The word bourgeois' is often used in a derogatory way to refer to the capitalist, non-communist way of thinking, which is assumed to be self-seeking, materialistic, dull and unimaginative.

Josef Breuer befriended Freud and even lent him money. Their relationship became so close that Freud named his first child Mathilde after Breuer's wife. For some time Freud was quite dependent on Breuer, but eventually a rift occurred when Breuer simply could not agree with Freud's insistence upon sexual motives for everything. By the time their joint publication Studies on Hysteria was published in 1893, their friendship had already ended. Years later, after Breuer's death, Freud was greatly moved to find out that his friend had continued to follow his career with great interest even after the rift between them had occurred.

Freud suggested that the repressed emotion was rather like a mental boil, unable to discharge its toxic contents, and so giving rise instead to neurotic symptoms. In the case of hysteria, these symptoms became physical and expressed the patient's trauma in a symbolic, physical form; hence the term 'conversion hysteria'. Freud cited a case which provides an example of how repression can be expressed in this way, where a boy's hand froze when his mother asked him to sign a divorce document that denounced his father.

Freud emphasized the idea that buried emotions often surface in disguised forms during dreaming, and that working with recalled dreams can help to unearth these buried feelings.

One very important development during the nineteenth century was the formulation of the principle of conservation of energy, put forward by the German physician and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-94). This principle states that the total amount of energy in any physical system is always constant. Matter can be changed but never destroyed, so that when energy is moved from one place it must always reappear in another. The Helmholtz principle was applied to various branches of physics, such as thermodynamics and electromagnetism, which began to change the world in all kinds of hugely important ways, for example in the introduction of electrical technology. Biology was quick to take on board the new idea as well, and in 1874 the German Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke (1819-92) wrote a book which explained that all living organisms, including human beings, are essentially energy systems, to which the principle of the conservation of energy applies.

Because Freud admired Brücke so much, he took on board this new 'dynamic physiology' and arrived at the idea that the human personality is also an energy system and that we therefore have 'psychic energy'. The role of the psychologist was therefore to study how this energy works within the psyche. This is really the main basis for Freud's theories of psychoanalysis and he applied the idea in various ways, such as in his theory about sexual repression

Freud had learned Greek, Latin, German, Hebrew, French and English, and by the age of eight he was reading Shakespeare. As if all this wasn't enough, he also taught himself the rudiments of Spanish and Italian. He went into secondary school a year early and his education there emphasized classical literature and philosophy, which greatly influenced his later thinking and writing. His favorite authors were two of the greatest literary figures of Western Europe - the German writer and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and the poet and English playwright William Shakespeare (1564-1616).

The mechanistic view sees a person as a machine, whose life processes and behaviour are determined by physical and chemical causes. Vitalism takes the opposite viewpoint, saying that life processes cannot be explained by the laws of physics and chemistry alone. Heavily influenced by religious dogma, it assumes that non-material forces are at work in biological processes.

Freud rejected vitalist ideas and, following Brücke's teaching, he became convinced that all biological processes follow a rigid pattern of cause and effect. This way of thinking - the determinist stance - assumes that even the workings of a person's mind can be explained by strict physical laws.

In academic circles Freud was often seen as opinionated and rather peculiar, so that much of his work was done in what he called 'splendid isolation', just as it had been from boyhood. He obviously had outstanding intellect, but by his own admission he had a rather neurotic, obsessive personality and could not imagine a life without work. He wrote incessantly and much of his writing was done on his days off, or even after a busy day seeing his patients.

Freud's obsessive personality meant that he was the kind of person who has to do everything meticulously and accurately and he liked to be in control. This can be seen in various ways outside of his work. He was very superstitious about certain numbers - for instance, he became utterly convinced that he would die at 61 or 62, because of a series of rather tenuous coincidences to do with odd things like hotel room numbers.

Positivism is a philosophy which limits knowledge to that which is based on actual sense experience. It attempts to affirm theories by strict scientific investigation.

Sigi often came top of his class - in fact, he did it six years running, which must have annoyed his classmates considerably. He was obviously pushed to succeed by his family and teachers, and the lives of the whole family revolved around his all-important studies. He had his own room in the crowded home, while all the rest of his siblings had to share. He even ate his evening meal apart from the others, and when his sister Anna's piano playing distracted him from his studies, his parents had the instrument removed from the apartment.

The unconscious mental processes that produce hysterical symptoms actually go on in the minds of all people at levels of which they are not fully aware. These processes can affect people's behaviour. Freud realized that, although a patients behaviour could be affected by hypnosis, they often did not recall what had happened during the session. This was the beginning of Freud's development of psychoanalysis.