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Perhaps no other man has had as much singular intellectual impact and influence on a field and the paradigmatic thinking of a society than Sigmund Freud. Copernicus and Darwin were great deflators of humanity’s anthropomorphic world views, and Freud included himself among them, believing his unearthing of the unconscious to be disruptive enough to deflate humanity’s narcissism — we are not, as we had previously thought, the captains of our own ships.
Born Sigmund Schlomo Freud to a middle-class Jewish family in Austria in 1856, Freud was born in an era when those around him believed in humanity’s superiority to the natural world because of our cognitive ability to think and control our behaviors. Freud spent his early years as a medical student dissecting hundreds of eels in order to locate their reproductive organs without success and then briefly promoted cocaine as a miracle medical drug before hitching up with Josef Breuer, an Austrian physician (whose work and ideas are often overshadowed by Freud’s).
This collaboration would arouse within Freud his lifelong devotion to the field of psychoanalysis. It…
