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the same time thatCharles Darwin was publishing his revolutionary book
The Origin of Species
, a three-year-old boy from Moravia was moving with his family to Vienna. This boy,Sigmund Freud, would grow up with a brand-new Darwinian worldview in which man was no different from any other life-form, and the scientific spotlight could be cast on the complex fabric of human behavior.
    The young Freud went to medical school, drawn there more by scientific research than clinical application. He specialized in neurology and soon opened a private practice in the treatment of psychological disorders. By carefully examining his patients, Freud came to suspect that the varieties of human behavior were explicable only in terms of unseen mental processes, the machinery running things behind the scenes. Freud noticed that often with these patients there was nothing obvious in their conscious minds driving their behavior, and so, given the new, machinelike view of the brain, he concluded that there must be underlying causes that were hidden from access. In this new view, the mind was not simply equal to the conscious part we familiarly live with; rather it was like an iceberg, the majority of its mass hidden from sight.
    This simple idea transformedpsychiatry. Previously, aberrant mental processes were inexplicable unless one attributed them to weak will, demon possession, and so on. Freud insisted on seeking the cause in the physical brain. Because Freud lived many decades before modern brain technologies, his best approach was to gather data from the “outside” of the system: by talking to patients and trying to infer their brain states from their mental states. From this vantage, he paid close attention to the information contained in slips of the tongue, mistakes of the pen, behavioral patterns, and the content of dreams. All of these he hypothesized to be the product of hidden neural mechanisms, machinery to which the subject had no direct access. By examining the behaviors poking above the surface, Freud felt confident that he could get a sense of what waslurking below. 11 The more he considered the sparkle from the iceberg’s tip, the more he appreciated its depth—and how the hidden mass might explain something about people’sthoughts, dreams, and urges.
    Applying this concept, Freud’s mentor and friendJosef Breuer developed what appeared to be a successful strategy for helping hysterical patients: ask them to talk, without inhibition, about the earliest occurrences of their symptoms. 12 Freud expanded the technique to other neuroses, and suggested that a patient’s buried traumatic experiences could be the hidden basis of their phobias, hysterical paralysis, paranoias, and so on. These problems, he guessed, were hidden from the conscious mind. The solution was to draw them up to the level of consciousness so they could be directly confronted and wrung of their neurosis-causing power. This approach served as the basis forpsychoanalysis for the next century.
    While the popularity and details of psychoanalysis have changed quite a bit, Freud’s basic idea provided the first exploration of the way in which hidden states of the brain participate in driving thought and behavior.Freud and Breuer jointly published their work in 1895, but Breuer grew increasingly disenchanted with Freud’s emphasis on the sexual origins ofunconscious thoughts, and eventually the two parted ways. Freud went on to publish his major exploration of the unconscious,
The Interpretation of Dreams
, in which he analyzed his own emotional crisis and the series of dreams triggered by his father’s death. His self-analysis allowed him to reveal unexpected feelings about his father—for example, that his admiration was mixed with hate and shame. This sense of the vast presence below the surface led him to chew on the question offree will. He reasoned that if choices and decisions derive from hidden mental processes, then free choice is either an illusion or,