Questions about Man's Attempt to Understand Himself

When I read the title Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Science, it was the “and” that caught my attention because of the relationship it implies between the effort by man to understand himself through psychoanalysis, and his efforts through science to understand those other elements of his world that are perceived as not-self. Over some years of clinical experience in psychoanalysis and psychiatry and of laboratory research in neurophysiology, questions about the nature of this relationship had occurred to me in a number of different forms and contexts. The problems are old ones, epitomized by such antitheses as subjective-objective, private-public, and mind-brain. It is not clear, at least to me, how much progress, if any, we have made on the body-soul problem in the 2000 years since the Greeks formulated it. It seems appropriate, nevertheless, for the first issue of this new annual, to reexamine the relationships between science in general and those psychological disciplines that attempt to deal with man as an experiencing, self-aware subject.

My aim is to clarify some questions rather than to provide answers. This expresses a conviction that psychoanalysis (and psychiatry) should spend more energy distressing itself with questions and less energy comforting itself with apparent answers. Indeed, it seems to me that, in the history of science, progress has been retarded less by the difficulty of the questions faced than by man's in credible need to think that he knows, and therefore to accept almost any answer, however simplistic, superstitious, or irrelevant, in preference to living with a feeling of ignorance. Much of being a scientist involves the fight to overcome this irrational fear of ignorance, and to search for, welcome, and define gaps in knowledge.

Albert Einstein, according to one of his friends, once attributed his intellectual success to the fact that, when he was a little boy, his mother always inquired, when he came home from school, “Did y