ABSTRACT
Freud, Darwin and Marx are often linked as the three original thinkers who have most altered people’s view of themselves in the twentieth century. Freud’s ideas have exerted so powerful an influence that, in Western countries, psychoanalysis has become the most widely accepted idiom for discussing personality and interpersonal relationships. When I was young, psychiatrists were either Freudians or they were not. To be a Freudian implied having been through the process of Freudian analysis and also assumed acceptance of the greater part of what Freud had written as being true in the scientific sense. However, even amongst the Freudian establishment, some of Freud’s ideas, particularly the concept of the death instinct, were disputable. It was recognized that Freud’s notions about women rested upon outmoded nineteenth-century attitudes; and a number of psychoanalysts were uneasy about his ‘armchair’ anthropology. But the broad outline of Freud’s psychoanalytic theoretical scheme was wholeheartedly embraced by analysts and analysands; and anyone who seriously questioned it was regarded as ignorant, misguided, or so neurotic as to be manifesting impenetrable resistance.
