Sublime

I’m not making this up—though Freud, I’m afraid, was. It remains for me a cautionary tale of an explanatory system run amok. Freud was so sure of what he was looking for that he began to see it anywhere and everywhere.

Freud’s consulting room provided a confidential place for a person to talk, frankly and probably for the first time, about sex and anguish, to be understood and find healing. This in itself is a leap forward in the story of happiness, and perhaps for the first time in history a positive development that relates specifically to those who find

deep repetition compulsion, the term Freud used to describe the need to re-enact painful experiences in order to master them.

When Freud wanted to persuade us that perception was distorted by wish, he wanted to persuade us that we tend to see merely what we want in what is there, and that knowing (and not-knowing) is all to do with wanting rather than with truth.

“The ego is after all only a portion of the id, a portion that has been expediently modified by the proximity of the external world with its threat of danger.”

What happened to you as an infant has a profound impact on this capacity to love and be loved.

It was Jung and Bleuler who put Freud on the scientific map, not the other way around.