ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis belongs to the great scientific tradition of freeing thought from dogma, whether religious or arising out of an established scientific tradition itself. With psychoanalysis, however, the problem is not only a social one. Even though psychoanalytic ideas gained some general acceptance, the battle for the freedom of thought has to be fought individually with every analysand on the couch, as well within one’s self. The nascent thought conflicts with the illusion that the infant is merged with, or in possession of, an ideal breast. The notion of infantile sexuality was so unthinkable that Sigmund Freud himself, when first coming upon the evidence, assumed that all his patients had been seduced in childhood by an adult. Freud links thinking with ‘forming a conception of the reality circumstances in the external world’. This involves also forming a conception about one’s self, one’s needs, and one’s impulses—that is to say, forming some conception of one’s own internal world.
