**2. Reading Sigmund Freud's discoveries prior to 1915**

There is an understanding—quite consensual within the humanities, but not within the hard sciences—that all readings are tendentious. This is particularly true of the task of reading Freud's voluminous writings, in order to grasp what in them is profoundly unsettling and revolutionary. Not only because there is a restless shifting, reformulation, and regressive or progressive development in his thinking, but also because there are moments of perplexity and internal contradiction. He aspired to hard science ('natural science' under the eminent influence of pioneers such as Karl Rokitansky, the Dean of his Medical School in Vienna). But more than a 'natural science of the mind,' he penned what can be read as the most provocative, instructive, and insightful literature (with ideas that are a profound and powerful guide for praxis). Many of his key ideas are about matters of human functioning that are simply not operationalizable. They are not to be demonstrated, measured, or made ostensible in a manner that would satisfy the rigors of empirical science as established in 'western' discourse throughout the modern era (the hegemony of logical empiricism and analytico-referential rationality).

For example, Freud's 1923 idea (produced over two decades *after* his freeassociative discovery of the repressed unconscious) that the operations of psychic functioning can be partitioned into those belonging to the ego organization and to this organization's depiction of reality, to the id's drives, and to the forces of the superego (as well as the ego-ideal) provides a remarkably powerful hermeneutic for the conduct of psychotherapy, but scarcely is it scientifically provable in a manner that would satisfy a hard scientist.

But that does not diminish the revolutionary impact of Freud's ideas. Moreover, it must be noted that those discoveries, which are the most radical and which have been the most resisted subsequently, were the ones he advanced before he became obsessed with the generation of scientistic models. To describe this summarily: Prior to 1895, Freud was heavily preoccupied with hard science. In the years after graduating medical school, he dissected the gonads of eels, performed experiments on the nervous system of frogs, and published over 200 neurological papers (also experimenting with the effects of tropane alkaloids on human functioning). Hard science was his passion. However, with the discovery of the repressed unconscious around 1895 and of the fundamentality of erotic energies in our cognitive, affective, and conative operations, he was compelled to relinquish his teacher's (Ernst Brūcke) commitment to experimental methods. He discovered the repressed unconscious and the power of libidinal life simply by talking with patients (along with an initial use of hypnotic trances, which he soon relinquished) and asking them to disclose their 'associations.'
