ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud was the eldest of eight children. His father was a Jewish wool merchant in Vienna and struggled to support such a large family on his meagre income. In 1885, Freud, as a young doctor, went to study under Charcot in Paris at the Salpetriere. There, he witnessed the presence and power of the unconscious mind as demonstrated by hypnosis. The following year, Freud left the Salpetriere to set up his budding practice as a neurologist, where he used his newly learnt hypnotic skills. Freud's scientific tendency caused him to say 'event that provokes an affect' rather than 'person who hurt you', which had the virtue of a more broadly applicable generalisation, but it rather lost the idea that the patient might be better off sorting things out with the person who had upset him. Freud believed that everything could be explained by sex and the self-protecting reactions to it.
