Sigmund Freud
A Viennese neurologist who turned the treatment of hysteria into a theory of mental life: the unconscious, repression, the dream as the road to it, infantile sexuality, the ego and the id. “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900) sold a few hundred copies a year at first and then reshaped the century — psychiatry, literature, cinema and everyday speech, which kept the Freudian slip and the complex. He built a movement around himself and parted badly with those who left it, Jung and Adler among them. In 1938, after the Anschluss, colleagues and his former patient Marie Bonaparte bought him a way out to London; a year later he died there of the cancer of the jaw he had borne through sixteen years and some thirty operations.
He was born in Freiberg in Moravia — Příbor today — on 6 May 1856 at 18:30 local mean time. The hour is written in his father’s hand in the family record: a rare precision for the middle of the nineteenth century.