Medhat2’s Reviews > Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst > Status Update

Empirical knowledge, like its sophisticated extension science, is rational, not because it has a foundation, but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim into jeopardy, though not all at once.
—Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind

Sigmund Freud’s core idea was that much of human behavior is driven by unconscious psychological forces, particularly repressed desires and unresolved childhood conflicts—especially those related to sex and aggression.

It’s a hermeneutic (interpretive), not a scientific, system.

betray, behave like an artist who buys paints with his wife’s house-keeping
money or uses the furniture as firewood to warm the studio for his model. Without a trace of that kind of unscrupulousness the job cannot be done.

these psychoanalytical matters are intelligible only if presented in pretty full and complete detail, just as an analysis really gets going only when the
patient descends to minute details from the abstractions which are their surrogate.Thus discretion is incompatible with a satisfactory description of an analysis; to provide the latter one would have to be unscrupulous, give away