ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the background, intellectual, medical and social, which helped to mould even a genius like Sigmund Freud. The psychological writings of Freud alone extend to 23 large volumes in the English Standard Edition. For Freud dreams were of special interest for another reason— namely, that dreaming is generally acknowledged to be a perfectly normal product of mental activity, unlike so-called pathological conditions, such as the neuroses, with which his studies had begun; and yet it became clear that they had much in common with neurotic symptoms. His results, therefore, promised to illuminate not merely psychopathology but also normal psychology. The enormously important role of aggression became increasingly recognized, and Freud was led by discoveries in this area to a new classification of instincts into two great divisions—life instincts and death instincts, Eros and Thanatos.
