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50 free Sigmund Freud trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Sigmund Freud dissected hundreds of eels looking for their testes, championed cocaine, abandoned hypnosis for the "talking cure", and built from his patients' dreams and his own self-analysis a theory of the mind that reshaped the 20th century. He collected antiquities and disciples, lost Jung and Adler, smoked twenty cigars a day through thirty operations on his jaw, and fled the Nazis to London with the help of a princess. This quiz covers the man, the movement and the ideas. Easy questions ask what he founded, which book interpreted dreams and what the three parts of his model of the mind are called. Harder ones want his birthplace, the number of languages he spoke, the friend he called "the Kepler of biology", the patient who coined "talking cure", the meeting that became the first psychoanalytic congress, the producer he refused to meet, the man who saved his assets from the Gestapo, the last book he read and what holds his ashes. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's biography of Sigmund Freud, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Made for psychology teachers, students and quiz hosts. Related quizzes: Psychology, Famous Scientists and Vienna.
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Q 01What clinical method and theory of mind is Freud the founder of?
Psychoanalysis
It treats conflicts in the psyche through dialogue between patient and analyst.
Q 02What are the three parts of the model of psychic structure Freud developed?
Id, ego and superego
He set the second topography out in The Ego and the Id in 1923, on top of his earlier conscious-preconscious-unconscious scheme.
Q 03What did Freud call the sexualised psychic energy that invests mental processes?
Libido
He paired it with a death drive, the source of compulsive repetition, aggression and neurotic guilt.
Q 04Which idea, built on his redefinition of sexuality to include infancy, became central to his theory?
The Oedipus complex
It grew from his own self-analysis of hostility to his father and jealousy over his mother's affections.
Q 05In which Moravian town, now Příbor in the Czech Republic, was Freud born on 6 May 1856?
Freiberg
He was born with a caul, which his mother saw as a lucky omen, in a rented room in a locksmith's house.
Q 06What was Freud's given name at birth?
Sigismund Schlomo
His father Jakob was a wool merchant twenty years older than his mother Amalia, his third wife.
Q 07What was Freud's uncle Josef convicted of in 1866, turning his father's hair grey in days?
Dealing in counterfeit rubles
Police inquiries pointed toward Manchester, where Freud's half-brothers lived, though they were never named.
Q 08How many languages was the young Freud proficient in, according to his biography?
Eight
German, French, Italian, Spanish, English, Hebrew, Latin and Greek; he graduated with honours in 1873.
Q 09What did the 20-year-old Freud spend four weeks dissecting in Trieste in 1876?
Hundreds of eels
The search for the eels' male reproductive organs was inconclusive.
Q 10Whose essays did Freud translate during the downtime of his compulsory military service in 1879?
John Stuart Mill's
He graduated with an MD in March 1881 after six years in Ernst Brücke's physiology lab.
Q 11Which drug did Freud extol in his 1884 paper "On Coca", recommending it as an antidepressant?
Cocaine
He narrowly missed priority for its anaesthetic use, which his colleague Karl Koller demonstrated in eye surgery.
Q 12Whom did Freud marry in 1886, the granddaughter of a chief rabbi of Hamburg?
Martha Bernays
As an atheist he was dismayed to need a Jewish religious ceremony and was hastily tutored in the Hebrew prayers.
Q 13At what Vienna address did Freud and his family live from 1891 until 1938?
Berggasse 19
The American consul-general arranged regular monitoring of the building after the Anschluss.
Q 21Which 1901 book won Freud a wider readership by applying his ideas outside the clinic?
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
It is the source of the idea of the "Freudian slip".
Q 22What was the real name of the patient in the famous 'Dora' case study?
Ida Bauer
The 1905 case taught Freud the importance of transference; Little Hans was Herbert Graf and the Rat Man Ernst Lanzer.
Q 23By what pseudonym is Freud's Russian patient Sergei Pankejeff known in the case histories?
The Wolf Man
Freud also had a single extended consultation with the composer Gustav Mahler.
Q 14How many children did Sigmund and Martha Freud have?
Six
The youngest, Anna, born in 1895, became a psychoanalyst and her father's closest collaborator.
Q 15Which Berlin ENT specialist, called "the Kepler of biology" by Freud, was his closest confidant in the 1890s?
Wilhelm Fliess
Fliess's nasogenital theories are now considered pseudoscience; his surgery on Emma Eckstein left gauze in her nose and disfigured her.
Q 16Which Paris neurologist did Freud study hypnosis and hysteria with on a fellowship in 1885?
Jean-Martin Charcot
Freud named his first son Jean-Martin after him and called the stay catalytic in turning him toward psychopathology.
Q 17Which patient of Josef Breuer's coined the phrase "talking cure"?
Anna O.
Her symptoms eased as she retrieved memories of traumatic incidents under hypnosis, transforming Freud's practice.
Q 18What did Freud call his method of having patients talk uncensored about whatever came to mind, after dropping hypnosis?
Free association
By 1896 he was using the word "psychoanalysis" for the method and its theories.
Q 19Which 1895 book, co-written with Josef Breuer, set out Freud's early clinical method and case histories?
Studies on Hysteria
It described the psychogenetic origins of hysteria in several cases.
Q 20In which year was The Interpretation of Dreams published?
1899
It reads dreams as wish-fulfilments disguised by the "dream-work"; an abridged On Dreams followed in 1901.
Q 24How, according to legend, was Freud's long-blocked professorship finally secured in 1902?
An ex-patient baroness bribed the minister with a painting
The title of "professor extraordinarius" carried no salary or duties but great prestige.
Q 25What was the group of physicians who began meeting at Freud's apartment in 1902 called?
The Wednesday Psychological Society
It was founded at Wilhelm Stekel's suggestion; the original members also included Alfred Adler, and all five were Jewish by birth.
Q 26Which Swiss psychiatrist became the first president of the International Psychoanalytical Association?
Carl Gustav Jung
He broke away after his 1912 book on the libido and named his own system analytical psychology.
Q 27Where did Freud's followers meet on 27 April 1908 for what counts as the first International Psychoanalytic Congress?
The Hotel Bristol, Salzburg
Ernest Jones proposed it; forty-two attended, half of them practising or future analysts.
Q 28Where did Freud give five lectures in September 1909, on his only visit to the United States?
Clark University, Massachusetts
He travelled with Jung and Ferenczi at the invitation of Stanley Hall and received an honorary doctorate.
Q 29Who resigned as Vienna society president in 1911 and founded what became individual psychology?
Alfred Adler
He left with nine others to form the Society for Free Psychoanalysis, soon renamed.
Q 30What did Ernest Jones set up in 1912 to safeguard psychoanalytic orthodoxy as the break with Jung loomed?
A Secret Committee of loyalists
Freud, Jones, Abraham, Ferenczi, Rank and Hanns Sachs each pledged not to depart publicly from core tenets without consulting the others.