Jerome S. Bruner
FREUD AND THE IMAGE OF MAN
By the dawn of the sixth century before Christ, the Greek
physicist-philosophers had formulated a bold conception of the physi–
cal world as a unitary material phenomenon. The lonics had set
forth a conception of matter as fundamental substance, transformation
of which accounted for the myriad forms and substances of the physi–
cal world. Anaximander was subtle enough to recognize that matter
must be viewed ,as a generalized substance, free of any particular
sensuous properties. Air, iron, water or bone were only elaborated
forms, derived from a more general stuff. Since that time, the phe–
nomena of the physical world have been conceived as continuous and
monistic, as governed by the common laws of matter. The view was
a bold one, bold in the sense of running counter to the immediate
testimony of the senses.
It
has served as an axiomatic basis of physics
for more than two millennia. The bold view eventually became the
obvious view, and it gave shape to our common understanding of the
physical world. Even the alchemists rested their case upon this doc–
trine of material continuity and, indeed, had they known about
neutron bombardment, they might even have hit upon the proper
philosopher's stone.
The good fortune of the physicist-and these matters are always
relative, for the material monism of physics may have impeded
nineteenth-century thinking and delayed insights into the nature of
complementarity in modem physical theory-this early good fortune
or happy insight has no counterpart in the sciences of man. Lawful
continuity between man and the animal kingdom, between dreams
and unreason on one side and waking rationality on the other, be–
tween madness and sanity, between consciousness and unconsciousness,
between the mind of the child and the adult mind, between primi-
