VIENNA - At the Cafe Freud, a whimsical watering hole two doors down from the apartment where Sigmund Freud plumbed the human psyche, a famous poster commands instant attention.

It’s a cartoon profile of the frowning father of psychoanalysis, with nose and eyebrows blending into the image of a naked woman. “What’s on a man’s mind?” reads a wry inscription in English, but the real question might be: What would your mother think?

Mirth and melancholy, hubris and humor — it’s how the world likes its Freud, whose legacy is still being celebrated and scorned as the 150th anniversary of his birth arrives today.

For every sober and scholarly discussion about his groundbreaking theories on neurosis, narcissism or Oedipus complexes there’s a New Yorker cartoon, a Woody Allen clip, a “Seinfeld” rant or a memorable Freudian slip of the tongue that springs to mind.

“There are only a very few personalities who have had such a significant, fundamental impact on today’s cultural history as Sigmund Freud,” said Austrian President Heinz Fischer, a law scholar who says he “always loves” to read Freud’s works and who is the official overseer of his country’s anniversary events.

A special exhibition titled “The Couch” is being mounted at his apartment at Berggasse 19, now the Sigmund Freud Museum. There are also plans to display paintings by psychiatric patients, screen films about Freud and hold an international symposium on psychoanalysis.

His face, bearded and brooding, is on the covers of magazines comparing him to Copernicus and Darwin — an inspired genius who developed the science that would fundamentally change mankind’s understanding of the mind.

Freud, he said, made it easier for people to talk about sex and aggression, and his ideas spurred a surge of public interest in personal and sexual fulfillment around the time of World War I.

Many of Freud’s ideas have been modified or discarded, and even psychoanalysts differ on how closely to follow the father of their profession. But they all basically accept Freud’s notions that human behavior is unconsciously motivated and that people all struggle to keep their underlying motivations out of their consciousness, said Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, a New York City psychoanalyst.

More specifically, Freud’s hand can be seen in the popularity of such notions as being a supportive parent rather than just a strict disciplinarian, and the idea that a person’s childhood experiences will influence how he or she turns out as an adult, said psychologist James Hansell of the University of Michigan.

An early user of cocaine who thought it might have cure-all properties, Freud believed psychoanalysis might someday be replaced by medication. But today, talk therapy in general has not given way to drugs. In fact, it has formed a useful partnership.

One form of talk therapy, called cognitive-behavioral therapy, coupled with an antidepressant, works better for depression than just the pills alone, says Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Coyle.

It’s not psychoanalysis, but Freud “did, I think, lay the foundations for future clinicians to develop talk-therapy type of interventions that are quite effective,” Coyle said.

Millions of others worldwide channel the good doctor with the kind of “Freud Lite” pop psychology chatter so often overheard at cocktail parties. Who among us has never indulged in a little armchair analysis of our dreams or childhoods, or snapped up a self-help book laced with Freudian ideas?

Some of his signature work has inspired generations of comedians and cartoonists — the Oedipus complex, penis envy, infantile sexuality, the anal phase, the meaning of dreams.

Even at the Freud Museum in Vienna, which displays his “Prof. Dr. Freud” nameplate, degrees, fedora and cane, “Analyze Me” T-shirts are on sale in the gift shop.

“My grandfather was a good and loving man, but he understood nothing about a woman’s sexuality,” Freud’s granddaughter, 82-year-old Sophie Freud — who emigrated to the United States in 1942 and became a social worker — said in an interview with the Austrian news magazine Profil.

A Jew by birth but an avowed atheist, Freud was born in what is now the Czech Republic in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire on May 6, 1856. He spent most of his life in Vienna but fled Nazi persecution in 1938 for England, where he died at 83 of cancer on Sept. 23, 1939.

His love of cigars was his undoing. In what might have been a macabre example of his own theory of oral fixation, he is said to have smoked a box a day even after a malignancy forced the surgical removal of his jaw.

Unconscious: Freud maintained that people are not entirely aware of what they think and frequently act in ways that have little or nothing to do with their conscious thoughts. He proposed that awareness existed in layers and that important and influential thoughts occurred “below the surface,” and wrote extensively about how people repress painful ideas, thoughts or feelings.

Psychosexual development: Freud argued that starting at birth, people go through stages of development — including the oral, anal and phallic stages — and become fixated on different objects. He also believed that children at one point see their mothers as a sexual object, a theory that became known as the Oedipus complex; the phenomenon of little girls fixating on their fathers was dubbed the Electra complex.

Id, ego and superego: To explain the driving forces behind human behavior, Freud theorized that the psyche is divided into three parts: the id, which contains primitive desires such as hunger, rage and sex; the superego, which internally deals with morals, taboos and societal norms; and the ego, which shifts between the two and plays a key role in a person’s sense of self.

Defense mechanisms: Freud believed the ego uses defense mechanisms to resolve conflicts between the id and superego. These include denial, displacement, repression or suppression, projection, compensation, intellectualization and rationalization, all of which Freud was convinced were ways people try to spare themselves emotional pain when confronted with stress, unpleasant truths or undesirable thoughts.

Psychoanalysis: Freud pioneered the modern concept of “talk therapy” to help patients explore what subconscious fears and desires might be surfacing in their conscious thinking or behavior. The technique, known as the cathartic method, initially involved using hypnosis to get a patient to recall and relive forgotten or repressed memories. Freud later rejected hypnosis and developed “free association,” in which patients are encouraged to express seemingly irrelevant thoughts as they occur to bring repressed traumatic events into the open.

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