Sigmund Freud was the founder of psychoanalysis. He started out as a neurologist and then began to develop theories. He was born in Czechoslovakia but moved to Vienna when he was a child. He trained in Paris and the unconscious mind was intriguing to him. This is where he started to explore the unconscious using hypnosis and analyzing dreams.
People believe that Freud is either an idol or a fraud. Many people believe that his theories are not supported with scientific data. Because his theories are so old a lot of critics have debunked his psychoanalytic theories. There was a time when he believed that most people with psychological issues resulted in being sexually assaulted as a child but he later retracted those statements. He also abandoned hypnosis as a way to uncover data from the unconscious mind. He later started to encourage patients to talk about their feelings while they were awake.
Freud had his own doubts that he kept from the public. There was a time when he analyzed the Wolf Man (a wealthy Russian immigrant) who was suffering from psychological problems. He declared that his issues came from an incident when he was a toddler of him seeing his parents making love. He analyzed a dream that the Wolf Man had about wolves and it was discovered that the incident never happened.
Regardless of whether or not his theories are accurate he is famous for making people conscious of the unconscious which later helped many other psychoanalysts reveal their own theories. Scientists have also piggybacked from some of his theories resulting in attention to issues that were only uncovered by Sigmund Freud. Even though hardly anyone uses his theories in practice today he is still known as a man of importance.