It's very ingenious, as all Freudian arguments are but didn't make much sense because I have seen the same delusion, a patient having the same delusion, about his pet poodle.

You can think of this nagging inner voice as sort of the brain's equivalent of the Catholic Church, if you're an Austrian like me, or the super ego, if you're Freudian, or your mother, if you're Jewish.

NEW YORK Do nations have psychological processes even Freudian processes, such as collective egos that can be injured, and repressed guilt feelings that can well up from the collective unconscious just as individuals do? I believe that they do.

Now, the most common interpretation of this, which you find in all the psychiatry textbooks, is a Freudian view, and that is that this chap and the same argument applies to women, by the way, but I'll just talk about guys.

It's a lovely example of the sort of thing we do take a bizarre, seemingly incomprehensible, neural psychiatric syndrome and say that the standard Freudian view is wrong, that, in fact, you can come up with a precise explanation in terms of the known neural anatomy of the brain.