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Believing as we do in the centrality of conflict in human experience, it should come as no surprise to us that conflicts in the intellectual domain, between theories about human nature or human behavior, can become as emotionally charged and as vitiating as the conflicts we observe in our patients. Despite our analytic training, it is easy for us to succumb to the illusion of a scholarly community ruled by a dispassionate intellect, when in fact history has clearly shown that men are as willing to slaughter each other for the sake of their commitment to a particular idea as they are for any other object-choice. But the emotional obstacles to the operation of our intellect, severe as they are, are not the only difficulties: the philosophical problem of how to deal with conflicts between fundamentally differing theories is itself enormous, and indeed the entire history of philosophy could be read in terms of differing—and competing—answers to this question.
We live with an illusion that the history of human thought is that of continuous progress, a steady, reliable accretion of more and more bits of wisdom, filled with confidence that false theories will fall away, with truth victorious, if not in our lifetime, at least in the world to come. This is the “illusion of a future” which Benjamin Nelson understood so well, an illusion that Freud himself repeatedly disavowed. This is not at all the only illusion functioning to obscure our understanding of the nature and meaning of intellectual history, but it is perhaps particularly appropriate to those who feel themselves an oppressed minority, looking to the hereafter for their reward and their vindication.
In its conflict with behaviorism dynamic psychology must recognize that victory and vindication are not inevitably a part of the world