ABSTRACT
The controversies associated with Freud’s work are sufficiently unusual to deserve special scrutiny. The contentiousness surrounding his standing has followed partly from the way he presented his ideas, for he was convinced early in his career as a psychoanalyst that he had “discovered” a series of remarkable truths about human nature. The metaphor of a discovery implied that he had come upon something radically new that could be verified scientifically, rather than that he simply was proposing a fresh way of looking at things. Freud put forward his “findings” with the utmost conviction, and he systematized them into a framework that lent added credibility to his contentions.
