My Heroes: (5) Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud 1856-1939

Most of the photographs that I have seen of Sigmund Freud show him looking straight back at the camera in a defiant manner. He was always confident of his theories and vigourously defended his findings. Although he was a ground-breaking pioneer many of his ideas have been superceded and challenged but that is often the fate of an original thinker. When he published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 he introduced the concept of the unconscious mind to the public and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life in 1901 dealt with the theory that nothing one said was an 'accident' but the result of the activity of the 'dynamic unconscious'; that is what we now refer to as a 'Freudian Slip'.

He went on to shock the world with his ideas on how the sex drive was the primary motivational force in mankind (and, later, womankind) eg. the Oedipus Complex. Whatever one thinks of his work now, and there are plenty of detractors, I admire the way he confidently published absolutely revolutionary ideas and generated a leap forward in understanding ourselves that others have taken forward and refined.