With Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis was born more than a century ago. As the heir to a long and complex tradition, it established the first school of psychotherapy in the modern sense. Many contemporary schools derive from it, such as psychoanalytic psychotherapy and analytical psychology founded by Carl Gustav Jung.

Freud laid the foundations for a new theory of the psyche and developed methods for exploring it, such as dream interpretation, the analytic relationship, symptomatic actions, and so on.

C. G. Jung, initially a follower of Freud, later distanced himself from Freudian orthodoxy to develop his own vision of depth psychology. Myths and their symbols became instruments for interpreting dreams and fantasies, no longer constrained solely by symptoms.