PSYCHOANALYSIS HAS PERMEATED the contemporary mind to such an extent that an introduction to its main tenets would seem almost superfluous. Superego and id have become household names; we are all familiar with Freudian slips; we all know that boys secretly desire their mothers (and girls their fathers), that dreams are wish-fulfillments, and that somehow everything and anything is supposed to be about sex. Is there anything more to it? Well, there is. Besides, the cult status of psychoanalysis has generated a multitude of misconceptions about Freud's ideas. In other words, not only is there more to know than most people know already, but what they think they know is often quite wrong. By way of illustration, let us take a look at a number of popular ideas about Freud and psychoanalysis.

1. Freud discovered the unconscious.

2. The unconscious is the part of the mind we are not conscious of; the conscious is the part we are conscious of.

3. Freud uses the word subconscious to highlight the fact that the unconscious is a more hidden, “deeper,” region of the mind.

4. Because Freud focuses one-sidedly on the sexual drive, he takes insufficient account of other drives such as aggression.

5. Its subject matter — sexuality in both its normal and abnormal forms — was the biggest obstacle to the scientific and social recognition of psychoanalysis.

6. The superego constitutes what is good in us; the id constitutes what is bad in us.

7. Freud’s theory of the mind leaves no room for the analysis of social phenomena.

8. Psychoanalysis is primarily a branch of medicine whose task it is to cure mentally disturbed people.