Awkward 23 year-old dude, William James, in Brazil 1865. 

Functionalism, early movement in the study of psychology credited to James, denies the principle of introspection, which tends to investigate the inner workings of human thinking rather than understanding the biological processes of the human consciousness, says Wikipedia. I'm getting a lot of shade and attitude towards psychoanalysis and Freud in that mission statement. And who might counter, I'll add, why overlook what tremendous insights the inner workings of human thinking can tell us about biological processes? Foremost, sex. But also childhood development and neurosis and the promise of offering some relief to those suffering neurotic conditions through clinical psychoanalysis or a talking cure. Isn't sex or sexual reproduction one of the most basic and fundamental biological processes? Maybe your puritan modesty and laudably fierce commitment to individual privacy rights, Professor James, obstructs your view but it's the behavioralism, Skinner et al, that grew out of your prudish functionalism that, unfortunately, lends itself to applying surveillance and coercive mechanisms of social control to biological processes. In psychoanalysis we are trying to help liberate humans from a traumatizing and haunted past. In behavioralism they attempt to reduce the human subject to a rat in a cage and data collection, although I understand you cannot be blamed entirely for any of that. But maybe a little? 

Psychoanalysis Rule No. 1 (maybe): The Child is Father to the Man. The Child is Father to the Man.

 

Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959):

The primal act of the human ego is a negative one-- not to accept reality, specifically the separation of the child's body from the mother's body. 

Sigmund Freud: One might even believe that this first love relation of the child is doomed to extinction for the very reason that it is the first, for these early object-cathexes are always ambivalent to a very high degree; along side of the child's intense love there is always a strong aggressive tendency present, and the more passionately the child loves an object, the more sensitive it will be to disappointments and frustrations. In the end, the love is bound to capitulate to the accumulated hostility. 

Objective dependence on parental care creates in the child a passive, dependent need to be loved, which is just the opposite of their dream of narcissistic omnipotence. Thus the institution of the family shapes human desire in two contradictory directions [need to be loved and narcissistic omnipotence], and it is the dialectic generated by this contradiction which produces what Freud calls the conflict of ambivalence.

The aim of psychoanalysis-- still unfulfilled, and still only half-conscious-- is to return our souls [sublimations] to our bodies, to return ourselves to ourselves, and thus to overcome the human state of self-alienation. 

*No doubt, Freud was a male chauvinist and often comically exaggerates win-lose binary sexual conflicts but come on psychoanalysis is the Moby Dick of modernist intellectual systems. A colossus inspiring great work in the arts, literature, philosophy and history, even some great work he might not have agreed with. Brown believes in the unity of opposites; I'm still not sure Freud really does. 

Biography without Psychoanalysis

A Freud comment, accepting a prize in honor of Goethe, and responding to the general academic hostility towards psychoanalysis, not least of all from historical biograhers, with some psychoanalysis-- 

"All the same, we may admit that there is still another motive force at work. The biographer's justification also contains a confession. It is true the biographer does not want to depose his hero, but he does want to bring him nearer to us. That means, however, reducing the distance that separates him from us: it still tends in effect towards degradation. And it is unavoidable if we learn more about a great man's life we shall also hear of occasions on which he has done no better than we, has in fact come near to us as a human being. Nevertheless, I think we may declare the efforts of biography to be legitimate. Our attitude to fathers and teachers is, after all, an ambivalent one since our reverence for them regularly conceals a component of hostile rebellion." 

--Sigmund Freud, 1930