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Psychoanalysis has from its beginnings been closely associated with causal determinism. A typical, standard introduction to psychoanalysis asserts that the principle of “psychic determinism” is a “fundamental hypothesis,” which has been “abundantly confirmed” (Brenner, 1973, p. 2). A notable attempt to systematize psycho-analytic theory claims that “the basic assumption of psychoanalytic theory was and is thorough-going psychological determinism” (Rapaport, 1959, p. 110).
Psychoanalysis has not merely been content to regard determinism as an assumption. Scholars often claim that psychoanalysis provides empirical evidence for the truth of determinism of a sort that was unavailable to earlier scientific determinists (Kaplan, 1957, pp. 82-83). The philosopher John Hospers (1950, 1958) has written several articles arguing that psychoanalysis provides compelling evidence that, in an important sense of “freedom,” human beings are not free. The fact that Hospers'