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Nearly a half century ago, Ramzy (1965, p. 105), of the Menninger Foundation, wrote:
how psychoanalysis is engaged in the consideration of value systems, and how such a broad subject does not transcend the technical, therapeutic or theoretical work of the analyst …. Such ultimate riddles as the supreme good, the meaning of life, and human destiny are not the concern of the analyst; … as long as the analyst adheres to the scientific and technical safeguards of his discipline, his concern about values will not make of him a moralist or a preacher, even when he is bold enough, like Erikson, to suggest a schedule of virtues.
In a polemic against religion and theoretical anarchism, Freud (1933, p. 158) queried: “Does psychoanalysis lead to a certain Weltanschauung?” I wrote earlier that in
answering this question in the negative, Freud counterpoised empirical science against illusion and emotion. Science, in Freud's way of thinking, was about capturing the truth or, at least, about approximating closely towards the truth, while illusion was of and about the magical fulfillment of the wishes of childhood. Freud hoped, apparently, that Psychoanalysis could be established as one of the Natural Sciences, where it is assumed that researches are independent of value, meaning and notions of good and evil. … In the Psychological and Social Sciences, such theoretical neatness is a luxury, at best … Psychological theories of development, as well as the nosologies that arise from them, are inextricably intertwined with idiosyncratic views of the healthy polity, of the well individual and even with ethico-religious and literary images of the good life. How can we possibly, after all, specify a developmental growth towards wholeness that is independent of the definitions that boundary these very notions? And how can we reasonably hope to conceptualize any aspect of human development without attending to — or at the very least allowing for — the exigencies of social and political life as