Abstract
When we discuss Freud's 'psychoanalysis as a human science', it is very tempting to rush for a definition as to what human science is, that is, a definition that could encompass the different ways of doing history, the various ways of doing sociology, psychology, etc. You understand by now that there is no such definition and we can be glad there is no such thing. There is a short step from definition to exclusion, and Freud himself did a lot a defining and excluding. What we can do however, is try to understand Freud's special way of 'doing science' and this is what we are going to do. In a letter to his friend and confidant Wilhelm Fliess dated February 1st 1900, Freud wrote something that announces Freud's relationship to established science and to the institutional keepers of orthodoxy was going to be somewhat difficult, "I am actually not a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador, an adventurer if you want it translated, with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort".
