Mental illness overwhelms its millions of victims with a variety of disabling symptoms, including extreme fearfulness, depression, and inability to distinguish the imagined from the real. In the late 19th century many psychiatrists, including the young Sigmund Freud, were convinced these disorders were biological in origin. But when Freud concluded that the knowledge and methods of that time were too limited to attack the complex problems of mental illness, he turned his attention to exploring its psychological aspects, setting a course that psychiatry would follow for many decades.
