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This series of four articles attempts to subject to a critical examination the assumptions on which freudian theory is based. The authors are concerned with the methodology and reasoning used by Freud to explain his clinical observations, and they offer alternative explanations from Sandor Rado's adaptational psychodynamics for those hypotheses of Freud that they feel are defective.
They agree with Freud's general 'assumptions': 1, adult behavior is rooted in childhood experiences; 2, frustration of sexual needs leads to neurosis; 3, much of behavior is integrated by unconscious mental processes, because these assumptions are capable of validation or refutation through clinical investigation. However, the authors feel that Freud's libido theory, stressing the sexual instincts, its energetic concept, and psychosexual development, cannot be supported by psychological data. They discuss freudian concepts which they feel do not add to psychological knowledge, those concepts which they hold as scientifically useful, and those they formulate as new. In reviewing the origins of Freud's earliest concepts, they stress that the discoveries in The Interpretation of Dreams were inferences drawn from observations of aberrant behavior induced by unacceptable motivations, representing the person's adaptive devices for coping with a conflict and consisting of a modification of the primitive infantile wish, in accordance with the necessities of logic and security, i.e., 'secondary process'.
The fundamental dynamic and topographic principles of freudian psychology with which they agree are: 1, motivation; 2, pleasure-pain principle; 3, the unconscious; 4, psychodynamics; 5, principle of defense; 6, ontogenesis; and 7, continuity of behavior. The concept of psychic energy is rejected as an assumption which adds nothing to our knowledge; rather it is an attempt to interpret psychological events in terms of physical forces. The authors feel that there is no neural basis for the co