ABSTRACT
As a young man Freud was very interested, as is known, in philosophy and in the humanities before he turned with a remarkably strong emotional reaction to the natural sciences. Freud as a "philosophical physician" could establish a new "science of the unconscious". Freud emphasised that psychoanalysis did not deserve to be "swallowed by the medical faculty, but could instead as 'the psychology of the unconscious' the discipline of the unconscious, become indispensible to all sciences that have to do with the emergence of human culture. The typical groping, psychoanalytic process of searching for "unconscious truths" can only be carried out with the analysand, and is regarded as one of the marked characteristics of psychoanalysis—for example in opposition to the top-down procedure of behaviour therapy. A new characterisation of psychoanalytic conceptual research was finally laid out by Joseph Sandler and Anna Ursula Dreher in the 1990s, setting themselves apart from other forms of psychoanalytic research.
