Mortal Secrets

Creating a useful, accurate picture of something complex and abstract is very difficult. And there is nothing more complex and abstract than the human mind.

this can be viewed as a defining feature of Freud's modernity: his total engagement with compound meanings and contradictions; his continuous excavation of mental life, all the way down to its primal substances. We do not think logically like characters in a novel. The mind is messy and loose chains of association unravel in unexpected directions.

The predictive brain has much in common with Freud's general understanding of how the mind functions. Predictions are comparable to desires (or wishes), and desires encounter limitations imposed by reality. Behaviour is a compromise, a middle way negotiated between internal drives and the environment. These compromises are, in effect, revised 'pred

Freud's novel framework suggests that the neuroses are not illnesses in the accepted sense, but a consequence of incomplete development, reawakened infantile desires and unmastered childhood conflicts.

Anxiety, depression, addiction and exhaustion are the new normal.

Freud's structural model is predicated on three key ideas. Firstly, mental life is mostly unconscious. Secondly, primitive urges are constantly vying for gratification. Thirdly, primitive urges must be inhibited so that rational and cooperative behaviours can evolve.

In fact, it is possible to read The Interpretation of Dreams as a first-person, experimental novel; a book about a late nineteenth-century bourgeois doctor's obsessive search for the solution to an ancient mystery. His single-mindedness is vaguely reminiscent of Ahab's obstinate pursuit of the great white whale in Moby Dick. As the quest proceeds,

This is intoxicating speculation. If we excavate our dreams, to the lowest level, we will find the remains of our ancestors. Freud's evolutionary psychology comes perilously close to mysticism: 'Every dream has at least one point where it eludes explanation - a sort of umbilicus linking it to the unknown.'

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein found Freud's dream theory logically inconsistent. How can a wish be fulfilled in a dream if the dreamer isn't aware of having had that wish in the first place? And how can a symbol function as a symbol if the dreamer doesn't know what it is supposed to be symbolising? The simple answer to these questions is that