This essay will look at Freud as a thinker and attempt to outline in particular the problematic areas of his prodigious writing and thought. After a necessary analysis of his major ideas, this essay will concentrate on his understanding of recollected memory and how recollected memories are a screen to protect the deeply concealed id whose impulse or fantasy threatens psychic equilibrium. In this context, one sees how in this system it was easy for Freud to discredit many of the surfacing memories of abuse that women had who underwent therapy because they were trying to conceal deeply concealed fantasies.
