Freud's unintended institutional facts

“[A]pplications of analysis are always confirmations of it as well”, Sigmund Freud wrote in the Neue Vorlesungen zur Einfuhrung in die Psychoanalyse, expressing his confidence that psychoanalysis could be successfully applied as a new autonomous research method in anthropology, literary studies and other disciplines in the humanities (Freud, 1933, SE XXII, p. 146), and de facto confirmed by countless applications of his theories to cultural and social phenomena.1 In her insightful study Freud and the Institution of Psychoanalytic Knowledge, Sarah Winter points out that Freud’s official explanation of the remarkable expansion of the psychoanalytic method was based on two considerations: “According to Freud, the psychoanalytic work in interpreting dreams has shown, in the light of analogies with ‘linguistic usage, mythology and folklore’, that ‘symbols seem to be a fragment of extremely ancient inherited mental equipment’ and that ‘the use of a common symbolism extends far beyond the use of a common language’ ” (Winter, 1999, p. 216; referring to SE VIII, p. 242). Moreover, Freud stressed the