No other contemporary thinker has influenced
twentieth-century intellectual thought more profoundly than Dr. Sigmund Freud
(1856-1939), the founder of psychoanalysis. His Freudian theories, though often
modified over the years, emphasize the importance of the unconscious, infantile
sexuality and the role of sexuality in the development of neuroses, while
Freudian methods, such as free-association, are methods for treating mental
disorders. A Freudian slip is popularly a slip of the tongue revealing a
repressed subconscious thought or desire. The Austrian physician and
psychoanalyst met with extreme hostility when he published The Interpretation of
Dreams in 1900, but his views increasingly became accepted. He founded the
International Congress of Psychoanalysis seven years later, gathering around him
such giants as Adler and Jung, the group pioneering many psychological concepts.
Freud practiced in Vienna until 1938, when he fled Nazi anti-Semitism to London,
where he died the following year. Some of his disciples broke with him over the
years to form new groups, but all acknowledged their great debt to the master.