Freud’s theory of personality begins with a controversial assumption that is an important key to unlocking the secrets of personality. To understand how Freud found this key idea, we’ll journey back in time to the late 1800s. At that time, Freud was wondering why several of his women patients had developed very noticeable symptoms, such as losing all sensation in their hands or being unable to control the movements of their legs. What most puzzled Freud,
who was a medical doctor, was that despite these obvious physical complaints, he could not identify a single physical cause for these symptoms. Somehow, Freud’s brilliant mind solved this problem and, in so doing, found an important key to unlocking the secrets of personality. Freud reasoned that since there were no observable physical or
neurological causes of the women’s physical symptoms, the causes must come from unconscious psychological
forces (Westen & Gabbard, 1999).