Sigmund Freud
Austrian neurologist (1856–1939), founder of psychoanalysis, and the figure the rest of this spoke’s depth-psychology corner is defined against: Jung broke with him over whether the unconscious is personal, and Fromm rewrote him with Marx. He left Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938 and died in London the following year.
The apparatus
Psychoanalysis began as a clinical method — hypnosis learned from Charcot, then free association and dream interpretation — and became a theory of mind. Its load-bearing parts: an unconscious that drives behaviour and symptoms; repression keeping unacceptable material out of awareness; the id / ego / superego division between demand, prohibition and the mediator between them; transference, in which old relational patterns reappear inside the therapy; libido and drive theory, later joined by a death drive; and the Oedipus complex. Major works: The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).
Influence and status, which are different questions
The influence is hard to overstate — Auden’s line, quoted in the article, is that Freud became “a whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our different lives,” and the vocabulary of the unconscious, repression and defence mechanisms is now ordinary language. Clinically, psychoanalysis is much less prevalent than it was; in psychology, psychiatry and the humanities it remains present.
Its scientific status is contested and the Wikipedia article says so plainly, alongside debate about therapeutic efficacy. One consequence sits elsewhere in this wiki: aaron-beck built cognitive-behavioral-therapy out of exactly that objection, having concluded that psychoanalysis had no empirical support as a treatment for depression. Both of the spoke’s testable therapies descend from that break. This wiki does not adjudicate that here, but the shape of the objection is the same one analytical-psychology faces: a clinical, interpretive method produces claims it cannot itself test. Freud is the origin of that whole predicament in this corpus — enormous explanatory reach, evidence that doesn’t underwrite it — and the standard against which the field’s later reckoning with evidence reads as a very long argument with its own founder.
Related
carl-jung · erich-fromm · analytical-psychology · aaron-beck · cognitive-behavioral-therapy · replication-crisis · synthesis