Though the theories of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, are now subjected to the scrutiny of modern science, he is still considered the most influential psychologist to have lived. His idea that neurosis was caused by occurrences in our subconscious — the underlayer of our minds — was revolutionary, and continues to form the basis of much modern psychotherapy. In this obituary written a week after he died on 23 September 1939, James Strachey argues that Freud’s impact was to draw the study of the mind into the world of science. His legacy, he writes, was to consider the meaning and continuity of purely mental events, “not only in neurotics but in normal people”. Freud was “the first to give us knowledge of the strange reality of our own minds” — for that reason, Strachey declared in 1939, his name will live on forever.
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