ABSTRACT
Goals and values make people strong; it would even appear that they contribute decisively to biological survival. Their absence—manifest either as disillusionment and sarcasm or through the espousal of an uninspired technology—tends to usher in extinction, whether the end comes dramatically or via a process of silent diffusion. Professional, educational, and investigative pursuits, however, must all be integrated with, influenced by, and subordinated to our dominant concern for the science of psychoanalysis, and even our role as therapists when viewed within the broadest perspective should not be regarded as supreme. Psychoanalysis is therefore first and foremost a unique instrument for the gathering of an important segment of psychological knowledge; and the major obligation psychoanalysts have to society lies in the use of their scientific and therapeutic instrument for the gathering of data about human motivations and for the ever-deepening understanding of human behavior.
