Freud's great discovery was that not all represdentations were accessible to consciousness; he never seemed to doubt that the unconscious, for all that it might operate on a different symbol system that the conscious, was fully symbolic. fully intentional, and fully representational. (p47)

Despite all the cultural conservatism, then, the Confucian view of civilized life is, in the end, optimistic. Sigmund Freud, to take a prominent Western counterexample, saw the tension between hot and cold cognition as the ineradicable tragedy at the heart of modern life. We were miserable in the state of nature because a world where everyone alliowed their id—their hot cognition—to run wild would be chaotic, capricious, and brutish...A civilized life is better for everyone overall, but it also exacts a cost: everyone is required to either rpress or sublimate a large portion of their instinctual drives and to live under the iron rule of cold cognition. The result is a state of what Freud calls Unbehagen, which is usually translated as "discontent" or "dissatisfaction" [as in Civilization and its Discontents, aka Das Unbehagen in Kultur] but also includes a sense of physical unease (p76)

It is not enough to say that Freud created a fundamentally radical doctrine that was somehow captured by bourgeois interests – it is necessary to recognize and spell out the points within Freud's psychoanalysis which already represented those interests and sought their embrace. Freud was ambivalent, but ultimately believed in reason, knowing it be but the 'bound or outward circumference of desire – yet he had no faith in the desire which gave reason life.

In the 1910s, Freud wrote a series of twelve essays, to be collected as Preliminaries to a Metapsychology. Five of these were published independently under the titles: "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," "Repression," "The Unconscious," "A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams," and "Mourning and Melancholia." The remaining seven remained unpublished, an expression of Freud's ambivalence about his own attempts to articulate the whole of his vision of psychoanalysis. In 1919 he wrote to Lou Andreas-Salome, "Where is my Metapsychology? In the first place it remains unwritten".10 In 1920 he published Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a text with metaphysical ambitions.