Sublime

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

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.

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

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

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.

Soon psychopathology replaced ethnicity as the critical demographic determinant.

Some of the people who nowadays call on a psychiatrist would have seen a pastor, priest or rabbi in former days.

Decades ago, Bill Moyers put out a book called Healing and the Mind.