Sigmund Freud

Brief overview of the life and work of Sigmund Freud. According to Freud's theories, which he began to develop in the 1890s, all humans have an unconscious portion of the mind in which strong sexual and aggressive drives struggle against the mind's attempts to suppress them. Freud believed that dreams were one way to look into the unconscious and to discover a person's deepest desires and fears. The publication of his book "The Interpretation of Dreams" in 1899 helped make psychology a hallmark of the new century. In the 1930s, the Nazis burned Freud's books, and when they annexed Austria in 1938, Freud fled to England and died there the next year. Today, fewer than 5000 patients in the U.S. are treated with Freud's method of psychoanalysis, but as a theorist, Freud succeeded in forever changing how people think about the human mind.