Sublime

Dennis went from zero to sixty on the MidAm in record time, and no one knew how he learned to do what he was doing. He knew that traders had a tendency to self-destruct. The battle with self was where he focused his energies: “I think it’s far more important to know what Freud thinks about death wishes than what Milton Friedman thinks about deficit

For Freud, the self is – rather than a soul with an eternal nature – a complex amalgam of biological and social impulses, many of them quite ‘Darwinian’ in their primal mechanisms, and the conscious mind is only the surface of the ‘unconscious’, where hidden, largely irrational impulses, repressed desires,

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.

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.