There's an even better article than the one that follows available, but it's not online. It's a 10 page, in depth examination of how many of Freud's ideas are accepted by cognitive behaviorists today.

Text of Newsweek article
http://www.msnbc.com/news/829644.asp?cp1=1#BODY

What Freud Got Right
His theories, long discredited, are finding support from neurologists
using modern brain imaging
By Fred Guterl
NEWSWEEK

Nov. 11 issue - Sigmund Freud has been out of the scientific
mainstream for so long, it's easy to forget that in the early-20th
century he was regarded as a towering man of science-not, as he is
remembered today, as the founder of the marginalized form of therapy
known as psychoanalysis.

AT THE START of his career, he wanted to invent a "science of the
mind," but the Victorian tools he had were too blunt for the task. So
he dropped the "science" part and had his patients lie on a couch,
free-associating about childhood, dreams and fantasies.
This technique yielded the revolutionary notion that the human
mind was a soap opera of concealed lust and aggression, of dark
motives, self-deception and dreams rife with hidden meaning. The
problem was, Freud had lots of anecdotes but almost no empirical
data. With the invention of tools like the PET scan that can map the
neurological activity inside a living brain, scientists discounted
the windy speculations of psychoanalysis and dismissed Freud himself
as the first media-savvy self-help guru.

But a funny thing happened to Freud on the way to becoming a
trivia question: as researchers looked deeper into the physical
structure of the brain, they began to find support for some of his
theories. Now a small but influential group of researchers are using
his insights as a guide to future research; they even have a journal,
Neuropsychoanalysis, founded three years ago. "Freud's insights on
the nature of consciousness are consonant with the most advanced
contemporary neuroscience views," wrote Antonio Damasio, head of
neurology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine. Note that
Damasio did not refer to psychoanalysis or the Oedipus complex.
Instead the work is going on at the fundamental level where emotions
are born and primitive passions lurk in the shadows of dreams.

HOW THE MIND WORKS
Beyond the basic animal instincts to seek food and avoid pain,
Freud identified two sources of psychic energy, which he called
"drives": aggression and libido (the latter encompasses sexuality but
also had a more expansive meaning, involving the desire for
stimulation and achievement). The key to his theory is that these
were unconscious drives, shaping our behavior without the mediation
of our waking minds; they surface, heavily disguised, only in our
dreams. The work of the past half-century in psychology and
neuroscience has been to downplay the role of unconscious universal
drives, focusing instead on rational processes in conscious life.
Meanwhile, dreams were downgraded to a kind of mental static, random
scraps of memory flickering through the sleeping brain. But
researchers have found evidence that Freud's drives really do exist,
and they have their roots in the limbic system, a primitive part of
the brain that operates mostly below the horizon of consciousness.
Now more commonly referred to as emotions, the modern suite of drives
comprises five: rage, panic, separation distress, lust and a
variation on libido sometimes called seeking. Freud presaged this
finding in 1915, when he wrote that drives originate "from within the
organism" in response to demands placed on the mind "in consequence
of its connection with the body." Drives, in other words, are
primitive brain circuits that control how we respond to our
environment-foraging when we're hungry, running when we're scared and
lusting for a mate.

The seeking drive is proving a particularly fruitful subject
for researchers. Although like the others it originates in the limbic
system, it also involves parts of the forebrain, the seat of higher
mental functions. In the 1980s, Jaak Panksepp, a neurobiologist at
Bowling Green State University in Ohio, became interested in a place
near the cortex known as the ventraltegmental area, which in humans
lies just above the hairline. When Panksepp stimulated the
corresponding region in a mouse, the animal would sniff the air and
walk around, as though it were looking for something. Was it hunger?
No. The mouse would walk right by a plate of food, or for that matter
any other object Panksepp could think of. This brain tissue seemed to
cause a general desire for something new. "What I was seeing," he
says, "was the urge to do stuff." Panksepp called this seeking.

To neuropsychologist Mark Solms of University College in
London, that sounds very much like libido. "Freud needed some sort of
general, appetitive desire to seek pleasure in the world of objects,"
says Solms. "Panksepp discovered as a neuroscientist what Freud
discovered psychologically." Solms studied the same region of the
brain for his work on dreams. Since the 1970s, neurologists have
known that dreaming takes place during a particular form of sleep
known as REM-rapid eye movement-which is associated with a primitive
part of the brain known as the pons. Accordingly, they regarded
dreaming as a low-level phenomenon of no great psychological
interest. When Solms looked into it, though, it turned out that the
key structure involved in dreaming was actually the ventral
tegmental, the same structure that Panksepp had identified as the
seat of the "seeking" emotion. Dreams, it seemed, originate with the
libido-which is just what Freud had believed.
Freud's psychological map may have been flawed in many ways,
but it also happens to be the most coherent and, from the standpoint
of individual experience, meaningful theory of the mind there is.
"Freud should be placed in the same category as Darwin, who lived
before the discovery of genes," says Panksepp. "Freud gave us a
vision of a mental apparatus. We need to talk about it, develop it,
test it." Perhaps it's not a matter of proving Freud wrong or right,
but of finishing the job.

? 2002 Newsweek, Inc.

More:

A century later, science still grapples with Freud

http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9911/01/freud.dreams/index.html

Hey Silky... let me find it, and then I can review the basic points here.

I would appreciate that! thanks

Todangst was still thinking about it. I wonder what that means in a psychological sense.

Thanks for the response todangst!

No prob, I forgot to make sure only logged in guests could post. Glad that happened on you and not some troll.