September 23: Freud in Exile

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis who launched a revolution in how human beings view their personalities, thoughts and emotions, died on this date in 1939, in exile in London from Nazi-ruled Austria. Freud spent nearly all of his life in Vienna, developing his theories during a time of acute anti-Jewish discrimination, which made it difficult for him to find platforms for his controversial ideas. Between 1897 and 1917, therefore, Freud delivered twenty-seven lectures about psychoanalysis to the local B’nai B’rith lodge. “To my Jewish nature,” he wrote to them on the occasion of his 70th birthday, “I owed two characteristics... indispensable to me in the difficult course of my life. Because I was a Jew I found myself free from many prejudices that restricted others in the use of their intellect, and as a Jew I was prepared to join the Opposition and do without agreement from the ‘compact majority.’”

“Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.” —Sigmund Freud