Austrian doctor Sigmund Freud who, is widely known as the father of psychoanalysis, did not receive a Nobel. The committee not only gave Freud the cold shoulder but even criticised his work
13 Nobel nominations
Freud went on to be nominated for a Nobel a total of 13 times until 1938, one year before his death in London. Freud’s name was put forward 12 times for a Medicine Prize and once for a Literature Prize. In 1929, professor Henry Marcus of the Karolinska Institute, home to the Nobel medicine committee, summed up the scientific community’s mistrust of Freud’s doctrine: “Freud’s entire psychoanalytic theory, as it appears to us today, is largely based on a hypothesis”
Prizes for poems?
Faced with the Nobel science committees’ lack of interest in him, Freud’s close friend and translator Princess Marie Bonaparte of France tried to round up support for a Nobel Literature Prize when he was in his 70s and was suffering from jaw cancer, according to AFP
But Per Hallstrom, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy at the time, did not mince his words about Freud’s nomination. Freud, he concluded, “should not be awarded any poet laurels, no matter how poetic he has been as a scientist”
Einstein’s problem
Albert Einstein, who won the Physics Prize in 1921, refused to endorse Freud’s nomination for the Medicine Prize in 1928. “About the truth content of Freud’s teachings, I cannot come to a conviction for myself, much less make a judgement,” Einstein wrote
But one cannot write off Freud’s entire body of work. “Before Freud … all psychiatrists regarded the hysterical woman as a madwoman, the masturbating child as a pervert and the homosexual as a degenerate,” AFP quotes Elisabeth Roudinesco, the author of the biography Freud, In his Time and Ours, as saying