Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) Founder of psychoanalysis and arguably the most influential theorist of mind of the 20th century.
Whether we know it or not, we are all of us Freudians! His discoveries and writings, his psychodynamic view of mind has been taken up at so many levels of our culture that it is the bedrock of our understanding of ourselves – our lives, our loves, our creative productions and our symptoms – in short our relations with ourselves, the world, and others.
As author, Freud is very present in his writings, sometimes openly, sometimes covertly, not driven by an attempt to treatise on ‘mental illness’ but rather by the project of de-medicalising psychopathology as human suffering. In this he revealed the unconscious underpinnings of the psychopathology of everyday life and the discontent inherent to civilisation, as running roughly along the same lines as the problematic symptoms which had up to then been seen only as illnesses. There is a dis-ease inherent to our social being and it sometimes registers in symptoms. His hope was to provide a new general psychology, which both ‘normalised’ the psychopathologies and ‘psychopathologised’ what passes for normality.