ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis has had an extraordinary history. It was a child of a great intellectual and spiritual revolution—the naturalization of the human mind—which has still not yet reached its culmination. It is a history of compelling visions of the human condition devised by colourful, creative, and sometimes anguished individuals. It is a history of controversy and strife. Psychoanalysis is strong on bold and imaginative theorizing, but weak on making disciplined links between rival theories and observations of the phenomena that it purports to explain. Psychoanalysis is not condemned to its insularity. The need for collective intellectual effort with colleagues from related disciplines is further underscored by what we know about the size of the problem of understanding the human mind. Psychoanalysis is a research programme that was noble in its inspiration but faulty in its execution. It has become derailed, but not fatally so. In trying to understand the human mind, psychoanalysts are trying to understand something awesomely vast.
