Perceptions of Freud

Freud once said that it had been his lot to agitate the sleep of mankind. Yet it took six years for The Interpretation of Dreams, the book that he always regarded as his most important, to sell the first 350 copies. Perhaps the very title made the work suspect: the study of dreams was not thought a proper pursuit for reputable scientists or psychologists. And yet the theoretical part of the work, often referred to simply as Chapter 7, contained the most radical rethinking on mental organization and functioning that had ever been undertaken.

Five years later Freud published his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, which was received with something approaching outrage. Although Freud insisted that sexuality in children was known to every nursemaid, this did nothing to prevent attacks on him as ‘perverted’ and ‘obscene’. The notoriety rapidly spread to everything he had written on psychological matters.

Psychologists and philosophers attacked the notion of a dynamic unconscious—a fundamental argument of the Dream book—on the grounds that mental activity was, by definition, conscious. The notions of the mind and consciousness went hand in hand. Yet it was Freud's contention that what was inadmissible to awareness was kept at bay by active forces collectively called ‘repression’, and that this barrier to conscious accessibility reached its most structured and powerful organization somewhere around the age of five. All the sexual and violent forces that, in later years, would have appeared as perverse and unthinkable, were locked in a childhood amnesia. This apparent loss of memory is common to every adult so that, to this extent, he is cut off from some of the most stormy and tempestuous events and unrealizable wishes of his own past. So it was perhaps not altogether surprising that many people were unable to bear what they were told about their early years and the influence these continued to have, unknown to themselves, on their own present.

Over eighty years later, i