Conclusion

Summary

We asked in the introduction whether Freud was a philosopher rather than a scientist. The answer must now be “yes,” despite Freud’s many protests to the contrary. Frank Sulloway describes Freudian psychoanalysis as a cryptobiology, meaning that it is a biological theory presented in the form of psychology. It should be added that this cryptobiology is even more profoundly a cryptophilosophy, a speculative philosophy of nature built from evolutionary postulates borrowed from the biology of the time and placed on clinical material in an entirely a priori way to guarantee the internal coherence of the system Freud was building.