ABSTRACT
Different people will come to have different impressions of a great man depending on their own personality traits and on the nature of their relationship with him. The discovery of the psychological unconscious represented a severe narcissistic blow to man, as Freud himself pointed out in one of his papers. Freud’s generation reacted with horror to the disclosure of infantile sexuality and particularly to the Oedipus complex. Freud himself knew that the concepts of psychoanalysis would be developed and revised. At the same time, he felt quite understandably very protective of the great field of his scientific investigation and theory that he had christened psychoanalysis, and he resented any distortion or misinterpretation of his concepts. Freud’s extension of the term “libido” to designate the dynamic expression of all life instincts, that is, both the ego and the sexual instincts, reminded some analysts of Jung’s use of this term indiscriminately for every kind of vital energy.
