- is a system of mental therapy developed by Sigmund Freud in Austria in 1894 and which depends upon the following practices for its effects: the patient is made to discourse (free associate) on and recall his childhood for years while the practitioner effects 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 significance into all discourse and evaluates it for the patient along sexual lines; the entirety of the cases of psycho-analysis have never been tabulated and little or no testing has been done to establish the validity of the system. (PAB 92)