[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Sigmund Freud theory of psychoanalytic
The introduction of notions and categories pertaining to history could not but make appear as "unscientific" a doctrine which claimed to follow the rules of scientific inquiry. The preservation of a mode of thought fashioned on the pattern of science could but make the same doctrine appear later as "too scientific," at a time when the study of man began to search for its own appropriate viewpoints. Today, after six decades, it is easier to realize the nature of psychoanalytic theory than it had been at the beginning. Now, in retrospect, this doctrine reveals itself as essentially a compromise between the exclusively scientific and the historical approach. It is this ambiguous nature to which psychoanalysis owes its success.
When psychoanalysis began to be recognized, around the beginning of our century, it was dimly felt by many that the study of man had not yielded the results one had expected. But nobody could conceive then of the idea that this study requires categories and viewpoints very different from those which prevail -- and must prevail -- in science (Hines, 103).
It has been said that later times will refer to the last fifty years as the age of Freud. This is certainly an exaggeration; psychoanalysis is by far not the only new phenomenon in the world of ideas and knowledge that has come forth since the beginning of the twentieth century. It is also an exaggeration to believe that an age be shaped by one theory. Quite to the contrary, the theories which arise at a certain historical period are expressive of the deep undercurrents by which the former are shaped as much as they influence the latter.
Viewed as a partial manifestation of an encompassing process in the history of ideas, psychoanalysis appears as an important event. Event, because no man's conception of empirical data be it however original....................
