Psychoanalytic Approaches to Personality The area of psychology with perhaps the most controversial history, due to it’s complete lacking of empirical evidence, psychoanalysis, has it’s origins in the teachings of Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis is a form of therapy developed by Freud in the early 1900’s, involving intense examinations into one’s childhood, thought to be the origins of most psychopathology which surfaced during adulthood. Ideas about the subconscious, which saw the human mind as being in continuous internal conflict with itself, and theories that all actions are symbolic, for “there are no accidents”, were also major themes of the psychoanalyti