Freud struggled with trying to apply positivism to the way the

mind worked. This proved to be tricky, because thoughts, feelings,

fantasies and moods are abstract in their nature rather than concrete.

This means that they only exist in thought rather than in solid

matter and are therefore hard to observe. Most psychologists took

the positivist stance, but psychiatry – the study and treatment of

mental illnesses – was also developing, as people became interested

in the workings of the mind and what could go wrong with it. It was

hard to explain these illnesses by means of conventional medicine

and mechanistic thinking. People were beginning to understand that

psychiatric problems might be rooted in events such as traumatic

experiences, and were not always merely an indication of a

malfunction in the physical body. This seems obvious to us today,

Freud struggled with trying to apply positivism to the way the

mind worked. This proved to be tricky, because thoughts, feelings,

fantasies and moods are abstract in their nature rather than concrete.

This means that they only exist in thought rather than in solid

matter and are therefore hard to observe. Most psychologists took

the positivist stance, but psychiatry – the study and treatment of

mental illnesses – was also developing, as people became interested

in the workings of the mind and what could go wrong with it. It was

hard to explain these illnesses by means of conventional medicine

and mechanistic thinking. People were beginning to understand that

psychiatric problems might be rooted in events such as traumatic

experiences, and were not always merely an indication of a

malfunction in the physical body. This seems obvious to us today,

Freud struggled with trying to apply positivism to the way the

mind worked. This proved to be tricky, because thoughts, feelings,

fantasies and moods are abstract in their nature rather than concrete.
This means that they only exist in thought rather than in solid

matter and are therefore hard to observe. Most psychologists took

the positivist stance, but psychiatry – the study and treatment of

mental illnesses – was also developing, as people became interested

in the workings of the mind and what could go wrong with it. It was

hard to explain these illnesses by means of conventional medicine

and mechanistic thinking. People were beginning to understand that

psychiatric problems might be rooted in events such as traumatic

experiences, and were not always merely an indication of a

malfunction in the physical body. This seems obvious to us today,