Freud's theory of psychoanalysis was in its day a "great blow to human self-esteem" (Leahey 67) and thus began a shift in psychology.
According to the world conquered by psychoanalysis, a revolution was needed and it was Freud who attempted to answer the call of change. Psychoanalysis is a " "specialist science, a branch of psychology", dealing with the "mental field" but in so doing extending the reach of science, rather than betraying it" (Frosh 13). This idea rests on three key principles. First, people's actions are determined by the connection of thoughts, feelings, and wishes to their minds. Second, many of these mental events occur outside of conscious awareness. Thirdly, these mental processes may conflict with one another, leading to compromises among competing motives. A statement by Freud himself best explains these concepts:.
Psychoanalysis makes a basic assumption, the discussion of which is reserved for philosophical though but the justification of which lies in its results. We know two kinds of things about what we call our psyche (or mental life): firstly its bodily organ and scene of actions, the brain (or nervous system) and, on the other hand, our acts of consciousness, which are immediate data and cannot be further explained by any sort of description. Everything that lies between is unknown to us, and the data do not include any direct relation between these two terminal points of our knowledge (Smith 31).
In the time before Freud, scientific thinking had no way of explaining the behavior of patients who were preoccupied with irrational guilt of a loved one or were so paralyzed with fear that they could not leave their homes. After years of analysis and research, Freud reached a simple conclusion that changed the face of intellectual history and proved "to be amongst his most significant gifts to the twentieth century " (Smith 8). If the symptoms were not consciously created and maintained with physical basis, only one possibility remained: their basis must be unconscious.
