ABSTRACT
In the preceding chapters of this book we have seen how Freud wanted to be and considered himself to be a scientist. From his point of view, it is true, psychoanalysis is unquestionably part of the scientific enterprise. “Psycho-analysis is a part of the mental science of psychology” (1940b (1938), p. 282), he reminds us in his posthumously published elementary lessons in psychoanalysis. Be that as it may, what these first chapters of The Paradoxical Legacy of Sigmund Freud make clear is that Freud was about something different from science. He was involved in something that at the time, he was unable to recognize for himself. His life’s work, as transmitted in the Standard Edition, reads as a thorough, energetically and constantly worked psychoanalytic theory of practice. As such, it gains unqualified and lasting value in its own right.
