While Sigmund Freud was not the first to hypothesize the existence of subconscious motivation, his groundbreaking contributions to the scientific examination of "Id," "Ego," and "Superego" have permeated all 20th century thought and literature on the workings of the human mind. The publication in 1900 of The Interpretation of Dreams was the start of a revolution in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness that continues to this day.

In this program, Freud is understood in the context of his times. Sometimes known as the "father of modern psychology," he has also been characterized as an "archaeologist of the mind." Born in 1856, we learn that he studied the nervous systems of animals in college and researched the effects of cocaine before its addictive properties were understood.

In Freud's day, explanations for mental illness were expressed in terms of supernatural events. People believed that mental illness was caused by evil spirits who "possessed" their victim.

Freud's first exposure to the mentally ill came while an intern at a hospital in Vienna, Austria. Freud left Vienna to continue his studies of neuropathology in Paris, where he worked under the guidance of Jean-Martin Charcot, a famous hypnotist. Charcot's work with patients classified as "hysterics" introduced Freud to the possibility that psychological disorders might have their source in the mind rather than the brain. Charcot's demonstration of a link between hysterical symptoms, such as paralysis of a limb, and hypnotic suggestion implied the power of mental states rather than nerves in the etiology of disease. Although Freud later abandoned his faith in hypnosis, he returned to Vienna with the seed of his revolutionary psychological method implanted.

Freud began his clinical practice in neuropsychology, and the office he established at Berggasse 19 was to remain his consulting room for almost half a century. His now-famous patient named Bertha Pappenheim--or "Anna O.," as she became known in the literature--suffered from a variety of hysterical symptoms. Rather than using hypnotic suggestion, Freud allowed her to lapse into a state resembling autohypnosis, in which she would talk about the initial manifestations of her symptoms. To Freud's surprise, the very act of verbalization seemed to provide some relief from their hold over her. "The talking cure" seemed to act cathartically to produce an abreaction, or discharge, of the pent-up emotional blockage at the root of the pathological behavior.

Freud then developed the technique of free association. By encouraging the patient to express any random thoughts that came associatively to mind, the technique aimed at uncovering hitherto unarticulated material from the realm of the psyche that Freud called the unconscious. Because of its incompatibility with conscious thoughts or conflicts with other unconscious ones, this material was normally hidden, forgotten, or unavailable to conscious reflection. Difficulty in freely associating--sudden silences, stuttering, or the like--suggested to Freud the importance of the material struggling to be expressed, as well as the power of what he called the patient's defenses against that expression. Such blockages Freud dubbed resistance, which had to be broken down to reveal hidden conflicts. Freud came to the conclusion, based on his clinical experience with female hysterics, that the most insistent source of resisted material was sexual in nature. This was especially revolutionary during a time when sex was not an everyday topic of conversation. He linked the etiology of neurotic symptoms to the same struggle between a sexual feeling or urge and the psychic defenses against it. Being able to bring that conflict to consciousness through free association and then probing its implications was thus a crucial step, he reasoned, on the road to relieving the symptom, which was best understood as an unwitting compromise formation between the wish and the defense.

We learn that Freud was a workaholic who was addicted to cigars and had to overcome a travel phobia to be honored in other countries, including America, for his theory of psychosexual development. He suffered from anti-Semitism. The Nazis burned his books and forced him to flee to London. His four sisters died in concentration camps during WWII. Mouth cancer took his life in 1939.