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Canetti’s open hostility to Freud and to psychoanalysis as a whole has its origin in two key notions: firstly the idea that psychoanalysis is a form of charlatanism which aspires to the status of a hard science while it is only an ordinary human science, secondly the failure of psychoanalysis to analyse any phenomenon outside the confines of the individual. This hostility allows Canetti to define his own theory in which he seeks to understand the phenomenon of the mass.