Sigmund Freudthe doctor of the unconscious

He trained as a neurologist and spent his early career on eels, cocaine and the anatomy of the nervous system. What redirected him was a colleague's patient, recorded as Anna O., who improved when she was simply allowed to describe her symptoms out loud. She called it the talking cure. Freud spent the next forty years building a theory large enough to explain why it had worked.

The Interpretation of Dreams was published at the end of 1899 and sold a few hundred copies in six years. His picture of the mind — that most of it is unavailable to the person who has it, and that the parts you cannot see are doing much of the work — took decades to be taken seriously and then became so ordinary that people now use it without knowing whose it is.

A great deal of the specific machinery has not survived contact with evidence, and he is argued with more than he is read. The general claim has held: that a life is shaped by things you were never consulted about and largely cannot recall. He left Vienna for London in 1938, five years after his books were burned in Berlin, and died there with the war three weeks old.

“Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.”

Sigmund Freud