mysteries of human nature—and resonated with my own efforts to understand myself. I thrilled to such sentences as: “The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.”
There’s a common phenomenon among medical students known as “intern’s syndrome”: studying the list of symptoms for some new ailment, the student realizes—lo and behold—she herself must be afflicted with diphtheria, or scabies, or multiple sclerosis. I experienced a similar reaction with my initial exposure to Freud. I began to reinterpret my behavior through Freud’s theories with a sudden rush of apparent insight. Did I argue so often with my male professors because of a repressed Oedipal conflict with my father over winning my mother’s attention? Was my room messy because I was stuck in the anal stage of psychosexual development as a consequence of my mother making me wear a diaper to nursery school?
While I may have indulged in overly elaborate interpretation of trivial behaviors, Freud did teach me the invaluable lesson that mental phenomena were not random events; they were determined by processes that could be studied, analyzed, and, ultimately, illuminated. Much about Freud and his influence on psychiatry and our society is paradoxical—revealing insights into the human mind while leading psychiatrists down a garden path of unsubstantiated theory. Most people forget that Freud was originally trained as a hard-nosed neurologist who advocated the most exacting standards of inquiry. His 1895 work Project for a Scientific Psychology was intended to educate physicians about how to approach psychiatric issues from a rigorous scientific perspective. He trained under the greatest neurologist of the age, Jean-Martin Charcot, and—like his mentor—Freud presumed that future scientific discoveries would clarify the underlying biological mechanisms responsible for thought and feeling. Freud even presciently diagrammed what may be one of the earliest examples of a neural network, depicting how systems of individual neurons might communicate with one another to learn and perform computations, foreshadowing the modern fields of machine learning and computational neuroscience.
While Wilhelm Reich frequently made public claims that Albert Einstein endorsed his ideas about orgonomy, in actuality, Einstein considered Reich’s ideas ludicrous and demanded that he stop using his name to market his products. But the great physicist had a very different attitude toward Freud. Einstein respected Freud’s psychological acumen enough to ask him, shortly before World War II, to explain man’s capacity for warfare, requesting that Freud “might bring the light of [his] far-reaching knowledge of man’s instinctive life to bear upon the problem.” After Freud responded with a dissertation upon the subject, Einstein publicly endorsed Freud’s views and wrote back to Freud, “I greatly admire your passion to ascertain the truth.”
Freud’s pioneering ideas on mental illness were initially sparked by his interest in hypnosis, a popular nineteenth-century treatment that originated with Franz Mesmer. Freud was captivated by the uncanny effects of hypnosis, especially the mysterious phenomenon whereby patients accessed memories that they could not recall during their normal state of awareness. This observation eventually led him to his most celebrated hypothesis: that our minds contain a hidden form of awareness that is inaccessible to our waking consciousness. According to Freud, this unconscious part of the mind was the mental equivalent of a hypnotist who could make you stand up or lie down without your ever realizing why you had done so.
These days we take the existence of the unconscious for granted; it strikes us as so obvious a phenomenon that it almost seems ridiculous to credit a single person with “discovering” it. We casually use terms