ABSTRACT
It is not at all surprising that, seventy-five years after his death, Sigmund Freud’s face is vaguely known to most educated people in the free world, in the same way as most of them would recognize the faces of Marx, Darwin and Nietzsche. No cultural historian would even question whether Freud was one of the defining figures of twentieth-century culture. His impact on psychology, psychiatry, sociology, political thought, art and popular culture during that century was enormous. Metaphors he had coined and concepts he had developed were used by most educated citizens of the Western world in daily parlance roughly from the 1930s until deep into the century’s last quarter, even if they were unaware that Freud had created them.
