ABSTRACT
The ‘Three Essays’ show the people Freud, the psychoanalyst, for the first time engaged in synthetic work. Further researches connected with psycho-analysis convinced him that sexuality plays a far greater and more complicated part in the psychic activity of normal and healthy people also than had hitherto been considered possible-so long as one could only assess the evident manifestations of sexuality and was unaware of the unconscious. Before Freud, psychiatry was a collector's cabinet of extraordinary and meaningless clinical pictures of disease, and the science of sexuality consisted of the descriptive grouping of repulsive abnormalities. The first ray of light illuminating the mechanisms of psychic life came from psycho-analysis. Psychoanalysis, however, dissected human psychic activity, pursued it to the limit where psychic and physical come in contact, down to the instincts, and thus freed psychology from anthropocentrism, and only then did it trust itself to evaluate this purified animism in terms of biology.
