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Before Freud, poets and mystics had probed the unconscious and irrational aspefcts of human behavior. But most professional, “scientific” psychologists assumed that a single, unified conscious mind processed sense experiences in a rational and logical way. Human behavior in turn was the result of rational calculation -- of “thinking” -- by the conscious mind. Basing his insights on the analysis of dreams and of hysteria, Freud developed a very different view of the human psyche beginning in the late 1880s

According to Freud, human behavior is basically irrational. The key to understanding the mind is the primitive irrational unconscious, which he called the id. The unconscious is driven by sexual, aggressive, and pleasure-seeking desires and is locked in a constant battle with the other part of the mind: the rationalizing consciousness (the ego), which mediates what a person can do, and ingrained moral values (the superego), which tell what a person should do. Human behavior is a product of fragile compromise between instinctual drives and the controls of rational thinking and moral values. Since the instinctual drives are extremely powerful, the ever-present danger for individuals and whole societies is that unacknowledged drives will overwhelm the control mechanism in a violent, distorted way. Yet Freud also agreed with Nietzsche that the mechanism of rational thinking and traditional moral value can be too strong. They can repress sexual desires too effectively, crippling individuals and entire peoples with guilt and neurotic fears. ~ Page 899