Click here to read “Deluded Individualism” by Firmin Debrabander from The New York Times on August 18, 2012.
There is a curious passage early in Freud’s “Ego and the Id” where he remarks that the id behaves “as if” it were unconscious. The phrase is puzzling, but the meaning is clear: the id is the secret driver of our desires, the desires that animate our conscious life, but the ego does not recognize it as such.