid fantasies and repressions that have been hidden for years (hatred of the father, lust for the mother...). However, Freud always took a scientific, not moral, approach to all these discoveries and develops for the first time the idea of the Oedipus complex. All these ideas were greeted with derision, considered pornographic even, dirty, libertine. His self-analysis lasted a total of four yours, and ended with the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).

In the years following his self-analysis, Freud would become an apostle of psychoanalysis, sometimes fearing that a deep-seated anti-Semitism in European society might stop it. Indeed, at the beginning all of his followers were Jews, with the exception of Carl Jung. Then, in 1901 he published Psycopathology of Everyday Life, which would become his first popular hit. In 1909, Freud was invited to Clark University in the USA to receive an honorary degree and give a series of lectures, which pretty much marked the origin of a public acceptance of psychoanalisis. But precisely at the moment when Freud's beloved science was beginning to enjoy some widespread acceptance, several of his disciples started to disagree with his orthodox line, leading to Jung's bitter resignation from the group in 1914.

The traumatic experiences of the First World War caused Freud to reconsider some of his ideas, which he developed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle where he opposes the concept of Eros to that of Thanatos. He had never considered the importance of this instinct of death, the innate human aggressiveness, as a vital force in our societies.

In the 1920s, he developed cancer of the mouth, which did not manage to convince him to abandon his addiction to cigars at all. It was also in this decade that Freud would nearly become a household name, making it quite often to the newspaper headlines. Very complex concepts such as penis envy, Superego and others were greatly simplified, popularized and became common currency in the daily conversations and analysis. Also, it was around this time that Freud broke one more taboo by psychonalizing his own daughter, Anna Freud, a practice that to this day is strongly recommended against in the psychoanalisis community.

Towards the end of his life, Freud defended a more pessimistic approach to civilization itself. In 1929, he published Civilization and Its Discontents, where he displays a clear lack of faith in civilized restraints. It is, after all, the years where Nazism is rising. In 1938, Hitler annexed Austria but Freud refused to leave Vienna until the Gestapo sacked his office and arrested his daughter. Finally, he moved to London in 1938. His sisters were not allowed to leave, and would die in a concentration camp.

Although his ideas about dreams, sexuality and the world of the unconscious permeated Western culture, Freud still felt disappointed to the end of his days that the science of psychoanalysis had not succeeded as he wished. He died in 1939 from a lethal dose of morphine, but this archeologist of the mind, as he always thought of himself, left a great work behind that would let us navigate the human mind for decades after his death.