*Rediscovering the Psychoanalytic Revolution: Contemporary Crisis as the Result of Resisted… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110157*

Although subsequently he reverted to a conservative position, in its implications, the period of Freud's writing from 1895 to about 1915 is wild and revolutionary, as previously discussed quite extensively [1–8]. During this period, he relinquished—at least somewhat—the challenge of specifying only what might be 'scientifically provable' and documented a radical exploration of the human condition. After 1915 (and especially after World War I, with the death of family members, his aging and ailing health, and the vision of a whole world ending), Freud became significantly more preoccupied both with building a movement invulnerable to apostasies (such as those of Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, and Wilhelm Stekel) and with courting credibility in the general scientific community. Consequently, he began to produce quasi-scientific 'models of the mind'—of narcissism, of object relations, of the structural-functional partitioning of psychic life, of anxiety as a non-conscious signal system, and of the splitting of the ego organization in the face of unbearable events. In different ways, all these objectivistic models have been elaborated and made central to their conception of the discipline by his successors (frequently augmented by a particularly biased reading of Freud's 1920 writing on the 'death drive'). My thesis is that there are losses inherent in these 'developments.'

What happens if we dim the emphasis on post-1915 theorizing and focus on Freud's ideas between 1895 and 1915? A rather different 'take' on the discipline of psychoanalysis emerges.
