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Despite the pioneering, not to say heroic, efforts of Kluckhohn and Murray in anthropology, Talcott Parsons in sociology, Harold D. Lasswell in political science, and others, the relationship between psychoanalysis and the behavioral sciences has always been a troubled one. The reasons for this, which are both complex and
numerous, touch upon a variety of substantive and methodological problems. To begin with, psychoanalysis from the beginning has been poorly understood by most behavioral scientists, notwithstanding the profusion of books and articles attempting to explain "What Freud Really Meant." As a consequence, psychoanalysts have been charged with being reductionist in their approach to social phenomena, and they have also been accused of basing their generalizations about the human condition on the fantasies and dreams of a few sick or even severely disturbed patients drawn largely from the affluent white middle class. The clinical method of psychoanalysis does not lend itself easily to behavioral science usage, and psychoanalysts for the most part have little training in the research technologies extensively employed by behavioral scientists. In recent years, moreover, psychoanalysis as such has become somewhat demimodé in intellectual circles, almost as if it were no more than a fad that, once fashionable and in vogue, has seen its time irretrievably passed. All of these factors, and more besides, have served to exclude psychoanalysis from the main stream of behavioral science research, and, for that matter, the small number of psychoanalytically trained behavioral scientists attached to universities are apt to find themselves working in isolation from their colleagues. If the chasm separating psychoanalysis from the behavioral sciences is smaller than it was 40 years ago, it is still wide enough to discourage all but the most determined collaborationists on both sides.
One of the most influential of these collaborationists is Robert A. LeVine who,