Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian psychiatrist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century who developed the practice of psychoanalysis. Freud was originally trained as a medical doctor. He began to examine his patients that were brought to him for hysteria and other minor medical disorders and began to develop a theory that their conditions were psychological in nature. He theorized that psychological disorders were caused by repression of certain basic drives or impulses by the higher order, moral mind. He developed the process of psychoanalysis to show the patient the particular part of their psyche that they are repressing in an attempt to reintegrate that part of the mind and eliminate the disorder. Many of the underlying psychological processes dealt with infantile and childhood sexuality and were shocking to many of the readers at the time.

Freud's ideas, though controversial, were extremely influential. He taught many...