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Freud, himself a physiologist, in pioneering a new field, kept as strictly as possible to the psychological approach in psychoanalysis for methodological reasons. Nevertheless his thought was strongly biological, as exemplified in his whole theory of instincts. Moreover, he repeatedly emphasized the biological basis of psychology. In his paper on Narcissism (1914) he said: 'We must recollect that all our provisional ideas in psychology will some day be based upon an organic substructure'. To take another random example, at the end of Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937), he states: '… in the psychical field the biological factor is really the rock-bottom'.
Sixty years have brought important changes in the field of psychoanalysis, some of them resisted by a more or less healthy conservatism, proper to a new and easily exploited field. In a slow and sound way psychoanalysis has been emerging from its scientific isolation.
Perhaps such a field could only have developed as it did through the creativity of a powerful independent personality who gave his contribution to his followers in a way reminiscent of his description of Moses passing down the tablets of the Lord. It may well be that only such strength could have preserved these insights into man's unconscious motivations in the face of the resistances and hostilities of a Victorian world. Now, however, the advantages of development in isolation no longer obtain. Freud's own spirit, that of the experimental physiologist, is beginning to prevail over the authoritarian tendency to seek the truth in the Collected Papers rather than using them as a guide to seeing the truth in the world of reality. Moreover, the reality of the unconscious and of the findings of psychoanalysis are now so well established that the necessity no longer exists to exclude rigidly any other type of thinking except the psychological, or to keep analysis insulated from the other sciences.
Freud's work like that of Pasteur, Darwin,