Sigmund Freud

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

Freud's parents were poor, but they ensured his education. Interested in philosophy and 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 (or "analysand") 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. Freud has been called one of the three masters of the "school of suspicion," alongside Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche.

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.One analysis of research literature concluded that experimental data supports some of Freud's theories, including the ideas of oral and anal personality types and the importance of Oedipal factors in some aspects of male personality development, but that others, such as Freud's view of dreams as primarily bearers of unconscious wishes, and several of his views about the psychodynamics of women, were either unsupported or contradicted by research.Regardless of the scientific content of his theories, his 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 ..."