Synopsis He opened a window on the unconscious - where, he said, lust, rage and repression battle for supremacy - and changed the way we view ourselves. There are no neutrals in the Freud wars. Admiration, even downright adulation, on one side; skepticism, even downright disdain, on the other. This is not hyperbole. A psychoanalyst who is currently trying to enshrine Freud in the pantheon of cultural heroes must contend with a relentless critic who devotes his days to exposing Freud as a charlatan. There is nothing new about such embittered confrontations; they have dogged Freud's footsteps since he developed the cluster of theories he would give the name of psychoanalysis. His fundamental idea - that all humans are endowed with an unconscious in which potent sexual and aggressive drives, the defenses against them, struggle for supremacy, as it were, behind a person's back - has struck many as a romantic, scientifically unprovable notion. The book proposedly represents Sigmund Freud as the main figure with who psychological theory changed the thinking of the world.