Freud was clearly a minority in the sense that his ideas were very different from the conventions of the time and what was accepted by the majority of people in society. Reaction to Freud was typical of that experienced by minorities. His work was initially not allowed to be printed, and, when it was, it was boycotted by the main scienti®c community, and both he and his supporters were labelled `perverts'. But as history tells us, despite the outrage and resistance that initially met Freud, his ideas became accepted and developed into the enduring, if still disputed, approach of psychoanalysis. This story is not a one-off. We could replace Freud with a range of historical ®gures including Copernicus, Galileo, and Jesus, or indeed their modern counterparts. The underlying theme is similarÐa lone person who initially had very different opinions from those of society in general, who was chastised for holding those beliefs, but who subsequently had a profound and lasting impact upon the same people who had initially vili®ed them.