Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was an Austrian psychoanalyst who is considered to be the founder of modern psychoanalysis. In 1881, he became a Doctor of Medicine after completing his program at the University of Vienna. However, it was not until 1885 that the young doctor began to turn his attention toward psychoanalysis. While on a three-month fellowship in Paris, Freud visited a hypnotist who inspired him to bring hypnosis into his own clinical practice.

Freud’s focus on therapeutic techniques was a shift from his contemporaries, who sought to categorize and name mental conditions rather than understand how to treat them. He used the techniques of free association and dream interpretation to engage his patients in uncovering the repressed desires and traumas residing in the unconscious. His work led him to develop a theory of the psyche containing three parts: id, ego, and superego. In his early work, Freud emphasized the role of the libido in driving human behavior toward pleasure-seeking. After setting up a private practice in Vienna, Freud worked with patients to interpret their dreams and uncover the repressed drives of the unconscious. He recorded his findings in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899).

In his 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud began to develop some of the concepts he would come to clarify in The Ego and the Id. In particular, he argued that the psyche was driven not only by the drive for life, Eros, but also by the drive for death. Biographers have suggested that Freud’s views on the importance of the death drive were inspired by the deaths of his sons in World War I and the death of his daughter, Sophie, in early 1920 of Spanish flu. The Ego and the Id expands on Freud’s theory of the death drive and its role in the psyche to develop a new topography of the mind that takes into account the complex dynamics these two core drives and the id, ego, and superego.

Freud, who was Jewish, was forced to flee Vienna for London in 1933 during the Nazi regime. He died in London in 1939 of cancer of the jaw.