ABSTRACT
In previous publications on Sigmund Freud I have examined his attempts to develop a comprehensive theory of mind and behavior (Sulloway, 1979, 1982). My historical approach has emphasized the insufficiently appreciated continuity between Freud's earlier career as a biologist and neurophysiologist and his subsequent creation of psychoanalysis. In this connection I have argued that many of Freud's most essential psychoanalytic concepts were based on erroneous and now outmoded assumptions from 19th-century biology. Psychoanalysis was never a “pure psychology,” to use Jones's (1953, p. 395) phrase, but rather a complex psychobiology in which the biological aspects became increasingly cryptic. Cryptic or not, bad biology ultimately spawned bad psychology. Freud erected his psychoanalytic edifice on a kind of intellectual quicksand, a circumstance that consequently doomed many of his most important theoretical conclusions from the outset.
