Genius of the Modern World

Episode
Freud
Broadcast Info
2016 (59 mins)
Description
Historian Bettany Hughes retraces the lives of three great thinkers whose ideas shaped the modern world. This time she travels to Vienna on the trail of Sigmund Freud - the father of psychoanalysis.
Freud’s influence surrounds us today. In our vocabulary: repression, penis envy, wish fulfillment and the Freud slip, and in the freedom we take for granted, to talk openly about our deepest feelings - from sexual difference, to inner demons.
Yet Freud’s career was riven with controversy. His early research into cocaine almost ruined his reputation. His theories about childhood sexuality have been fiercely debated.
Freud was a pioneer in the study of the human mind. Working as a young doctor in the 1880’s he became fascinated by the medical conundrums of nervous conditions like hysteria.
Believing these illnesses had deep-seated psychological causes, his psychoanalytic talking cure addressed deep-seated emotional issues that had seldom been discussed openly before.
Freud believed that psychoanalysis and dream-analysis could reveal, hidden aspects of the mind. It’s from Freud that we get the idea of the unconscious mind, where repressed emotions, irrational primal desires, and complex feelings about our parents bubble beneath the surface of consciousness.
Genre
History; Philosophy and Ethics; Psychology
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How to cite this record

The Open University, "Genius of the Modern World". https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ou/search/index.php/prog/225459 (Accessed 24 Nov 2025)