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Almost since its emergence out of the murky past of hypnotism and exhortative psychotherapy, psychoanalytic science, while trying to maintain its dedication to a primacy of values of objective truth-seeking, has struggled against the regressive pull of the human concerns of psychoanalytic practice. Freud himself managed to maintain an uneasy but productive balance between the cool detachment of the laboratory scientist and the compassionate healer of the medical tradition. He knew that his patients came for amelioration of their misery and not because they wanted to advance the cause of psychological science. But he also knew that all the compassion in the world could not cure psychoneurotic suffering. His hope was that a fuller understanding of the mental processes would make treatment more effective. He took the revolutionary step of expanding the concept of the mind to include, in addition to conscious thoughts and feelings, a vast realm of unconscious mental activity. Inevitably, his interest had to shift away from observation of his patient's behavior to attempting to feel himself into their subjective experiences.
To examine with objective, scientific detachment the subjective experience of oneself and of others had never before been done consistently and systematically. Thus was born the psychoanalytic method as the scientific study of a person's inner life. Objective data had to be obtained about subjective experiences in order to stay within the canons of those sciences that were regarded as the only legitimate ones. Vicarious introspection into the inner life of others—that