Laurence J. Peter, in his 1969 book, The Peter

Principle, said that psychiatry helps us to solve our problems by confessing the sins of our parents. It was a wry comment on the conclusions reached by psychoanalytic guru Sigmund Freud, the 150th anniversary of whose birth will be on May 6. Born in the Saxon town of Freiberg in 1856, he spent most of his life in Vienna with significant intervals in Paris and Nancy. In 1938 he took refuge in England from the Nazis and died there the next year just as Britain declared war on Hitler's Germany.

In Austria, after the age of four, he "found that I was expected to feel myself inferior and an alien because I was a Jew". As such, he always had an 'outsider' mentality. Later he was much vilified for his radical re-assessment of human nature. People of the early 20th Century heard with shock and distaste what he said about sexuality and conventional morality. As the poet W.H. Auden noted, Freud is more than a person of the past; he has become a whole climate of opinion. His relationship with his father, his life-long insecurity and his "new psychology" have made us all think twice about ourselves and about one another. Many colleagues, including his disciples Carl Jung and Alfred Adler, dissented from some of his conclusions but Sigmund Freud has left his fingerprints on all our minds.

His beloved mother, barely 20 years old when he was born, was the third wife of his 40+ father, Jakob, a wool merchant who appeared as a formidable patriarch to the sensitive and precautious young Sigmund. His later 'Oedipus Complex' theory was rooted in a son's desire to 'possess' his mother and, like the mythical Greek, to rid himself of the father figure's dominant presence. His early professional interest had been in neurology, the branch of medical science that deals with the nervous system. The treatment of neurotic patients led him to use hypnosis as his principal correctional tool. He had learned in Paris, studying with Jean Martin Charcot, that it could uncover and remove many physical manifestations of neurosis under the direction of a physician.

It is often said that Freud discovered the unconscious (popularly, the 'subconscious') mind. Actually, the hypothesis of unconscious mental processes had been advanced in the 18th Century (cf. L.L. Whyte, The Unconscious before Freud). Others had understood that people are governed less by rational decision than by what they choose to believe. Freud pursued that idea and demonstrated its operation in his patients.

He began to investigate their childhood experiences. Under hypnosis they revealed things they had succeeded in banishing from consciousness. Some, however, could not easily be hypnotised so Freud fell back upon dredging their memories. The free association of ideas that resulted from his suggesting certain lines of thought and then listening passively to a patient's response proved useful. The image of someone lying on a couch with the analyst seated behind, notebook in hand, became one of the 20th Century's familiar and 'cartoonable' scenes. Although the idea of "free association" has been important, Freud's German phrase "freier Einfall" doesn't really mean exactly that. It means, rather, "sudden idea", i.e. spontaneous thought or fancy. It may or may not correspond to any reality. The important thing is that such thoughts led to the healer being an observer rather than a director of the patient's thoughts.

Both diagnosis and prescription had cast the healer in an authoritative role. One did what the great man suggested or prescribed. Most neurotics have already suffered too much from authoritarian ideas imposed upon them in childhood. On the psychiatrist's couch they are free to dialogue with authority and to achieve autonomy. Psychoanalysts can be very dogmatic in media interviews but in their consulting rooms they are non-directive. Contemporary pastoral training for priests has learned that. The pastor of the parish must be a non-directive listener. A man must not be a sergeant major in Holy Orders and the more recently ordained women must forget that they were once school principals or hospital matrons.

Free association, patiently analysed, aided the recapture of painful memories long suppressed. That was accompanied by the disappearance of neurotic symptoms. Freud saw that many of those memories were sexual in nature. Further, he deduced that the primitive and instinctual sides of human nature challenged radically the self-understanding of bourgeois and upper class society.

Even when a patient's "memories" could not be taken literally, his/her inner world of fantasy, hopes, fears or dreams were important indicators for the analyst.

A complicating factor was that under analysis an intense emotional relationship, usually more perceived than real, grew between doctor and patient. Freud called it "transference". It has a common origin. Every time one is confronted by a new experience one transfers to the other people in it one's own particular past experience. In fact, getting to really know another person involves overcoming that projection or transference. To do so clears away the misunderstandings and unreal expectations that we bring unconsciously to a new encounter. That is why a marriage preparation course is important for those thinking of making marriage commitments.

Freud thought that his discovery that children have sexual feelings and that night dreams are as much a wish fulfilment as daydreams were his most important discoveries. The Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1900. In his 1927 The Future of an Illusion Freud fuelled the now-popular reaction to religion.

He opined that it would be best to "leave God out altogether" and to seek a human basis for all things.

That was not good news for Zionists looking to re-establish a State of Israel. Freud continued to think of himself as a Jew but cultural, non-religious

Jewishness' does not justify possession of Jerusalem's Temple Mount and the tombs of the patriarchs.

He knew that he embodied his own theories. His selfanalysis indicated that he hated the father whom he had thought he loved. The authoritarianism that he disapproved was, within himself, the barrier against a more fruitful co-operation with colleagues such as Jung. He was, to quote Henri Nouwen, a 'wounded healer'.