Before the couch, there were eels. In 1876 a young Sigmund Freud spent four weeks in an Italian lab dissecting hundreds of eels in search of their male reproductive organs. Born in 1856 in Moravia with a caul his mother took as an omen of greatness, he saw his family uprooted to Vienna after his uncle Josef was arrested for dealing counterfeit rubles. At the University of Vienna he studied philosophy under Franz Brentano and zoology under Carl Claus, compared the nervous systems of frogs, lampreys and crayfish, and earned his medical degree in 1881. In 1884 he published an influential paper praising cocaine, which he used himself.

His personal life grew tangled: he married Martha Bernays in 1886, and a Swiss hotel register from 1898 shows him signed in as Dr. Sigmund Freud and wife while traveling with her sister Minna. He leaned on Berlin nose and throat doctor Wilhelm Fliess, who left half a meter of gauze inside patient Emma Eckstein’s nose; Freud called her bleeding wish bleedings. Turning to Josef Breuer’s talking cure, he named psychoanalysis in 1896 and published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899. When the Nazis burned his books in 1933 he joked about progress, and only after the Gestapo questioned his daughter Anna did he leave Vienna for London, where he died in 1939.

• The Steinach operation, a vasectomy he underwent in hopes of rejuvenation
• Why he abandoned the seduction theory for the Oedipus complex after his father’s death
• The id, ego and superego, the death drive and the Wednesday Psychological Society
• Samuel Goldwyn’s $100,000 offer and nephew Edward Bernays turning his ideas into public relations
• The help from Ernest Jones and US ambassador William Bullitt that secured his escape