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Most sciences have their roots in philosophy, and academic psychology is no exception to this rule. It was, in fact, the last to break away and become an independent discipline. But psycho-analysis - that new science created by Freud - sprang from medicine rather than from academic psychology. Probably for this reason, philosophers and psycho-analysts have so far taken little interest in each other's work. And what interest there was at the beginning tended to be more hostile than co-operative. Of course there were always exceptions; but, on the whole, philosophers, so far as they took notice of psycho-analysis at all, condemned its basic concepts as muddled and self-contradictory. And analysts silently responded by dismissing philosophy, or at least classical philosophy, as a symptom of obsessional neurosis.
I think both criticisms exaggerate an element of truth which each side has gradually become more able to admit. If so, perhaps the time is ripe for more co-operation. I believe philosophy can be useful to the analyst - particularly in his attempts to reconstruct the development of the child's picture of the world. And a psycho-analytic approach to some problems of classical philosophy could be of interest to the philosopher. So I should like to say something - if only tentatively - about both, beginning with the second.
As my point of departure, I will take a question which has the deceptive appearance of being simple: What is philosophy as distinct from other disciplines? A good historical definition, from Russell's History of Western Philosophy (1946), is that