ABSTRACT

From 1895, when Sigmund Freud made his first attempt to sketch a theoretical framework for psychoanalysis, until 1938, the year before he died, Freud was determined that his new discipline should conform to the requirements of a natural science. The philosophers of science have dubbed it a pseudoscience on the grounds that, however large a measure of truth they may contain, psychoanalytic theories are cast in so elastic a form that they are unfalsifiable—for example K. Popper. If, therefore, psychoanalysis is to become the natural science based on sound biological principles that Freud intended, there are compelling reasons for drastic changes in some at least of its basic assumptions. The fact that the behavioural systems remain intact and capable in principle of being activated, and so may on occasion show brief or incipient activation, can account for all those phenomena that led Freud to his ideas about a dynamic unconscious and repression.