Sublime

Freud was a modern alchemist who reformulated medieval demons as complexes and Darwinian imperatives. He translated all things devilish - lust, violence, cruelty - into terms that were compatible with twentieth-century thinking.

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.

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.

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.

Even though we have been in the post-Freudian era for some time, reductive versions of his ideas have become common-sense assumptions for many who have never read a word of his work.

Indeed, it is only after Freud that depictions of human absurdity have become commonplace.

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.