The Status of an Analogy: Psychoanalysis and Physics

In his often cited Inward Bound, Abraham Pais (1986) views the years 1895-1905 as the most critical for understanding the great revolution in physics. During that decade discoveries were made that produced the quantum theory and relativity, and thus the end of the unquestioned conceptions of energy and matter, space and time, derived from classical physics. At the conclusion of his overview of the decade Pais surprisingly cites one of Freud's letters to his friend, Wilhelm Fliess. Freud confides to Fliess that he is “not really a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, and not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador—an adventurer …” (cited in Pais 1986, 139). Pais comments that these “lines are especially fitting [my emphasis] since they were written in 1900 in the middle of the decade” (139) which produced the results, if not yet the theory, that would explode the presumed laws of nature. My entire topic is contained in Pais' word “fitting.” For reasons he does not explain, it is “fitting,” it accords well with his general understanding of how the revolution in physics came about, that the theory of mind, psychopathology, and treatment, finally formalized with the 1900 publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, should be viewed by Freud less as a “science” than as “adventure.” Freud too was “inward bound.” Why the analogy? If this private statement of Freud's is more than a coincidence, as Pais clearly seems to think, what makes it important? What does it give us to understand about the processes that simultaneously made possible psychoanalysis and the most important scientific revolution of the twentieth century?

If Pais is comparing Freud to any physicist in particular, I think it is to Max Planck, the father of the quantum theory. Pais says that if he had to choose “just one single discovery in