Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in Freiburg, a small city in Moravia, the eastern part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and moved with his parents to Vienna when he was three and a half years old. There he lived, obtained his classical Gymnasium education, graduated from medical school, raised his family, and after a period of laboratory research, undertook the study and treatment of patients with neurological and emotional disorders. It was in that setting that, in the waning years of the nineteenth century, he began to develop the theory and technique of psychoanalysis, publishing, among other things, such major works as The Interpretation of Dreams and Three Essays in the Theory of Sexuality. After the German absorption of Austria in 1938, Freud was helped by some of his students and followers to move to London to escape the Nazi's anti-Semitic persecution. The next year, after completing his final book, Moses and Monotheism, he died, widely celebrated as the founder of what had by then become the international psychoanalytic movement.