Psychoanalysis: The Dilemma of Science and Humanism

The recent history of psychoanalysis has been characterized by a chaotic jumble of theories, each contending for its place in the sun and each striving to establish hegemony over rival theories. What occasioned this rivalrous squabbling and contentiousness in a field where the psychology of Sigmund Freud reigned for so many years unchallenged and unquestioned? Had the father of the psychoanalytic primal horde finally been unseated and cast to the dust? Were the quarrelsome sons at each other's throats in an attempt to establish a new hegemony, a new psychoanalytic vision of man that would vanquish the views of the founding father and establish a reign of deeper and more fulsome psychoanalytic understanding?

For many years, Freud's own theories, particularly the overriding structural hypothesis and its commitment to a corresponding metapsychology, dominated the field. But scientific theories, regardless of whose genius has created them, are never adequate; they are always to some degree and in some respect false. Reality, and particularly the reality of human nature, can never be captured in a theory.