ABSTRACT
The biological basis of psychoanalysis does not provide a legitimate conceptual escape hatch when one reaches personal limitations in psychological inquiry. Psychoanalysts, in exploring unconscious forces within the mind, formulate interpretations tentatively, repeatedly recognizing the need to alter former conclusions that do not stand the test of new clinical experience. A movement away from the intersubjective psychic domain of analytic exploration invokes biology in deus ex machina fashion as an explanatory solution. Biology matters greatly to psychoanalysis, which is rooted in the biological, but it is not legitimate to use biological conceptualizations to extricate the analyst from a psychological impasse. An early instance of such an unwarranted maneuver in psychoanalysis may be found in a well-known statement made by Freud. Many factors can lie behind such resistance to forthright self-definition, and psychoanalysis best succeeds and brings about the greatest opening of previous character constriction when individual particularity and uniqueness are valued over dictates of theoretical fashions.
