I think I was originally invited to present this paper at a conference on narcissism primarily as a talking document, a case study for the collective: a once-intact and complacent body which illness first magically transformed and then had radically carved up. It is difficult for the amateur to probe any distance into Freud's writings, not least because of the problem of translation (does ‘The Ego’ really mean only ‘the I’, and ‘the Id’ ‘the It’?) Nonetheless, I have my own agenda. I want to know where Freudianism stands now: as ‘the science of unconscious mental processes’ or as an ‘interpretative activity comparable to literary criticism,’ and whether the two are incompatible. I want to know whether classic Freudianism and modern psychoanalytic practice are, unlike physiological medicine, necessarily culture-bound, and therefore inapplicable to, for example, sixteenth-century Aztecs, or 21st century Aztecs, for that matter. I also want to learn when and why I might need the concept of the unconscious.