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.
We need to formulate 'some kind of philosophy' that takes into consideration this century's upheavals and can be integrated with new psychological knowledge. We are reviewing the 'true nature of man'. Psychoanalysis has become involved in all the intellectual and moral crises of our day.
Freud stood alone because he proposed to the scientific world examination of the psyche. He cared little about the alleged untouchability of the soul but proceeded into the unknown to learn and understand. It is too early to say whether Freud was completely free of religious trends or whether he intended to produce a philosophy of his own. He raised a number of questions which he did not intend to answer, but which people suppose that he did answer.
Freud worked empirically in an area bordering upon metaphysical, ontological, and moral problems. If we make one move beyond the purely empirical, we touch upon morality, religion, or theology and ontology. Psychoanalysts seem not to have given full cognizance to this fact; thus psychoanalysis has developed fragmentary philosophies and has tended to become not a scientific discipline but a movement, duly organized, and with accoutrements of power. But the whole of social and moral philosophy is outside the psychoanalyst's scope. The psychoanalyst, like any other human being, must have a philosophy of life but more than any other professional man he must cultivate a philosophy of values because his work is always on the borderline of ontological and moral issues.
It is puzzling and regrettable that psychoanalysis has paid so little attention to the only frankly moral foundation in Freud's teaching: his own statement that he understood by Eros that which St. Paul designated in his Epistle to the Corinthians as caritas. When Freud sought a truly moral-philosophic basis for the integration of his scientific findings, he looked outside of scientific empiricism to one of the richest sources of moral philosophy.