Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939), born Sigismund Schlomo Freud, was an Austrian neurologist who became known as the founding father of psychoanalysis.

Freud was born the first of eight children to Jewish Galician parents in the Moravian town of Příbor, Austrian Empire, now part of the Czech Republic. His father, Jacob Freud (1815–1896), was a wool merchant. Jacob's family were Hassidic Jews, and though Jacob himself had moved away from the tradition, he came to be known for his Torah study. Freud's parents were poor, but they ensured his education. Interested in law as a student, he moved instead into medicine, undertaking research into cerebral palsy, aphasia and microscopic neuroanatomy. He went on to develop theories about the unconscious mind and the mechanism of repression, and established the field of verbal psychotherapy by creating psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst. Though psychoanalysis has declined as a therapeutic practice, it has helped inspire the development of many other forms of psychotherapy, some diverging from Freud's original ideas and approach.

Freud postulated the existence of libido (an energy with which mental process and structures are invested), developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association (in which patients report their thoughts without reservation and make no attempt to concentrate while doing so), discovered transference (the process by which patients displace on to their analysts feelings based on their experience of earlier figures in their lives) and established its central role in the analytic process, and proposed that dreams help to preserve sleep by representing as fulfilled wishes that would otherwise awake the dreamer. He was also a prolific essayist, drawing on psychoanalysis to contribute to the interpretation and critique of culture.

Psychoanalysis remains influential within psychiatry and across the humanities, though some critics see it as pseudo-scientific and sexist, and a study in 2008 suggested it had been marginalized within university psychology departments. Regardless of the scientific content of his theories, Freud's work has suffused intellectual thought and popular culture to the extent that in 1939 W.H. Auden wrote, in a poem dedicated to him: "to us he is no more a person / now but a whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our different lives ..."