ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud’s life spanned the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries almost entirely in Vienna, Austria. When Freud was born, Europe was in the Age of Reasonalso termed the Age of Enlightenment or Modernity. The premodern worldview was that religious or supernatural forces could explain everything. By contrast, modernist thinkers emphasized “unbiased rationality” and sensory experience; they were in awe of the mechanistically ordered universe that Newton had revealed; and many of them questioned, and in some cases denounced, the existence of God. Their prevailing belief was that “the advance of science and the general extension of education assured the progressive perfection of society” (Huizinga, 1936, cited in Kreis, 2000a, p. 1). It was through science, which integrates empirical observation with rational theories, that Freud himself, along with other social and intellectual forces, helped to advance the Age of Modernism (Kreis, 2000a).
