ABSTRACT
The development of psychology in general, and of psychoanalysis in particular, reveals an increasing degree of sociological orientation. Hartmann writes: 'Many schools of psychology have completely disregarded the individual's social relationships. The need for psychology to take account, not only of the individual and his 'mind', but also of his world, was responsible for the discarding of the old definition of psychology as 'the science of the mind' and the adoption of the definition of 'the science of behaviour'. While Sigmund Freud hovered between a psychology of the organism and a psychology of the person, a theory of instincts and a theory of object-relations, his theory in toto remained fundamentally orientated to biology. The aim of psychodynamic theory is to explain the nature and functioning of the individual in the context of, and as he is himself fashioned by, his personal relationships.
