ABSTRACT
To grasp the scope of Freud's work it is crucial to understand the psychology of the family in the Victorian era in the second half of the nineteenth century. Medical science before the 1800s was primitive, and most doctors believed that a person's health was determined by shifts in the balance of bodily fluids called humors. Some even thought that illness, physical or mental, meant that people who were ill were haunted by spirits or cursed by God.
