Sigmund Freud has been out of the scientific mainstream for so long, it's easy to forget that in the early 20th century he was regarded as a towering man of science—not, as he is remembered today, as the founder of the marginalized form of therapy known as psychoanalysis. At the start of his career, he wanted to invent a "science of the mind" , but the Victorian tools he had were too blunt for the task. So he dropped the "science" part and had his patients lie on a couch, free-associating about childhood, dreams and fantasies. This technique yielded the revolutionary notion that the human mind was a soap opera of concealed lust and aggression, of dark motives, self-deception and dreams rife with hidden meaning.