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.
The principle of causality, whatever shape it may have taken in the development of modern science, requires that for every observable fact a corresponding law be established. This principle also applies to psychology. The progress that Freud's work brought into psychology can be measured by the range of facts for which, until then, no regularity had been found, and for which Freud discovered laws. The extension of data subjected to scientific investigation led to intensive scrutiny of minutest details that earlier no one would have thought either worthy of attention or decisive in hypotheses or theories about the mind.
One has but to peruse one of Freud's case histories, such as the 1909 report of an obsessional neurosis,1 to sense this new importance the psychological detail acquired by psychoanalysis. To some, the psychoanalyst's preoccupation with psychological detail appeared downright scurrilous. But this reaction can occur only if one believes that psychology is not a branch of science and therefore does not have to live up to a standard of rigor similar to that which is accepted in other sciences, particularly the experimental. Indeed, in all sciences there is no limit to the subtlety of details that may be the occasion for inquiry and from which far-reaching conclusions are drawn.
The text in which the new standing of psychological detail can best be studied remains Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. There, the single dream is broken down into its elements, each of which finds its special explanation. The sequence of these elements, their structure and the structure of the whole dream, every facet of the single element and of the complex