ABSTRACT
John Dewey once remarked that although he was critical of dualistic elements in S. Freud’s psychology, especially of his concept of a substantial unconscious, he was deeply impressed by Freud’s extraordinary powers of observation of human behavior. Unless psychoanalysis has better clinical or experimental successes than alternative theories, it can hardly aspire to scientific status. Human beings have become so case-hardened to shock and cruelty and celebration of the absurd in our century that they could hardly be more disturbed if all the reports of psychoanalysts about what they have dredged up from the depths of men’s minds turned out to be true. Many have been the attempts to offer psychological interpretations of philosophy. The existence of an oedipal phase in the development of the young child is based upon definite, observable patterns of behavior, upon a concrete set of interpersonal relations and upon a host of other mental phenomena.
