From Essays After Montaigne
'A strong imagination begetteth chance,' say learned clearks. I am one of those that feele a very great conflict and power of imagination. All men are shockt therewith, and some overthrowne by it. One impression of it pierceth me, and for want of strength to resist her, my endevour to avoid it.
But our will,... how much more likely, and consonant to trueth may we tax it of rebellion, and accuse it of sedition, by reason of its unrulinesse and disobedience. Will shee at all times doe that which we would have her willingly to doe? Is shee not often willing to effect that which we forbid her to desire? and that to our manifest prejudice and dammage? Doth she suffer herselfe to be directed by the conclusions of our reason?
Sigmund Freud's great insight--the reason why he's still an intellectual force in our culture (and is likely to be for a long time to come) despite all of the blows that his reputation has suffered--was the idea that the psyche isn't a simple, unified entity; that it's the result of the complicated interplay among a host of entities and impulses. Whether the actors involved are called Eros and Thanatos; the id, the ego, and the super-ego; anima and animus; spirit, emotion, and intellect; or will and imagination is of secondary importance. The real insight is that our psyche is actually an astonishingly active multiplicity, and almost all of its activities occur outside of our conscious awareness.
When you first read Freud in high school, college, or wherever, it's great fun to apply his ideas to whoever you find at hand. If you do this properly, you can gain great insights into behavior that would otherwise be inexplicable (and annoy the hell out of friends and family with your superior, knowing attitude). In his review of Avishai Margalit's The Ethics of Memory, Jonathan Lear uses Freud's dynamics to gain just this sort of insight into the strife in the Middle East:
On the face of it, no one wants to be humiliated. Indeed, because humiliation is supposed to be so awful, some kind of retaliation is thought to be justified. The question, then, is whether there might be hidden currents through which people become attached to humiliation, the very emotion they sincerely claim to despise.
We can gain some insight into this question if we contrast humiliation with the dynamics of another moral emotion, guilt. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud argued that guilt arises as a solution to the problem of how humans, who have various aggressive impulses, live in society. Basically, they turn aggression on themselves in the form of a punishing and inhibiting superego. Thus we have inhibiting guilt, which, Freud thought, is bound to make us somewhat uncomfortable with civilized life. When it comes to bin Laden and his associates, there does not seem to be any self-imposed inhibition about attacking Western civilization. In fact, in the peek the public got into his cave, he and his friends seemed to be taking tremendous pleasure in recounting the attack on the World Trade Center. But isn't this just the obverse of Freud's thesis? If the inhibition is lacking, one should expect someone to derive pleasure from the destructive aggression. And might not this pleasure serve to secure an alternative psychic structure to the one Freud described?
The real challenge of Freud's ideas comes when you're the subject of the analytic or therapeutic process and it's your own psyche (your own sense of self) that's disintegrating. Having the apparently unitary self behind the voice in your head decomposed into its constituent parts (as textual researchers have convincingly decomposed the voice of God in the Books of Moses into those of several authors) is disorienting. The idea of a self upon which or within which all of these actors perform quickly disappears.
When I was a child first learning the nuances of language, I asked my mother: If I'm made up of my body, my mind, and my soul, who is the me that has all of those pieces? Or as I might put it now, what is the aspect of me that is the subject of all of the objects referred to as mine? Freud runs across this same question (apparently without noticing it) in his Interpretation of Dreams:
What role is left in our account for once-ominpotent consciousness, which hid everything else from sight? No more than that of a sensory organ for perceiving psychical qualities.
He doesn't ask the next question there or, as far I know, anywhere else, which is: If consciousness is a sensory organ, who or what is the recipient of those sensations? What is the self?
8:00:39 PM 
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