On a Saturday night in Leeds, I learnt something about pinball and psychoanalysis. By psychoanalysis, I don't mean dreaming and joking and slipping as revealing what is unconscious or the way that what happens in families affects how boys and girls develop, but rather some of the basic descriptions of thinking that were elaborated by Freud even before he used the term ‘psychoanalysis’ and that continued to underlie his accounts of how and why repression and free association work. There is plenty of pop-psychoanalysis around us now, but you will still not find much there, in popular culture, about quantities of excitation in the neurological apparatus. Descriptions of narcissism and sibling rivalry don't require us to think about neurology, but that is where Freud started speculating in his ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ (the title provide by the editors upon the manuscript's first publication in 1950), and if a lot of psychoanalysis was already there in that project, we need to understand how those representations of mind endured and how they are still here, still with us now.

Unlike the other more fantastic contents of psychoanalytic discourse that fascinate so many people in the media, the formal structure of the mind that Freud scribbled during a train journey in a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess – in a manuscript that was not published until after his death – seems like dull stuff.