Nerves, sex and celebrity are still closely connected in the popular imagination. Exclusive rehab clinics may have replaced the Grand Hotels of spa towns, but they essentially provide similar services for a similar clientele. And Schiele's brand of erotic emaciation continues to exert a strong influence on fashion.

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

The id does not care about facts or evidence. The id's favourite literature is 'fake news'.

We must reclaim as much of ourselves as we can. We must discover a personal morality shaped by experience rather than 'tribal' prohibitions. We must wrestle our minds free of prehistory so that we can make better, rational choices.

In essence, Friston's principle explains how living systems defy (at least temporarily) the second law of thermodynamics and achieve homeostatic stability. Broadly speaking, the free energy principle is consistent with Freud's principle of constancy, which asserts that the nervous system conserves energy and tends towards stability.

Freud set out to develop a medical specialism but succeeded in producing a complex system of thought, a new way of understanding the mind, relationships, history and culture.

The relevance of the death instinct isn't restricted to behaviour that is manifestly self-destructive. The death instinct is also expressed across a spectrum of mental states characterised by passivity and inertia. These states can be construed as small resistances and oppositions to vitality, and they seem particularly prevalent in the modern worl

A central tenet of Buddhism is that the self is illusory. We are more than our conscious minds and we are wrong to think of our autobiographical self as a 'true self'. Freud's 'ego' is also illusory, insofar as it generates a misleadingly comprehensive sense of selfhood, whereas in reality it is only a small part of a much larger, opaque totality.