Sigmund Freud was born on May 6, 1856, in Freiberg. At a very young age, Freud showed that he was very brilliant and intelligent. He had an excellent memory and loved to read plays and poetry. As he grew older Freud became very interested in scientific investigation, and decide to become a medical student shortly before beginning school at Vienna University in 1873. There he was able to set up practices, he specialized in nervous disorders. As he continued his practices, Freud's views evolved as he studied his patients and himself more. Freud's studies eventually filled 24 volumes, published from 1888 through 1939, as well as his first book called The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1990. Although Freud had many dedicated followers, he also had many who criticized everything he did or said. Another of Freud's huge accomplishments was psychoanalysis, which was Freud's theory of personality that attributes our thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts. In the following, I will further discuss Freud's psychoanalytic perspective and his belief on the psychosexual stages.
             Freud explained his psychoanalytic perspective of personality as being an iceberg, mostly hidden. He said the conscious awareness was the portion of the iceberg the floats above the water, but the larger portion that is hidden under the surface of the water was our unconscious. According to Freud, our unconscious is a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories of which we are unaware. Some of our thoughts are stored in a preconscious area temporarily where we are able to retrieve them and place them in our conscious awareness. We also have thoughts and passions, which are considered unacceptable that we block because they would be painfully difficult to acknowledge. Freud tried to prove that even though we may not be consciously aware of the problem, it still affects our feelings and ideas. He was sure that our hidde...