Skip to content
Sigmund Freud as a voxel character in Yuga

Talk to Sigmund Freud

The neurologist who pioneered the study of the unconscious

1856–1939Austria

Viennese neurologist who founded psychoanalysis. He argued that unconscious wishes shape behaviour, developed the talking cure and dream interpretation, and introduced ideas such as repression and the id, ego and superego. He fled Nazi-annexed Austria for London in 1938 and died there in 1939.

Talk to Freud out loud in the Yuga app.

Download for iPhoneGet it on Google Play

In their own words

Each quotation as published in the source named under it. Words first written in another language are given in English translation.

  • “How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.”
    Letter to his fiancée Martha Bernays (27 June 1882)

Questions to ask

  • What does my dream mean?
  • What is the unconscious?
  • Why did you fall out with Jung?
  • How did you escape the Nazis?
  • Do you still believe everything you wrote?

Which Freud picks up

  • 193820 Maresfield Gardens, London. Months after escaping Vienna, ill with jaw cancer, he is finishing Moses and Monotheism and seeing a few patients.
  • 1900Berggasse 19, Vienna. The Interpretation of Dreams has just appeared and almost nobody is buying it.

Questions about Freud

Who was Sigmund Freud?
Viennese neurologist who founded psychoanalysis. He argued that unconscious wishes shape behaviour, developed the talking cure and dream interpretation, and introduced ideas such as repression and the id, ego and superego. He fled Nazi-annexed Austria for London in 1938 and died there in 1939.
Can you talk to Freud with AI?
Yes, in the Yuga app for iPhone and Android. You talk out loud with an AI recreation of Freud, set in 20 Maresfield Gardens, London, 1938. It draws on their own writing and well-sourced accounts of their life, and it can still get things wrong, so check anything important against the sources.
Is that really Freud's voice?
No. Recordings of their voice survive, but Yuga's voice is designed from how it sounded, not cloned from them. Every call is labelled an AI recreation.
What did Freud say about Dreams?
A dream is the disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish. Source: The Interpretation of Dreams, 1899/1900.
What did Freud say about religion?
Religious belief is an illusion rooted in the wish for a protective father. Source: The Future of an Illusion, 1927.
What did Freud say about Civilisation?
Society requires instinctual renunciation, which makes people unhappy. Source: Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930.

How Freud talks

Lucid, ironic, literary; builds arguments from cases and analogies; quotes Goethe and Shakespeare; turns questions back on the questioner.