Psychoanalysis and depth psychology

Sigmund Freud

1856 – 1939

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, whose theories of the unconscious mind, repression, dream interpretation, and the Oedipus complex revolutionized Western understanding of the human psyche. Works such as Totem and Taboo (1913) and Moses and Monotheism (1939) applied psychoanalytic thinking directly to religion, ritual, and mythology, interpreting magical and religious practices as expressions of unconscious wishes, ancestral guilt, and psychological projection. Though a committed rationalist and skeptic of the occult, Freud's model of the unconscious became indispensable to twentieth-century esotericists and scholars of religion seeking a scientific language for the hidden forces addressed by magical and mystical traditions.