From the sexcapades of Bill Clinton to the fifteen-year-old who weighs only eighty-two pounds but believes she's obese to the professor who screams profanities at other drivers in snarled traffic, we wonder, "What are they thinking?" What drives so many apparently normal, intelligent people to act irrationally, at times harming themselves and others?

To Sigmund Freud, such behavior was caused by the "id," our built-in mental invitation to uninhibited action. For popular psychology writer David L. Weiner, who draws on the research of evolutionary psychology, "id" stands for "Inner Dummy," which resides in the primitive, limbic realm of the brain.

Through anecdotes from the famous and infamous this inviting and often humorous romp with the Inner Dummy explores how its thirst for status, sex, attachment and territory...its distorted outlooks and senseless impulses, can drive seemingly normal people to outrageous behavior. Weiner interweaves delightful, imagined conversations with a hesitant Freud and staffers at a mythical advertising agency who have been asked to develop such id antidotes as T-shirts that say "Would someone please fix my Inner Dummy before I fall in love with another idiot?" Then, with clinical psychiatrist Dr. Gilbert Hefter Battling the Inner Dummy describes the major strategies for dealing with this dunce that resides in a corner of our brains.