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Life - Death
Solid - Liquid
Certain - Uncertain
Coherent - Random
Rigid - Flexible
Order - Chaos
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Freud claimed to be a scientist, and was certainly not a philosopher in the technical sense [...] Nevertheless, he resembled some philosophers in being a system-builder.
Very early in its history, psycho-analysis left the narrow confines of the consulting room and made incursions into anthropology, sociology, religion, literature, art, and the occult. It became, if not a philosophical system, at least a Weltanschauung; and this extraordinary expansion of a method of treating neurotics into a new way of regarding human nature had its origin in the psychological needs of its founder.
Freud repudiated religion as an illusion, yet needed some systematic approach to making coherent sense out of the world.
Excessive generalization is a temptation for all original thinkers, who are usually in love with their own ideas and who therefore over-value them.
[It can spring from a] desire or need which is very characteristic of thinkers with obsessional personalities. Because their psychology is based on the need to order and control, they tend to look for, and be attracted by, comprehensive systems of thought which promise near-complete explanations of human existence, and which therefore hold out the hope that the individual can master both his own nature and external reality by means of his new understanding.
[Anthony Storr]
Freud, p.8-9
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