You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
phi-los-o-phy, n. 1. the rational investigation of the truths and principles of being, knowledge, or conduct. 2. the pursuit of wisdom.
We may insist as often as we like that man's intellect is powerless in comparison with his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weak ness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds.
Sigmund Freud was above all a philosopher of human nature, and it would be hard to overestimate the impact that he has had upon the modern mind. His prodigious volume of creative writings (over 20 volumes!) profoundly affected the Zeitgeist of the 20th century by making humankind conscious of the existence of the unconscious, finally and truly ending the age of innocence that began so long ago with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Freud (1926) himself observed that “the future will probably attribute far greater importance to psychoanalysis as the science of the unconscious than as a therapeutic procedure” (p. 265).
Thus, to think of psychoanalysis as if it were merely another form of psychotherapy does justice neither to Freud nor to psychoanalysis. And once and for all, we should abandon the practice of confounding the term psychoanalysis with the term psychotherapy. The subject matter of the two fields certainly overlap, but they are not congruent. In fact, they are complementary. Psychoanalysis is a method that through the use of words enables