Ideas are the occasions of grace by which history comes to pass. Our own age has come in large part of its special concerns and its commitments out of a unique apposition of especially sympathetic minds in a historical time given cast by the dialogues they effected. Between 1856 and 1877 were born Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, Benedetto Croce, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim; Georges Sorel was born in 1847 and Vilfredo Pareto in 1848. A generation of precursors had come before them: Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Karl Marx, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Wilhelm Dilthey. Applied psychoanalysis grew out of and was dedicated to the spirit of the remarkable humanistic dialogue in which these men conceived their particular time in history. To continue in the intent of such dialogue, applied psychoanalysis must address itself to the questions posed by a modern predicament in its own terms. This essay represents an inquiry into certain methodological arrests of the psychoanalytic idea which have compromised the continuance of such dialogue down into our time.