Finding Freud: a personal tribute on the 150th Anniversary of Sigmund Freud's birthday

To briefly describe my own development from medical student, through junior resident and psychiatry registrar and finally qualified psychiatrist, to feeling the need to undertake psychoanalytic training in order to grapple with the complexities of treatment of personality disorders.

My encounter with the concepts developed by the Viennese physician, Sigmund Freud, as represented by a number of significant teachers and clinicians was a formative experience in my early career. My subsequent development as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst was highly influenced by the understandings of human mental development and function set in train by Freud's clinical findings and ground-breaking thinking in the early 20th century. It is hoped that registrars-in-training and young psychiatrists may be particularly interested in how things 'once were' in NSW Mental Health Services which permitted this course of development.