Sigmund Freud: 1856 - 1939 Sigmund Freud was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1856. His father was a small time merchant, and Freud's mother was his second wife. Freud had two half-brothers some 20 years older than himself. His family moved to Vienna when he was four years old, and though he often claimed he hated the city, he lived there until it was occupied by Germany in 1938. Freud's family background was Jewish, though his father was a freethinker and Freud himself an avowed atheist. Freud was a good student, and very ambitious. Medicine and law were the professions then open to Jewi