For Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, the seeds of his personality were sown at the earliest stages of his life.

At least that's what he would have us think.

Seven decades after his death, opinions vary on how well (or poorly) Freud's theories have held up. What seems beyond dispute is his continued relevance in the field of modern psychology.

Freud (1856-1939) was born in what is today the Czech Republic, but moved with his family to the Jewish ghetto in Vienna, Austria, at age 4. It was a hardscrabble upbringing, with Freud, his parents and six younger siblings sharing a small apartment.

The young Freud considered his father, Jacob, a middleman in the textile trade, to be something of a failure. Growing up, Freud's best friends were books. His heroes were the larger-than-life men whose stories he devoured: Oedipus, Moses, Hannibal, Napoleon.

His mother, Amalia, lost her second child — Freud's baby brother — when Sigmund was not yet 2 years old. Her melancholy, followed by the birth of six more children in rapid succession, left Freud feeling detached from his mother in his early years, and uncomfortable around women long after graduating from medical school with training in psychiatry.

Perhaps a bit too coincidentally, his family dynamic formed the basis for Freud's most famous theory, the Oedipus complex.

As he put it in a letter to a colleague: "A single idea of general value dawned on me. I have found, in my own case too, the phenomena of being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood."

The Mother Link

The Oedipus complex comes from the mythical story of the king of Thebes, who assumed the throne after unwittingly killing his father and marrying his mother. Like so many Freudian theories, the purported complex raises the question: Where does Freud's life experience end and the science begin?

Biographer Louis Breger says Freud's tortured relationship with women is the key to understanding his analyses.

Although he was at least 26 years old when he became engaged to his wife, Martha, Freud's lack of sexual experience made him more like a 16-year-old, writes Breger in "Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision." After putting up with a domineering mother and five sisters vying for attention, Freud decided that Martha fit his ideal of a woman — passive and nurturing.

That's understandable enough, but how to explain Oedipus? Breger says the theory was a manifestation of Freud's fantasy life — in this case, the young warrior battling his kinglike father for his mother's love.

The Oedipus theory, Breger wrote, "became his bid for 'eternal fame'; it would make him a great and powerful scientist."

It was a role that Freud would grow into. His book "The Interpretation of Dreams," published in 1900, was a landmark that established the importance of symbolism in psychology.

In 1901, "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life" introduced Freud's theory that some common mistakes — slips, if you will — could be attributed to the foibles of the unconscious mind: the blurting out of embarrassing language at inopportune moments; the inability to recall the name of a hated rival or jilted lover.

But Freud's views on the childhood experience — in particular that children are sexually aware and that adult neuroses proceed from childhood traumas or abuse — proved difficult for his contemporaries (and some latter-day skeptics) to accept. Freud's penchant for sloppily documenting his research and waffling on his own conclusions didn't help his cause.

When a critic calls Freudian dogma into question, the discussion often widens into an indictment of psychoanalysis as science.

In a 2006 retrospective published in Newsweek magazine, experts wondered whether Freud merely invented a more complicated terminology for explaining the mundane — substituting psychobabble for common sense.

"Shakespeare managed to say an awful lot about human nature without the vocabulary provided by psychoanalysis," said Patricia Churchland, a philosophy professor at the University of California, San Diego.

Frederick Crews, a fierce critic of Freud, says the psychiatrist's real brilliance was in controlling his own legend. "He was a charlatan," said Crews, a professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley, in a 1999 interview with Harry Kreisler, head of the school's Institute of International Studies.

Crews accused Freud of coaxing falsehoods out of patients, fudging figures in published papers and keeping silent when he began to doubt his own conclusions.

With so many brickbats to go around, who is taking up for the scorned father of psychoanalysis?

Nobel laureate Eric Kandel, for one. In a Newsweek interview, the Columbia professor defended Freud as "a giant" and "one of the great thinkers of the 20th century."

Kandel, a Vienna native who was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2000 for his work in learning and memory, views Freud-hatred as symptomatic of bigger issues in the field.

"The problem with psychoanalysis," he said, "and it's a deep problem, is not with Freud. Subsequent generations have failed to make it a more rigorous, biologically based science."

Sigmund Freud was a stubborn man. He clashed frequently with colleagues, seldom traveled and briefly remained in Vienna even after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany. He could not bring himself to believe that anything so horrible as the Holocaust was just years away.

Though agents of the Third Reich left the aging Freud and his wife well enough alone in their house, the anti-intellectual cast of Hitler's regime was clear: Freudian literature and other works of "Jewish" science were favorites of book-burners. By the time he decamped to Britain in 1938, Freud was sick from mouth cancer — a consequence of his 20-a-day cigar habit. He died the next year at age 83.

At The Forefront

While some might quibble with his methods, ethics and conclusions, Freud looms large in the Western consciousness. His intellectual curiosity and literary output — 10 books — speak to the vigor with which he pursued his life's goal: the unlocking of the mysteries of the human mind.

He opened his psychiatric office and lent his ear to patients with problems that were difficult to speak about in the Victorian era, with an eye toward helping them improve. In so doing, wrote Breger in "Freud," he developed "a method of treatment that became the forerunner of modern psychotherapy."

As James Hansell, a University of Michigan psychologist, told Newsweek: "He was wrong about so many things. But he was wrong in such interesting ways. He pioneered a whole new way of looking at things."

BY CHRISTOPHER CAILLAVET