The 160th birth anniversary of Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis and considered an influential and often controversial 20th century thinker, is being celebrated by Google with a doodle on its homepage.
Doodler Kevin Laughlin captures the image of a dreamer, perhaps Freud himself reclining on a blue iceberg with a vast hidden base that can be interpreted to be a “reference to the murky depths of the unconscious mind”, as a tribute to the psychologist who introduced concepts such as ‘Id’ and ‘Oedipus complex’.
“More importantly, the design draws our eye to the horizon, reminding us how the genius of Freud’s practice rests in the space between doctor and patient, reader and text, human and world,” Google describes the doodle.
The idea that dreams “mean” anything or that we have an active subconscious mind, is a concept by Freud, an Austrian neurologist, who created an entirely new approach to understanding of human personality.
Born on 6 May 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia (now Pribor in the Czech Republic) to a merchant father, he was educated in Vienna where his family moved to and eventually settled.
After graduating in medicine at the University of Vienna he worked at the Vienna General Hospital where he collaborated with Josef Breuer in treating hysteria by the recall of painful experiences under hypnosis.
