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Freud's work—psychoanalysis—is an aggregate of data, investigative methods, theories, and treatment methods dealing with personality—including illness—and the relation between personality and destiny; or, as Hartmann has put it, it is a scientific approach to the nucleus of the personality.
These simple formulations indicate a break with an ancient, deeply rooted tradition, viz., the traditional separation between science, on the one hand, and the humanities, on the other: philosophy, history, politics, which deal incidentally with man, too. This separation had long been institutionalized in the departmental boundaries of academies and universities.
The distinction was part of the prescientific analysis of reality which underlies our thinking and which we are wont to take for granted like the air which we breathe or the language which we speak. As is the case with many of these categories of thought in the Western world, its basic outlines are apparent in fifth-century Athens; they were then personified in the figures of Anaxagoras and Socrates. Anaxagoras, Ionian immigrant to Athens, friend of Pericles, belonged to the school of the Ionian philosophers of nature. Their thinking can hardly be called scientific by any modern standard, but they deserve to be called ancestors of science, or proto-scientists, because they sought to explain the visible world in terms of natural causes; and they had some actual scientific results like the method, discovered by Thales, of measuring the distance of a ship from the harbor.
On the other hand, there was the somewhat younger Athenian,