ABSTRACT
Freud was not without forerunners. Hobbes, an English philosopher of the seventeenth century, thought, in the words of Russell, 'Will is nothing but the last appetite of or aversion remaining in deliberation. That is to say, will is not something different from desire and aversion, but merely the strongest in a case of conflict'. It might not be an accident that God is missing from the psychoanalytic picture of man, and so is the will. On the other hand, the unconscious seems to have been something like a god for Freud. It is all-powerful, mysterious, the source of everything, and ubiquitous. The world of inner objects is important to settle our experiences with ourselves. Foulkes was not very interested in object relations, not because he would have denied them, but because he was concerned with something else. Freud wanted to establish psychoanalysis on a natural science base.