Sigmund Freud
The architect of the unconscious mind.
Founder of psychoanalysis, who proposed that hidden wishes, early childhood and the unconscious quietly govern adult life.
techniques
Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and come forth later in uglier ways.
Who they were
Sigmund Freud reframed the mind as a place of hidden depths. He argued that much of what drives us — desire, fear, the patterns we repeat — lives below awareness, formed in early childhood and revealed in dreams, slips of the tongue and the things we resist. Whatever later thinkers kept or discarded, nearly all of them began by answering him.
Famous books
What they left on the shelf
Terms they cared about
Ideas worth knowing
Their big idea
Psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud proposed that much of our inner life runs beneath awareness, shaped by buried wishes, early childhood, and the quiet conflicts we defend ourselves against. Dreams and slips of the tongue, he believed, let this hidden material briefly show itself.
The approach they founded
Psychoanalysis
The original talking cure. Long, deep exploration of the unconscious, early life and the patterns we repeat.
Questions in their spirit
What they’d ask you
Sit with one. Answer online, or in the app.
Carry the idea forward
Freud — What they’d ask you
Psipas asks you one small, honest question at a time — and builds the picture from your answers.