Volume 22, Number 5 · April 3, 1975
Freud and the Imagination
By Charles Rycroft
Psychoanalysts differ widely among themselves over which aspects of Freud's theories they wish to remember and commemorate. Freud's theories, so far from constituting a unitary, fixed structure, which either stands or falls as a whole and which analysts subscribe to in its entirety, are really more a collection of miscellaneous ideas, insights, and intuitions, which Freud propounded over a span of fifty years, which he derived from three disparate sources—his clinical experience, his self-analysis, and the biological theories current in his lifetime—and which have proved capable of development and elaboration in several different and apparently, perhaps even actually, incompatible ways. That this last statement is true is shown by the fact that there exist today in Great Britain at least three different schools of psychoanalysis, all claiming to be Freudian and all capable of showing that their ideas can indeed be discovered, albeit often in embryonic form, somewhere in Freud's writings.
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