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Among the many notable achievements of modern psychiatry there is one which is but seldom found in the lists. This achievement is the emendation of a gross error which first intruded into the thoughts of thinking men at the time of the intellectual renaissance, i.e., in the 17th Century. This error, involving the relationship of man to his universe, has persisted for long, and is far from obliterated even today.
Medieval science was aptly described as the study of the universe with man left out. Modern science, and particularly the biological sciences, can be described in like terms as the study of man with his universe left out. These summary descriptions are perhaps too terse to be equitable, but they are at least founded on valid facts.
In the Intellectual Renaissance man, the individual, was rediscovered. Its new-born science studied man intensively. But it did so in a manner which tore him from his social matrix, and by a method which further dismembered him. In the following centuries man was, so to say, torn into finer and ever finer shreds, and these parts of parts were studied scrupulously. All this was done according to the Methode formulated by Rene Descartes, and in the conviction that only the summation of the knowledge of the parts can yield a complete knowledge of the whole.
This error modern psychiatry has tended to correct in an effective measure. The credit for this achievement belongs, not as one might at first think, to Koffka and the Gestalt School, but rather to Freud and his co-workers.
For it was Freud who most effectively demonstrated that man is greater than the sum of his anatomical and physiological parts. In his postulations on the id, the ego, and the super ego, and in his theories on the etiology of the neuroses, Freud affirms that to be