All is Revealed

POWER OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

Freud was the first person to grasp the immense power of the unconscious - his chief claim to fame. Before, the "unconscious" had just meant instinct, or mechanical reactions. It was Freud who created a new picture of the mind as a kind of sea, with a few feet of upper waters - called the consciousness - and vast black depths, full of strange monsters. This vision transformed psychology, virtually creating a new science, to be known as "depth psychology".

THE SEXUAL THEORY
Freud shocked a conservative society by explaining social behaviours and institutions as based on the need for repression of man's basic drives - libido and aggression. Freud is best known for relating much of human behaviour to sex. Aggression as a drive was added only after World War 1. The foundation and focus of his thinking was always what he termed "the sexual theory", with libido as the major drive and the key to human behaviour. Freud placed great importance on childhood sexual fantasy. The ideal of the innocence of childhood was dead and the "sexual theory" was born.

TOTEM AND TABOO

Freud relates not only individual development but also social systems to man's need to repress basic sexual and aggressive instincts. He traces the origins of human society back to a primal herd in which the sons had to fight the father for mating rights. He even speculates that "during the human family's primeval period, castration used actually be carried out by a jealous and cruel father upon growing boys," and that circumcision as part of puberty rites is a relic of this. The development of human society as we know it demanded the constant suppression of man's basic sexual and aggressive instincts.

("Totem and Taboo" 169)