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When things fall apart, when the center cannot hold, is, perhaps, the most propitious time for a genius like Freud to attempt a new synthesis. Since its birth during the waning irrational days of an age of presumed rationality, psychoanalysis has reflected the hybrid nature of the times in being recognized neither as art nor as science. Freud was as much a student of Brentano as he was of Brücke and Helmholtz. In contrast to the psychoanalytic method, which was dictated by the need to turn to advantage the vagaries of the psychoanalytic situation, Freud constructed psychoanalytic theory ostensibly on the model of the physical sciences and as if he had never heard of intentionality; but he left plenty of room to let the ghost in the machine survive, as witness his frequent recourse to anthropomorphic explanation. The Freudian synthesis was mainly successful for Freud, for his immediate followers, and for his time: psychoanalysis was able to contribute illuminating insights about human motivations to the study of art, literature, religion, and the myriad manifestations of the human spirit.
Three-quarters of a century after The Interpretation of Dreams times have changed. The rear guard of the old rationalist and positivist order seems in rapid retreat. A new cultural "consciousness" stresses feeling along with thought and experiencing along with logical reasoning. New questions are addressed to psychoanalysts, not only by the changing symptomatology of their analysands but also by their colleagues who labor in the humanities. Yet psychoanalysis continues to be the most fruitful language for the dialogue between the sciences and the humanities. When freed of its nineteenth century physicalist façade, Freud's construct is revealed as a new kind of science yielding a new kind of knowledge which stands solidly grounded, partly on a new kind of data base, the specifically introspective-empathic data of psychoanalysis, and partly on the traditional naturalistic obs