ABSTRACT
Freud, of all contemporaries, is the one with the greatest cultural influence on the twentieth century. As psychoanalysts, we are both tremendously privileged and burdened that the founder of our discipline was such a towering figure—privileged, because if he were a lesser spirit, psychoanalysis would hardly be so widespread as it is today, and many of us would not have had the freeing experience of being analyzed; burdened because psycho-analytic theory and practice are so peculiarly interdependent that to challenge Freud's tenets ‘has usually been responded to with anxiety, as if a sacrilegious outrage were being perpetrated’ (Sutherland, 1980, p. 842). Pursuing the same line of thought, we quickly come upon the surprising reflection that among contemporary disciplines ‘theology and psychoanalysis are unique…in that their specialists constantly have their originator in mind’ (Mahony, 1977, p. 57).
