ABSTRACT
Recently, special attention has been paid to the problems of boundary work in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of psychology (Lachapelle 2011; Plas 2000; Sommer 2012; Wolffram 2009). As it has been revealed, the differentiation between science and pseudoscience was a particularly urgent need in academic psychology (Keeley 2001; Gyimesi 2016a). Actually, from a certain point of view, differentiation, exclusion, and inclusion were some of the basic tasks of early experimental psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, etc. They were pioneers of their time, and they not only sought to develop new concepts, accumulate evidence, and designate new fields of research in their work, but also sought to distance themselves from other fields of research or popular practices. It is not surprising that even Sigmund Freud himself introduced his essay on the history of the psychoanalytic movement with the following words:
If in what follows I bring any contribution to the history of the psychoanalytic movement nobody must be surprised at the subjective nature of this paper, nor at the role, which falls to me therein. For psychoanalysis is my creation; for ten years I was the only one occupied with it, and all the annoyance which this new subject caused among my contemporaries has been hurled upon my head in the form of criticism. Even today, when I am no longer the only psychoanalyst, I feel myself justified in assuming that none can know better than myself what psychoanalysis is, wherein it differs from other methods of investigating the psychic life, what its name should cover, or what might better be designated as something else. (Freud 1914, 7)
