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In his 1969 Nunberg lecture Peter Blos said: 'Psychoanalysis has always held firmly and passionately to the humanist tradition. Nothing remains more valued and worthy of our endeavor than the harmonizing influence we can exert through our science on the life of man' (Blos, 1971).
Though one may have doubts whether modern psychoanalysis can still hold passionately to the humanist tradition, it is certainly true that its founder and its original foundations were deeply influenced by humanistic ideas and ideals. How could it be otherwise since the educational system which formed Freud's spirit and intellect during the later years of his childhood, in his adolescence, and in his early maturity was dominated by the ideology of humanistic culture.
Humanism is a philosophy and value system which developed during the Renaissance. It is the result of cultural currents which began to influence the minds of the leading Italian intellectuals in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and which extended all over the Western world, and it persists as an important factor in the Western culture of our time. Here I shall try to demonstrate how humanism had a determining influence on the founder of psychoanalysis and therefore on its underlying philosophy.
It was in two ways that humanistic ideology and mentality expressed itself in the Weltanschauung and value system which underlie both the theory and the therapy of Freud's psychoanalysis. The