Psychoanalysis is a psychological and psychotherapeutic theory conceived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung, Wilhelm Reich and later by neo-Freudians such as Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan and Jacques Lacan.

The basic tenets of psychoanalysis include the following:

Under the broad umbrella of psychoanalysis there are at least 22 theoretical orientations regarding human mental development. The various approaches in treatment called "psychoanalysis" vary as much as the theories do. The term also refers to a method of studying child development.

Freudian psychoanalysis refers to a specific type of treatment in which the "analysand" (analytic patient) verbalizes thoughts, including free associations, fantasies, and dreams, from which the analyst induces the unconscious conflicts causing the patient's symptoms and character problems, and interprets them for the patient to create insight for resolution of the problems.

Sigmund Freud (German pronunciation: [ˈziːkmʊnt ˈfʁɔʏt]), born Sigismund Schlomo Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939), was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis. Freud's family and ancestry were Jewish. Freud always considered himself a Jew even though he rejected Judaism and had a critical view of religion. Freud's parents were poor, but ensured his education. Freud was an outstanding pupil in high school, and graduated the Matura with honors in 1873. Interested in philosophy as a student, Freud later turned away from it and became a neurological researcher into cerebral palsy, Aphasia and microscopic neuroanatomy.

Freud went on to develop theories about the unconscious mind and the mechanism of repression, and established the field of verbal psychotherapy by creating psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient (or "analysand") and a psychoanalyst. Though psychoanalysis has declined as a therapeutic practice, it has helped inspire the development of many other forms of psychotherapy, some diverging from Freud's original ideas and approach. Freud postulated the existence of libido (an energy with which mental process and structures are invested), developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association (in which patients report their thoughts without reservation and make no attempt to concentrate while doing so), discovered the transference (the process by which patients displace on to their analysts feelings based on their experience of earlier figures in their lives) and established its central role in the analytic process, and proposed that dreams help to preserve sleep by representing as fulfilled wishes that would otherwise awake the dreamer. He was also a prolific essayist, drawing on psychoanalysis to contribute to the interpretation and critique of culture.

Jay Gatsby (born James Gatz) is the title character of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. The character has become an archetype of self-made American men seeking to join high society, and the name has become synonymous with successful businessmen with shady pasts in the US, dealing with prohibition.

Seventeen-year-old James Gatz, who hails from North Dakota where he was born to a poor family in 1890, despises the imprecations of poverty so much he drops out of St. Olaf College in Minnesota only a few weeks after starting, due to his shame of having to work as a janitor to support himself through college. After reinventing his birth names as Jay Gatsby, he reunites with his mentor Dan Cody, a copper tycoon who invites him to join his ten-year yacht trek from Girl Bay. Over the next five years, Gatsby learns the ways of the wealthy until Cody's death. Gatsby soon is cheated out of a $25,000 bequest meant for him by Cody's mistress.

In 1917, during his training to join the infantry in preparation to join World War I, 27-year-old Gatsby meets and falls in love with 18-year-old Daisy Fay, who is everything he is not: rich and from a patrician East Coast family.

Hyman Spotnitz (September 29, 1908 - April 18, 2008) was an American psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who pioneered an approach to working psychoanalytically with schizophrenics in the 1950s called modern psychoanalysis. He also was one of the pioneers of group therapy.

Born in Boston to immigrant parents, Spotnitz attended Harvard College and received a degree in medicine from Friedrich Wilhelms University in Berlin in 1934. He continued his medical studies at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, earning a Medical Science degree in neurology in 1939. His initial work on schizophrenia was conducted while a consulting psychiatrist for the Jewish Board of Guardians in New York City.

At the time, most psychoanalysts did not think that schizophrenia was treatable through therapy and group approaches were not popular. His approach was considered controversial, and he left the New York Psychoanalytic Institute to continue to develop his work.

On April 18, 2008 he died in New York City of natural causes.

Susie Orbach (born 1946) is a British psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, writer and social critic.

Orbach was born in London in 1946, and was brought up in Chalk Farm, north London, the child of Jewish parents, British MP (Labour) Maurice Orbach and an American mother (who was a teacher). She won a scholarship to North London Collegiate School, and attended until she was 15.

With Luise Eichenbaum, Orbach created the Women’s Therapy Centre in 1976 and the Women’s Therapy Centre Institute, a training institute in New York, in 1981. She has been a consultant for The World Bank, the NHS and Unilever and was co-originator of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty.

Orbach has been a Visiting Scholar at the New School for Social Research in New York and Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics for ten years. She is currently chair of the Relational School in the UK. Orbach is a convener of Anybody, an organization that campaigns for body diversity. She is a co-founder and board member of Antidote, which works for emotional literacy. Orbach is also a co-founder of Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility. She lectures and broadcasts extensively world-wide and has been profiled in numerous newspapers, such as The Guardian.