ABSTRACT
Analysts who try to maintain a scientific posture are used to self-criticism, a seminal factor in scientists. No experienced analyst would ever think that it would be impossible to describe mental functioning in a still more precise way. So complex a system challenges any attempt at description. We already have more profound (because basic) descriptions, and in this sense they furnish more precision. Freud provided the psychoanalytic endeavour with initial discoveries endowed with this precise value, due to their (his) clinical intuition. He was able to immerse his clinical observations into earlier descriptions from art and philosophy, the first attempts to apprehend psychic reality in Western civilisation—which were, by themselves, hallmarks of the inception of this civilisation. Freud formulated—and in this sense, discovered—the two principles of mental functioning. Until then, only the first principle was known; the principle of pleasure and displeasure. It had already been depicted by Homer, described by Hobbes, Shakespeare and Locke, among a legion of thinkers and poets. Freud brought out the principle of reality, for the first time in Western thinking. It was implicit in Shakespeare’s and Goethe’s prose and verse, but a fuller individual awareness that is possible in the scientific endeavour, in order to be practically applied 46to human individual beings, had to wait until the advent of medicine, and within it Freud’s achievements. 1
