Three hundred years before Freud, Michel de Montaigne embarked on “a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it” (II:6,273)1 He was successful to an astonishing degree. To be sure, Montaigne was no systematizer: “I, who cannot see beyond what I have learned from experience, without any system, present my ideas in a general way, and tentatively … I speak my meaning in disjointed parts, as something that cannot be said all at once and in a lump” (III:13, 824). Nevertheless, the “disjointed parts” of his observations