Having discovered the unconscious for science and having developed a method for studying it, Freud saw that this knowledge of the emotional life was a key to various scientific fields and problems in which human motivation was an important element. In addition to the vast work accomplished by him in his own field of clinical personality investigation, he found time to point the way to applications of this new knowledge to many other fields—wit and humor, religion, anthropology, and sociology, among others.

Among the pioneers in the applications to sociology of psychoanalysis was Erich Fromm. In his Transformation of the Christ Dogma he made a valuable methodological contribution. Essentially, he applied Freud's method of understanding individual