Sigmund Freud in pop culture

In the upcoming Netflix thriller series "Freud," the iconic creator of psychoanalysis teams up with a psychic and a cop to track a serial killer. Set in late 19th-century Vienna, a fictional young Freud uses his groundbreaking theories to solve the case. Today, psychoanalytic criminology is a method used to study criminal behavior, drawing from Freud's ideas.

In 1916, Freud published "Criminality from a Sense of Guilt," in which he claimed that many criminals drew on unconscious guilt to commit their crimes, somehow hoping they would end up punished. According to a memoir by one of his famous patients, the Russian Sergei Pankejeff — best known by his pseudonym, Wolf Man — Freud had very attentively read Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

A fictional Sigmund Freud was already invited to play alongside the world's most famous detective. In the 1974 novel "The Seven-Per-Cent Solution," a pastiche of a Sherlock Holmes adventure that was also turned into a film in 1976, Dr. Freud (Alan Arkin, left) helps Holmes (Robert Duvall) shake off his cocaine addiction. The real Freud was actually an early user and proponent of the drug.

A non-fiction book from 1993 inspired Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg's historical film from 2011, "A Dangerous Method." Viggo Mortensen (right) starred as the founder of psychoanalysis, while Keira Knightley portrayed Sabina Spielrein, who was initially one of Carl Jung's patients, and later became a pioneering female psychoanalyst.

A previous biopic on Freud for the silver screen came with the US drama "Freud: The Secret Passion" (1962). Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the original script, but after a fight with director John Huston, he didn't want his name in the credits. Montgomery Clift portrayed Freud's character, while Susannah York played the role of a patient with neurotic symptoms. It premiered at the Berlin Film Festival.

Sigmund Freud's books were prominently burned and destroyed by the Nazis when they took power in 1933. Despite the threat, he didn't leave Austria and was still in the country when it was annexed by Nazi Germany in March 1938. When he finally fled to London in June that year, Salvador Dali, Stefan Zweig, Virginia Woolf and H. G. Wells were among the artists who visited him in support.

From Woody Allen's characters to cartoons in the New Yorker, a depiction of a psychiatrist's therapy session wouldn't be complete without a couch — even though they're no longer commonly used in real life. A gift from his patient Madane Benvenisti, Freud's couch is still on display in his last home in London, where the analyst died in 1939, at the age of 83.