ABSTRACT
This chapter assesses Freud's status in the world of science. Freud was very ambiguous in his pronouncements about himself. On the one hand, he classed himself with Copernicus and Darwin; as they had humbled mankind by demonstrating the insignificance of the earth in the celestial scheme, and the relationship between man and other animals, so he claimed to have shown the supreme power of the unconscious in governing our daily activities. Hermeneutics is the discipline concerned with interpretation and meaning. It compares the analysis of actions and experiences with the interpretive study of a text. The art of hermeneutics is to extract the meaning of a particular 'text' by knowing the implications of the symbols used, as well as their significance in relation to each other and the context in which they appear. When regarded as a hermeneutic method, psychoanalysis' weakness as an experimental science becomes its very strength.
