Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939), Austrian physician and the founder of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is a system of mental therapy which depends upon the following practices for its effects: the patient is made to talk about and recall his childhood for years while the practitioner brings about a transfer of the patient's personality to his own and searches for hidden sexual incidents believed by Freud to be the only cause of aberration; the practitioner reads sexual significances into all statements and evaluates them for the patient along sexual lines. Each of these points later proved to be based on false premises and incomplete research, accounting for their lack of results and the subsequent failure of the subject and its offshoots. —Secrets of the MEST Universe Glossary (approved 26-9-90)