Freud - The Wizard of Id

In October of 1900, an industrialist living in Vienna took his eighteen-year old daughter, "Dora," to see Dr Freud. Dora was acting peculiar and saying strange things. Could the good doctor restore her to reason? The case didn't seem particularly promising to Freud, just another garden variety hysterical woman, in his view, but his finances were none too secure and so he took her on.

A few days later, he wrote to a friend: "The case has smoothly opened to the existing collection of picklocks."

Freud had stumbled upon a strange new terra incognita he called the unconscious.

Under psychoanalysis, Dora told Freud of her family's closeness to that of Herr K, how her own father had been having an affair with Frau K and how Herr K was turning his attentions on her. Dora told the story of K's advances to her father, who rejected it as a sexual fantasy. Freud, however, accepted Dora's account, but wondered why his patient felt disgust rather than desire, and suddenly one of history's great Archimedes moments occurred - an aha! a Eureka!, an apple falling from the tree. Freud speculated that Dora UNCONSCIOUSLY desired Herr K. For good measure, he also claimed she lusted for Frau K.

Freud's reasoning, it goes without saying, was laughably absurd. Dora broke off her treatment, and critics - conjuring up a vision of a smart and beautiful woman reclining on that famous couch - contemplated the real unconscious at work here: that of the horny guy across the room with the goatee and spectacles.

Nevertheless, even his most strident detractors could not shoot down the idea of the unconscious mind and its influence over our conscious actions. In one fell swoop, Freud put an end to the notion that we were rational beings governed by rational thinking. But he also held out hope, that the worst inside us could be stripped of its strange dominion simply by bringing it out into the open.

Out of this mysterious mindscape of the unconscious would emerge a veritable glossary of Freudspeak:

• Id - our lower nature, as opposed to our super-egos or higher natures.
• Repression - our means of keeping our lower impulses locked away from our conscious awareness.
• Projection - an unconscious passing of our thoughts and feelings to another.
• Neurosis and psychosis - various behaviors that result from the unconscious at work.

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