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Psychoanalyst---Sigmund Freud
There are no neutrals in the Freud wars. Admiration, on one side; skepticism, on the other. But on one thing the contending parties agree: for good or ill, Sigmund Freud, more than any other explorer of the psyche, has shaped the mind of the 20th century.
The very fierceness and persistence of his detractors are a tribute to the staying power of Freud's ideas. There is nothing new about such confrontations; they have dogged Freud's footsteps since he developed the luster of theorieshe would give the name of psychoanalysis. His fundamental idea has struck many as a romantic, scientifically improvable notion.
His contention that the catalog of neurotic ailments to which humans are susceptible is nearly always the work of sexual maladjustments, and that erotic desire starts not in puberty but in infancy, seemed to the respectable nothing less than obscene. His dramatic evocation of a universal Oedipus complex, in which the little boy loves his mother and hates his father, seems more like a literary conceit than a thesis worthy of a scientifically minded psychologist.
The book that made his reputation in the profession—although it sold poorly—was “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900), an indefinable masterpiece—part dream analysis, part autobiography, part theory of the mind, part history of contemporary Vienna. The principle that underlay this work was that mental experiences are part of nature.
