“The more I became interested in psychoanalysis, the more I saw it as a road to the same kind of broad and deep understanding of human nature that writers possess.”
Anna Freud
Towards the end of the 19th century, the new discipline of psychology became entrenched in both Europe and America. The study of the human mind, hitherto a preserve of philosophers and theologians, became a legitimate subject of scientific (some would say, pseudo-scientific) scrutiny.
The Structuralists – Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Bradford Titchener – embarked on a fashionable search for the “atoms” of consciousness: physical sensations, affections or feelings, and images (in both memories and dreams). Functionalists, headed by William James and, later, James Angell and John Dewey – derided the idea of a “pure”, elemental sensation. They introduced the concept of mental association. Experience uses associations to alter the nervous system, they hypothesized.
Freud revolutionized the field (though, at first, his reputation was limited to the German-speaking parts of the dying Habsburg Empire). He dispensed with the unitary...
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