Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

Sigmund Freud studied at the University of Vienna and graduated in 1882. He began specializing in neurology, but later changed his specialty to psychopathology – the abnormal workings of the mind. According to Freud, the unconscious is the source of our motivations.

Freud also studied under Alfred Adler. In 1902, Adler agreed with Freud when Freud's publication on the interpretation of dreams. Freud later wrote about how in 1909, G. Stanley Hall invited him to Clark University, in Worcester, to give the first lectures on psychoanalysis. In the same year, Dr. Brill published the first of his translations of Freud's writings. "Since then," said Freud, "much has taken place in the world, and much has been changed in our views about the neuroses."

Freud analyzed himself by interpreting his own dreams. He said that the dreamer "... had to wait for the nightly relaxation of repression in order to arrive at any kind of expression." (P18) Freud concluded that where the dream merges into more comprehensive problems, we can solve these problems by analyzing our own dreams.