Sigmund Freud theorized that each person’s growth is governed by unconscious needs to please, placate, oppose, or terminate our images of parental authority. If we recognized the influence of those old images, however, we might consider them too infantile or too unworthy to tolerate and seek to replace them with something better.But then what would we substitute for them -once we divested ourselves of all those ties to instinct and society? We’d each end up as instruments of even more capricious sorts of self-invented goals.
-Self-Knowledge is Dangerious, Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky