The Failure that Led to Sigmund Freud’s Success

Why Even a Dead Page can have Purpose

In 1895, Sigmund Freud started Project for a Scientific Psychology, a monograph where he tried to explain all neuroses under a single framework. The ambition and expectation of the task brought trouble of equal magnitude. In Creating Minds, Howard Gardner writes that Freud “reveals his own despair at the magnitude of the task, the meager tools at his disposal, and the seemingly contradictory mission of laying bare what the psychic censors have withheld from introspection or consciousness.”

And yet, as Gardner highlights, Freud’s breakthrough work The Interpretation of Dreams can be seen as the successor to Project for a Scientific Psychology. The editorial note in Project for a Scientific Psychology agrees, “The immediate continuation of the ‘Project’ among Freud’s published writings is to be found in The Interpretation of Dreams.”

It was only after Freud finished Project for a Scientific Psychology, that he felt the doubts of it, “I no longer understand the state of mind in which I concocted the psychology,” he writes in a letter. He didn’t end up publishing Project, and it wouldn’t see the light of day until a decade after he passed away.

New creative work can always be built at the tail end of a creative failure. In…