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The article focuses on the historical pattern of psycho-analysis. Some twenty years ago psycho-analysis, Freudianism in particular, seemed to have been assimilated and consequently given its own place within Western civilization. Psycho-analysis was regarded as one among many hypotheses about the structure and evolution of the human mind. The first important fact about the present psycho-analytical revival is that it comes from the U.S. where psycho-analysis has been adopted mainly as a clinical practice. The lead taken by U.S. literature in making use of psycho-analytical ideas is a characteristic aspect of this phenomenon. The second factor in the popularity of psycho-analysis derives from the psychological repercussions of the Second World War. Due to the high frequency of mental disorders during the post-war period, psycho-analysis as a psycho-therapeutic method is more useful now than at any other time. The late war had a second even more important effect. It has in many aspects brought Western society nearer to the socio-cultural pattern characteristic of the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the last decades of its existence. It would be more accurate to say that it has brought London and Paris closer to the Vienna of 1900. All these circumstances have contributed greatly to the weakening of the critical resistance which was present twenty years ago. This study is a short account of the historical conditions of some fundamental psycho-analytical ideas, such as the discovery of the unconscious, as the principal layer of the mental energy; the bivalence of this energy as the life and death instincts; the stratification of mental life and the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious.