I don't think there's a single answer. I'm a pluralist with regard to motivation. Your story of why you eat food when you're hungry is going to be different from the story for why you scratch your leg when it ages. And in this sense, although I have critical things to say about Freud and I, as in some actually some outright mockery of Freud, I think he's right. There's a good reason that we have an unconscious and this unconscious we are often motivated to do things for reasons that we're unaware of. Where do you stand on that just general issue? Why do you think we should think about it? That's a good question.
Do psychologists know anything? Psychologist Paul Bloom says yes--but not the things that you might think. Bloom discusses his book Psych with EconTalk's Russ Roberts and what the field of psychology can teach us about human intelligence, consciousness, and unhelpful instincts. They also discuss just how far psychology is from a true understanding of the human mind, and why, according to Bloom, that might not be such a bad thing.