A recent essay in Science compares Freud's work with contemporary “cognitive science.”The comparison is rather to Freud's disadvantage, and to the disadvantage of Freud's contemporaries: Our contemporaries have a conception of the mind as a computational system. Some of their theories posit a quantity, “activation,” that is responsible for aspects of mental functioning. Some of their theories postulate “parallel processing”through a network that is analogous to the connected system of nerve cells in the human nervous system. Unlike Freud, the story goes, our contemporaries have an experimental tradition that supports their theories. The result is that we now have a powerful and distinctive science of both the unconscious and the conscious, a science whose theories have led to new experiments “that tentatively reveal a tripartite classification of nonconscious mental life that is quite different from the seething unconscious of Freud.”

In a general way, these perceptions are widely shared, not only among academic psychologists, but among philosophers of mind, philosophers of science, research administrators, and increasingly, the educated public. They have the impression that contemporary cognitive psychology with its computer simulations of mind is onto something new and scientific that was at best only dimly foreshadowed in earlier psychologies. My purpose is to argue the contrary. A big part of contemporary cognitive science is pretty much what you would expect to get if Sigmund Freud had had a computer.

Despite distorted understandings of Freud's views and despite periodic waves of Freud-bashing, Auden's assessment remains essentially correct. Freud's influence continues to be enormous and pervasive. He gave us a new and powerful way to think about and investigate human thought, action, and interaction. He made sense of ranges of experience generally neglected or misunderstood. And while one might wish to reject or argue with some of Freud's particular interpretations and theories, his writings and his insights are too compelling to simply turn away. There is still much to be learned from Freud.

The essays here collected focus on some of Freud's masterworks and some of his central concepts, trying to bring out the structure of his arguments and contributions to our self-understanding.

Freud was born in 1856 in Freiberg in Moravia, but after his family's move when he was four years old, he passed almost all of his long life in Vienna. The story of his life is the story of his thought. The great events were most often the occasions of his discoveries and speculations. After his childhood move, the rest of his life can be viewed as a tale of four cities, the psychogeography of which is explored by Carl Schorske. Vienna, embroiled in anti-Semitism, was the ambivalent scene of Freud's professional advances and defeats as well as home to his contented family life.

In his last decade of life Sigmund Freud turned once more to a question that had troubled him ever since he published his conception of the psyche in The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900: What were the implications of individual psychodynamics for civilization as a whole? His mature reflections on that subject he set forth in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930a). Its somber conclusions have, of course, become part of our self-understanding: that the progress of our technical mastery over nature and the perfection of our ethical self-control are achieved at the cost of instinctual repression in the “civilized” man - a cost so high as not only to make neurotics of individuals, but of whole civilizations. An excess of civilization can produce its own undoing at the hands of instinct avenging itself against the culture that has curbed it too well.

One might expect that, in making a point so historical in its essence, Freud would have reached out to propose a scheme of civilization's march toward the organization of nature and the collective development of the superego. Such was not Freud's way. He approached his problem not historically but analogically, proceeding from an analysis of the individual psyche, its structure and experience, to the functioning and future of society. Yet to introduce his reader to the difference between the psyche and history, he had recourse to an ingenious historical metaphor."

Often, when Freud mentioned morality, he was referring to a culture's restrictions on sexual behavior - a code regularly endorsed yet routinely defied. He was deeply interested in exposing the reasons for such restrictive sexual codes, and the dynamics of our deviations from them. Still, for Freud, it is not the sexual content nor the societal enforcement of certain constraints that makes them moral; moral constraints are, rather, constraints that play a particular role within the psychology of individuals - namely, the role of “superego.” While the emergence of a superego is, according to Freud, bound up with the dynamics of sexual desire in general and the oedipal complex in particular, in the end it is the relational properties and not the content of the superego - specifically, its historical relations to other people and its ongoing relations to the ego - that make it a superego and make it the agency of morality. An account of the formation and the character of the superego is, then, simultaneously an account of the formation and the character of morality.

To understand Freud's account of the superego, and the closely related ego-ideal, we must understand how a self or an ego is constituted and how characteristics of other people may be internalized to become parts of oneself. This story forms the crucial metapsychological background for Freud's account of morality, and I offer a somewhat novel interpretation of this background in the first and second sections of this chapter.

The first of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is titled “The Sexual Aberrations.” Why should Freud begin a book the main point of which is to argue for the existence of infantile sexuality with a discussion of adult perversions? (After all, the existence of the adult aberrations was not news.) I believe Freud's beginning can be usefully understood as part of an effective argumentative strategy to extend the notion of sexuality by showing how extensive it already was. Freud himself (in the preface to the fourth edition) describes the book as an attempt “at enlarging the concept of sexuality” (1903d, VII, 134). The extension involved in the notion of perversion prepares the way for the extension involved in infantile sexuality.

The book begins, on its very first page, with a statement of the popular view of the sexual instinct:

The Interpretation of Dreams is often regarded as Freud's most valuable book, and it was pivotal in his work.

Freud began his psychological investigations by following up an insight of his senior colleague Joseph Breuer. One of Breuer's patients was a very intelligent and articulate young woman diagnosed as hysterical. Breuer inquired into her symptoms in great detail, and discovered that they were connected with her emotional life in a number of ways.

In particular, she and Breuer could often trace the beginning of a symptom to an event that had been significant to her but that she had forgotten. Where this was so, moreover, the symptom itself could be seen to be connected with feelings related to this event, which she had not previously expressed. Such symptoms thus had a meaningful connection with events and motives in the patient's life. And they were relieved when she brought these events to consciousness and felt and expressed the motives connected with them.

She was, for example, afflicted for some time with an aversion to drinking, which persisted despite "tormenting thirst." She would take up the glass of water she longed for, but then push it away "like someone suffering from hydrophobia." Under hypnosis she traced this to an episode in which a companion had let a dog - a "horrid creature" - drink water from a glass. She relived the event with great anger and disgust; and when she had done so, the aversion ceased, and she was able to drink without difficulty.