The Uses and Abuses of Theory in Psychoanalysis*

Psychoanalysis is a part of the mental science of psychology. It is also described as depth psychology. Psychology, too, is a natural science. What else can it be?

Freud developed his theories almost contemporaneously with the emergence of psychology as a new scientific discipline, founded by Wilhelm Wundt in Germany and William James in the United States, both around 1879.

In texts on the history of psychology, psychoanalysis is included with four other major “schools of psychology,” all founded by about 1912: structuralism, functionalism, behaviorism, and Gestalt psychology (Heidbreder, 1933; Woodworth and Sheehan, 1964; Murphy and Kovach, 1972; Lundin, 1979). Of these schools only psychoanalysis and behaviorism currently exist as systematic approaches to the study of human behavior.

Since behaviorism is considered to have been founded by John B. Watson about 1912, psychoanalysis is thus the oldest school of psychology extant today, and it is the only one of the two with a dynamic set of concepts appropriate to both the study of behavior and the mental life of humans.

Despite Freud's obvious commitment to science and the scientific method and his evident mastery and understanding of the concepts of science, both in his neurological and psychological periods, psychoanalysis has periodically come under attack as not being a