Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud, an Austrian born during the Habsburg Monarchy, was one of the trailblazers of modern-day psychology. The american historiam william johnston sees freud, the father of psychoanalysis, among those personalities "that one made austria a shining example of modernism in a world that had lost orientation." In his function as a neuropathologist freud came to realize that he had no clear understanding of neurotic patterns despite his throrough studies of the human brain. From 1895 onwards he associated intensely with the Viennese internist Josef Breuer. Both discovered that hypnos