Freud claimed that his work led to a striking change in the way people in Western culture conceived of themselves. What was this change? What was Freud's most important "discovery"? Discuss.
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Freud had a variety of influences on psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, history, and literary studies, but his most important contribution was probably the simple claim that many of our behaviors are motivated by unconscious, often unpleasant desires. Previous writers and thinkers had acknowledged that much of what we do is automatic and unconscious (such as the complex set of muscle movements needed to ride a bike). And the idea that people acted for reasons other than those they professed–even when they were telling the truth as they knew it–was hardly novel either. But there were three things that were strikingly novel about Freud's approach. The first was that he claimed, at least in his writings before the First World War, that there was only one basic drive worth mentioning: the drive for sex. Previous writers had always suggested that humans were motivated by a number of drives, including survival-oriented drives like sex, food, and safety, as well as "higher" drives like morality and the desire for positive social interactions. Freud, in contrast, linked every pathological behavior–and most non-pathological ones–to sex. The second innovation was that Freud pointed to forgotten childhood experiences as the crucial source of individual differences in character. Most previous writers had argued that genetic or inherited characteristics, or, at the opposite extreme, conscious attempts at self-control, were most important. The third novelty was that Freud hypothesized a complicated, systematic unconscious that was governed by the interaction between "beliefs" and "desires" in much the same way that the conscious mind was–except much more childishly. Together, these three precepts led to the theory that behavior is governed by the interaction between self, situation, and society, on the one hand, and powerful, unconscious, and usually sexual urges derived from childhood experience, on the other. This led to a conception of humans as egos struggling for control over their primitive ids and fooling themselves into thinking they had won the fight.