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Sigmund Freud first formulated psychoanalytic principles as a) a psychological system which best described the psychodynamics of human personality and b) a therapeutic technique which could be used effectively for the reorientation and cure of those individuals whose personality structures had become disorganized, aberrant, and neurotic. Not long after his first psychoanalytic formulations, Freud, together with some of his outstanding pupils, began to apply analysis more widely and broadly to human affairs, and to use its principles for the fuller understanding of folk-lore, history, biography, literature, art, and many other important fields of human endeavor. In the writings of his final years, in fact, Freud was more consistently concerned with the meta-psychological applications of psychoanalysis than with its application to the theory and treatment of neurosis.
That psychoanalysis, if it has any validity at all, is applicable and pertinent to social, political, artistic, religious and other problems to which humanity is heir is hardly deniable. It may be wondered, however, to what extent psychoanalysts should utilize their time and energies for the investigation of metapsychological areas as against, say, their more intensively cultivating their original garden of human personality and its neurotic aberrations. On the one hand, there are those who contend that analytic writers, no matter how undisputed their competence in their milieu of diagnosis and treatment, have no right to extend their formulations to non-analytic fields where they are, at best, amateurs. On the other hand, there are those who say that precisely because human personality is at the root of all politico-economic-social-artistic