Sigmund Freud has been considered one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. He is renowned for his discoveries about the human mind, particularly about dreams, fantasies and the role of the unconscious. Although many of his theories were (and are) considered controversial, his ideas revolutionized the way people think about themselves. The power of his ideas permeated almost every discipline, including literature, art and medicine. This article will examine the life, influences and impact of Sigmund Freud. It will begin by discussing who he is, his personal history, and then talk about his role in the development of psychoanalysis. We will then discuss some of the figures who greatly inspired Freud. Finally, we will then talk about some of those on whom Freud had an influence. Freud was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1856, during the Victorian era. His father, Jackob, was a Jewish wool merchant and his father's second wife, Amalia, was Freud's mother. He was the first born in a family of three boys and five girls. When Freud was four years old, his family moved to Vienna where he remained until the Nazi occupation of Austria in 1933 (Gay, 1989). Freud distinguished himself academically from an early age. He was a prolific writer and an avid reader of the arts, humanities, and sciences. At the age of seventeen, he began attending the University of Vienna to study medicine, one of the few opportunities available to a young Jew. man during this period. He entered the program with ambitions of becoming a research scientist, but was unable to do so because there was a quota of Jews in that field that had already been filled. As an alternative...... middle of paper ......in addition to the unconscious, which he referred to as the "personal unconscious", there was also a deeper, more universal layer called “the collective unconscious”. ". According to Jung, the collective unconscious is a part of the human psyche that contains images, thoughts and feelings shared by all human beings, organized into underlying patterns and modified by each person's subjective experience (Stevens, 1990 ; Wedding, Corsini, & Dumont, 2008). Using his own ideas about psychic structure, Jung began to develop his own theories on dream interpretation. Jung's theories on dreams were strongly influenced by those of Freud; However, Jung believed that dreams were direct messages and a natural expression of the unconscious. Unlike Freud, who believed that dreams are disguised realizations of repressed desires (Stevens, 1990; Lear, 2005).