FEELING A strange electrical charge between your id, ego and superego this morning? Interpreting last night's dreams with a little more gusto? Is the toaster looking especially fetching right about now, causing you to wonder if your polymorphous perversity extends to kitchen appliances?

Sure, certain feminists have always hated Freud for viewing women as deformed males. And, granted, he may have come up with the whole oral fixation concept as a way of rationalizing his 25-cigar-a-day habit, to which he remained committed even after having his malignant jaw removed ("rationalizing," by the way, is a Freudian concept, as is the line "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" — though perhaps not when you eventually die of cancer).

But there can be no denying that when it comes to the way modern Westerners perceive ourselves, Freud was and is a very big deal.

If not for the contributions of the Shrinkus ex Machina, we would have been deprived of many of the ideas of Kafka and Proust, a great deal of the comedy of Woody Allen and possibly the entire career of Madonna. Freud, after all, is responsible for the modern concept of ego. Without ego, baby boomers would be identifiable only by their passports, and the state of California might not be here at all. Most disturbing, "Like a Virgin" would never have been written.

If you don't believe me, imagine a day without Freud. It would be like a day without immigrants, except with even more hassles because we would have no primal excuse for road rage, no occasion to blame our parents for our failed relationships and no chance to curse the anxieties brought on by our genitals.

We wouldn't even be able to conduct a conversation. Imagine fretting about work or dissecting a relationship without talking about defense mechanisms or repression.

How could we get out of bed in the morning without taking comfort in the fact that hitting the snooze button four times was simply a function of the id, and that those recurring dreams about freight trains have to do with our sexual prowess rather than … freight trains? Moreover, how could we justify gum chewing? Instead of being orally fixated, we'd have to admit we're just rude.