Freud's pessimism is fundamentally anti-Rousseauian: Rousseau claims we are corrupted by evil society and wants to change civilization; Freud claims humans are evil by nature and civilization, despite its constraints, actually makes us better than we would be without it—yet 'not very good'

If we cannot know ourselves with certainty (contra Descartes), then self-knowledge becomes radically ambiguous, and we face a fundamental interpretive problem: we have senses, fears, loves, hates, lusts, and emotions, but if we don't know them in any certain way and they're distorted, how do we interpret that raw data and find our way out of that labyrinth?

Freud's social philosophy is not merely an epiphenomenon of his psychological theory but an important element integrated into it; the connection between self and society through extrapolation from individual to collective is at least as old as Plato

Parapraxis (slips of the tongue, forgetting names, making mistakes) are not accidents but meaningful activities expressing unconscious desires; forgetting someone's name is not arbitrary memory failure but a symbolic representation of dislike for that person