Men who changed the world, part 1: the beast within

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Abstract

This program, first in a series of six about men who changed the world, shows the impact of Sigmund Freud's ideas on our lives. Lynn Poole briefly discusses Freud's early work with Joseph Breuer, who used hypnosis to treat patients with hysteria. This led to Freud's version of psychoanalysis. He believed that the human personality was composed of the conscious and unconscious mind and that impressions in childhood, predominantly sexual, which the conscious mind refused to accept became neuroses in the unconscious mind. Freud's publications affected all disciplines, as evidenced in the reading of a stream of consciousness passage from James Joyce's "Ulysses." The impact was similar in art works such as Salvador Dali's "Persistence of Memory" and Yves Tanguy's "Mama, Papa is Wounded!" Freud's influence on poetry is proven by comparing love poetry written by William Wordsworth in 1804 with that of W. H. Auden written in 1958. Freud's mark on child rearing is apparent when compared to recent works on the subject.