Chapter XI. Anthropology

Freud was all his life engrossed with the great problem of how man came to be man, probably more than with any other problem. His interest in the early history of mankind, together with the contributions he made to the study of it, therefore deserves a chapter of its own.

He displayed but little interest in the future of mankind, and only occasionally expressed a few speculations about it. There were very definite reasons for this attitude. He was greatly impressed by the complexity of the human mind, and consequently by the difficulty of making any trustworthy predictions. Even in his own field of work, when he might be certain that particular factors in the past were important, or essential, causes of various psychological manifestations—neurotic or otherwise—in the present, he held that it would have been impossible to predict from a knowledge of them at the time what their effects would be; an unknown shift in the strength of the forces concerned could have produced different effects. There were two features that distinguished his field of work from that of the exact sciences, where such prediction is commonly possible. One was that there was no way of isolating individual factors and excluding unknown ones, as one often can in, for instance, experimental physics. The other was that we have as yet no means of making any sort of quantitative measurement of the forces concerned and can make only very approximate guesses, of a largely subjective nature, about their relative strength.

Freud was primarily a discoverer, and his interest always turned to problems that offered some promising opening for investigation. Where none was visible, as with the problems of the future, his interest soon waned; it was a waste of time and thought to speculate about the unknown.

As for the present, Freud took the average interest in what was going on in the world around him, but he felt he had no great direct concern with it except where it affected his own work, on which he therefore