I will start this commentary on Freud by defending at least one basic tenet of his teachings. That is his stern belief that everything done, said or dreamed-even the misspelling of a word-almost always has meaning.

I proved this to myself when I was writing comments about an analyst I was working with some years ago. When writing about him, I inadvertently referred to him as my "anal-cyst." I really did consider him a pain in the . . . well, you get the picture. I had made a Freudian slip!

Sigmund Freud was, among many things, intransigent. While he may have considered himself open-minded, his actions do not reinforce his conclusion. To support my opinion, I offer his following quote that speaks to his opinion of his science: "The capacity to be content with these approximations to certainty and the ability to carry on constructive work despite the lack of final confirmation are actually a mark of the scientific habit of mind."

He openly commented, by the quote above, that his science was fraught with opinions not especially supported by empirical evidence. He indicated, through his words, he was okay with that. Yet, he was well known for removing himself from the company of anyone who disagreed with him in the very least.

Also, he was not subject to his own analysis. When a student asked him if there was any significance to his ever-present cigar, something that to him would have been an oral-fixation in another, he replied, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

But, with all of the faults we may want to point out in Freud's body of work or in his person, he has been, arguably, the most influential person ever in the field of psychoanalysis.

We must remember he was laboring at his science in another age and another society. This society, Vienna in the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, rather than being obsessed with sex, was a society that rejected anything written about sex or sexuality. Nearly the entirety of his society was made up of his worst critics. We cannot nearly give him as bad of a rap as did his own peers and social acquaintances.

With all that is said of him, he was still a genius of the highest order. While many of his perceived "instincts/drivers," that he felt influenced all of human behavior, have been roundly rejected (rightfully so, in this writer's opinion), just as many are still incorporated into many schools of psychology today.

Freud's analysis of a being, breaking them down into

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