Was Freud, At Heart, A Realistic Romantic?

The birth of psychoanalysis at the close of the nineteenth centurycoincided with a questioning of philosophical traditions and methodsepitomized by Nietzsche’s assault on current thinking. The Enlightenment had seen the questioning of religion as an explanation and a revelation of reality and of human life within that reality; science had been instigated as a more ‘enlightened’ and a more rational provider of truth and knowledge; but the ongoing nature of philosophical thought continued to encounter new challenges and the re-phrasing of old questions. Attempting to combine the exactness of scientific method with the openness of philosophical inquiry, psychoanalysis broached the terrain of the human mind, and attemptedto explore the perennial questions of meaning, truth and life with anunderstanding enhanced by the discoveries of its founder, Sigmund Freud.