ABSTRACT
If, however, we look more closely at these so-called laws in psychology we find, in the main, that they do not give sufficient explanations of
human actions, of what human beings do deliberately, knowing what they are doing and for which they can give reasons. Freud's brilliant discoveries, for instance, were not of the causes of actions like signing contracts or shooting pheasants; rather they were of things that happen to a man like dreams, hysteria, and slips of the tongue.5 These might be called 'passions' more appropriately than 'actions', and in this respect they are similar to what we call 'fits of passion' or 'gusts of emotion'. Men do not dream or forget a name 'on purpose' any more than they are deliberately subject to impulses or gusts of emotion. One class of laws in psychology, then, gives causal explanations which seem sufficient to account for what happens to a man, but not for what he does.
