Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis. He proposed that unconscious drives, childhood experience, and repressed desires shape human behaviour, and his concepts of the id, ego, and superego transformed the human sciences, literature, and philosophy.

Freud's influence on the twentieth century extends far beyond psychology: his ideas shaped literary criticism, anthropology, feminist theory, and political philosophy. Though many of his specific claims have been challenged, his insistence on the opacity of the self to itself and the formative power of early experience remains deeply embedded in Western culture.