Some Remarks on Freud's Place in the History of Science

In 1917 Freud published a short paper entitled, One of the Difficulties of Psychoanalysis.1 In it he wrote that psychoanalysis tends to arouse an affective prejudice, with the result that whoever hears about it is 'less inclined to believe in it or take an interest in it'. After explaining the force of narcissism in human beings, he discussed how the discoveries of psychoanalysis wounded narcissistic self-esteem. The discovery of the unconscious revealed 'that the ego is not master in its own house'; moreover, the statement that mental life is primarily unconscious was 'not affirmed by psychoanalysis on an abstract basis, but has been demonstrated in matters that touch every individual personally and force him to take up some attitude towards these problems'. Freud compares this narcissistic humiliation to two other similar humiliations man has suffered as a result of the development of scientific knowledge: the cosmological humiliation for which Copernicus was responsible when he proved that the earth is not the center of the universe, and the biological humiliation caused by Darwin when he showed that man is an animal like all other animals.

When one who has devoted his life to the practice and the further development of Freud's ideas attempts to evaluate what among his contributions is essential to human knowledge, he is so overwhelmed by the abundance of new concepts Freud introduced that he is at first inclined to give up the task. It is at this point that Freud's One of the Difficulties of Psychoanalysis comes to one's assistance. It describes a special 'difficulty' of psychoanalysis. It must be the principal merit of psychoanalysis to have overcome this difficulty. This is a consequence not alone of the discovery of the unconscious but more, the mode of thinking that made this discovery possible—the decisive step beyond those narcissistic prejudices which