Psychoanalysis neither developed from philosophy nor did it come into being in a university-psychoanalysis was born in the clinic. It was hysterical women who taught Freud. Their accounts of their pain, anxieties, and the physical symptoms they presented led him to formulate his theories about the existence of the unconscious.

Psychoanalysis is neither a theory nor a way of seeing life. It is a form of ethics unlike any other form of ethics--the subject's way of relating to the world. However, there is no doubt that it owes its existence to science. It could perhaps be termed the...