ABSTRACT
In another fascinating chapter (Chapter 2), Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau describes her methodical reading of Freud’s works and how she experienced reading The Ego and the Id as a rupture. She ends up understanding this puzzling feeling as a result of realizing that it was the first time Freud seriously grappled with how the psyche deals with what comes from the outside world. She describes how the mind starts out as an undifferentiated structure and is ready to be influenced by external forces leading to the building of the ego. Using cybernetics as a model theory to understand and evaluate Freud’s theories, she describes his first view of the mind as being driven by preservative and sexual drives and fully elaborates this position, which she’s described extensively in previous publications. She points out that Freud’s drive theory is the most disputed part of his theory due to a concretistic misunderstanding. She notes that in The Ego and the Id, the new definition of drive became murkier.
