Theodore Schwartz: belief

Transcript context

…Circa 2025, what do you think of Freud? Has he become underrated? Look, I think the fact that Freud realized that we have an unconscious that is controlling what we do, based on what was going on at the time. Some people think, just like Copernicus and Darwin, Freud was that revolution that took our own agency and our control of ourselves — the ego — and said, “No, the ego is this little tiny thing. The unconscious is really what’s making all these decisions.” Now, circa 2025, we realize that the brain is doing an enormous amount of processing that we’re not conscious of. That unconscious processing is exactly what Freud was getting at back in Victorian Vienna. Yes, I think he was probably underrated. If you look at Freud from a feminist perspective, and you don’t like penis envy, or you look at the Oedipal complex and just judge him that way, then sure, there’s a lot to criticize. But if you look at his structure of the mind and how he subverted the power of the ego and validated the unconscious, I think he was brilliant. Before we get to my last question, let me just plug the book again. Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery, Theodore Schwartz. Loved the book, read it cover to cover very quickly. Congratulations on that. Final question, what will you do next?…

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