You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Writing to Jung in 1911, Freud admitted that 'I was not at all cut out to be an inductive researcher—I was entirely meant for intuition (cited in Mahony, 1987, p. 17). Some 20 years before this letter was written, he had published a study of 35 cases of hemiplegia in cerebral palsy, and the next year, one of his students had carried out a related study which was based on 53 cases. As a young student working in a comparative anatomy lab, Freud had dissected some 400 eels in an investigation of their underlying gonadic structure. And in the course of developing his ill-fated theory of infantile seduction to account for the later onset of adult neurosis, Freud had proudly presented a series of 18 cases all of which supported the target hypothesis.
But this was to be his last systematic attempt to work by the rules of Galilean science and draw his conclusions from a series of repeated observations. Beginning with 'The interpretation of dreams' and then continuing into his five case studies, Freud turned away from the law of large numbers and began to focus more and more on the best example as a way of proving his point. It is noteworthy that the word specimen appears repeatedly in 'The interpretation of dreams', and it is common knowledge that his dream analyses are marked by the fascination with the particular detail that surrounded the dream and which made its context a unique object of study. In turning to the single case as the royal road to knowledge, Freud had turned away from a Galilean approach to the world and moved closer to an Aristotelian point of view. Whether he was brought to this position by the influence of Brentano (a specialist on Aristotle with whom he took five philosophy courses) or whether the form of the clinical material dictated this new approach, no one can say for sure, but it seems important to realize the breadth and depth of the Aristotelian heritage in psychoanalysis.
Where Galileo and Newton saw truth as resulting from a series of o