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tions of integration are touched by it. He sees integration as falling
within the larger contexts of conflict and of incompatible needs , con–
tradictory aims, and implacably opposed demands . Such integration as
he finds is never complete, rarely adequate, and more often than not
unstable. He never envisages the human or the social world as com–
posing now, or in the future, some harmonious order . There is the
recognition and remembrance of bliss and satisfaction in his world , but
there is no music of the spheres . In his world men and women go
through a long development ofstriving for autonomy , but the achieve–
ment of such autonomy is arduous, unpredictable, and easily sub–
verted .
After writing this text Freud was to live for more than thirty years .
During that period he would continue to write and develop his ideas .
But with the
Three Essays
now fitted in alongside of
The Interpretation
of Dreams,
the new theoretical paradigm-and the new vision of
human existence-that he was to introduce into the consciousness of the
Western world was there in its essentials. He and his followers would go
on filling in new details, adding observations , plugging up gaps ,
throwing out new explanatory epicycles . They would, in short , begin
to operate-as they are operating today-on the analogy of normal
science . But the fundamental theory was there in 1905. That it was a
theory fully deserving of the name is in part suggested to us in the
circumstance that nothing has come along in seventy years that re–
motely resembles it in explanatory power, coherence , and integrity .
No intellectually serious challenges to it have taken or lasted. The
supercessors of it that have been regularly announced have just as reg–
ularly fallen away . And Freud 's own followers continue working on the
boundaries ofknowledge , about four inches ahead of where Freud left
off. Such a circumstance is no discredit to them; it is one more illustra–
tion of how rarely genius of revolutionary proportions occurs in both
science and other theoretical disciplines . And it illustrates as well how
when such a genius occurs the world is changed.
