Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud trained in medicine and neurology in Vienna before developing the clinical methods and theories that became psychoanalysis. His work on dreams, repression, sexuality and the unconscious attracted a circle of followers and critics and helped reshape the language in which psychological experience was discussed.

Freud lived and worked in Vienna for most of his career, publishing works including The Interpretation of Dreams and building an international psychoanalytic movement. After Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, he escaped with his family to London, where he died the following year. His ideas remain influential and controversial across psychology, psychiatry and the humanities.

William Boyd’s Waiting for Sunrise uses Sigmund Freud as part of the intellectual landscape of Vienna in 1913, where actor Lysander Rief seeks psychiatric treatment and becomes absorbed in the city’s culture of psychoanalysis before the First World War. Lysander’s encounter with Freud is brief rather than biographical, but it places the fictional treatment of trauma, repression and self-deception beside the historical figure most closely associated with the new language of the unconscious.