What were Sigmund Freuds contributions to the study of human psychology?
Although Austrian physician Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was trained as a medical doctor, he is remembered for his psychological theories. Freud believed that disturbed mental states are influenced by repressed (buried) and forgotten impressions, many of them dating from childhood, and that if these recollections are revived in a process called psychoanalysis, the patient can be cured. He used a technique called free association, in which a patient talks about what is on his or her mind, jumping from one thought to the next. If patients were unable to free these deep, often painful thoughts, hypnosis (a sleeplike state in which a person is open to suggestion) might provide the information. Yet because some people could not be hypnotized, Freud turned to another expression of the unconscious mind (that part of the mind of which a…
