Freud's novel framework suggests that the neuroses are not illnesses in the accepted sense, but a consequence of incomplete development, reawakened infantile desires and unmastered childhood conflicts.

This is intoxicating speculation. If we excavate our dreams, to the lowest level, we will find the remains of our ancestors. Freud's evolutionary psychology comes perilously close to mysticism: 'Every dream has at least one point where it eludes explanation - a sort of umbilicus linking it to the unknown.'

this can be viewed as a defining feature of Freud's modernity: his total engagement with compound meanings and contradictions; his continuous excavation of mental life, all the way down to its primal substances. We do not think logically like characters in a novel. The mind is messy and loose chains of association unravel in unexpected directions.

Freud set out to develop a medical specialism but succeeded in producing a complex system of thought, a new way of understanding the mind, relationships, history and culture.

The idea of Rome as the Eternal City inspired one of Freud's most memorable metaphors. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud imagines a fantastical Rome ‘in which nothing that ever took shape has passed away, and in which all previous phases of development exist beside the most recent'. In this truly eternal city, every building would exist in

God (as Nietzsche famously declared) is dead. But in the unconscious, God is eternal.

The predictive brain has much in common with Freud's general understanding of how the mind functions. Predictions are comparable to desires (or wishes), and desires encounter limitations imposed by reality. Behaviour is a compromise, a middle way negotiated between internal drives and the environment. These compromises are, in effect, revised 'pred

The legend of Theseus and the Minotaur is full of imagery and incident that lends itself to psychoanalytic interpretation: the minotaur - half man, half animal - embodies the essential conflict between ego and id; the labyrinth, which coincidentally resembles the sulci of the cortex, suggests the complexities of the mind. In 1927, Freud told an int

The legend most strongly associated with Knossos is that of Theseus and the Minotaur, and it is arguably the oldest surviving European story.