Three blows to our hubris

BLOWS AT THE HANDS OF SCIENCE

During the course of centuries the naive hubris and self-love of men has had to submit to two major blows at the hands of science. The first was when they learnt that our earth was not the centre of the universe, but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarsely imaginable vastness.

The second blow fell when biological research destroyed man's supposedly privileged place in creation and proved his descent from the animal kingdom and his ineradicable animal nature. This revaluation was not accomplished without the most violent opposition.

But now human megalomania has suffered its third and most wounding blow from our psychoanalytical findings, which seek to prove that our ego is not even master in its own house, but has to contend itself with scanty information about what is going on in his unconscious mind.

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Freud, General Theory of the Neuroses, SE 16: 284-5 (paraphrased) 

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