Freud has, in fact, provided the West with a compelling myth—not in the sense of a narrative that everybody knows is false but in the sense of a basic idea by which we can understand the world around us, regardless of whether it is “true” in the commonsense way of understanding the word. That myth is the idea that sex, in terms of sexual desire and sexual fulfillment, is the real key to human existence, to what it means to be human.
