Imagine spending your whole life dedicated to the pursuit of a certain belief, only to have that cherished belief dashed to the ground right in front of your eyes at the very end of your life? That is exactly what happened to poor Freud, and it is easily understandable why he felt pretty letdown about the whole matter. As if he had wasted a whole lifetime for nothing! You see, he had researched tons of patients and written piles of research papers under the preconceived notion that all neuroses could in the end be traced back to some childhood sexual trauma(s) or other. In fact, even though he could not remember it at all, he was convinced that his own personal psychological problems were rooted to the fact that he had been sexually abused by his father because he was secretly in love with his mother (also known as the Oedipus Complex). So brainwashed by his own convictions and so much energy spent with zero results. Slowly but surely, Freud realized this ominous stroke of bad luck, but he could not muster up enough courage to admit this to his colleagues. This shortcoming of his theory became more and more obvious, eating way at him, and Freud became quite desperate and depressed. What was he to do? This is where the unexpected and the miracle of life comes into play. Suddenly, he realized something, and it was this new insight that was about to save his face. What Freud figured out was that it was not the "actual" episodes of the past which were the causes of neuroses, but one's "fantasies" about these episodes! A kind of meta-awareness in which one manipulates the subconscious in such a way that fantasies are used to reform and make repressions more acceptable to the mind. The mind does not want to be burdened by things like guilt, sadness or anger, so these feelings are cloaked in the more acceptable attire fantasy. Upon closer inspection, one quickly realizes how easy it would be to confuse the actual events with fantasies about these actual events, so Freud isn't really to blame for his near failure. In fact, he has become a kind of super-hero for having discovered this very fine boundary between the real and the unreal. To the human mind fantasies seem real, very real. But actually they are not real in themselves, only in the manner in which one uses these tools in order to pry into the subconscious world. Freud was not wrong at all, and boy did he feel relieved. There is always hope no matter what.
