Judging from the context, the term 'autistic ways' (paragraph 2) most likely refers to the psychologists' methods as

Use the following passage to answer questions: (1) Freud's theories are anything but theoretical. He was moved by the fact that there always seemed to be a close connection between his patients' dreams and their mental abnormalities, to collect thousands of dreams and to compare them with the case histories in his possession. He did not start out with a preconceived bias, hoping to find evidence which might support his views. He looked at facts a thousand times 'until they began to tell him something.' His attitude toward dream study was, in other words, that of a statistician who does not... Show more

Use the following passage to answer questions:

(1) Freud's theories are anything but theoretical. He was moved by the fact that there always seemed to be a close connection between his patients' dreams and their mental abnormalities, to collect thousands of dreams and to compare them with the case histories in his possession. He did not start out with a preconceived bias, hoping to find evidence which might support his views. He looked at facts a thousand times 'until they began to tell him something.' His attitude toward dream study was, in other words, that of a statistician who does not know, and has no means of foreseeing, what conclusions will be forced on him by the information he is gathering, but who is fully prepared to accept those unavoidable conclusions.
(2) This was indeed a novel way in psychology. Psychologists had always been wont to build, in what Bleuler calls 'autistic ways,' that is through methods in no ways supported by evidence, some attractive hypothesis, which sprung from their brain, like Minerva from Jove's brain, fully armed. After which, they would stretch upon that unyielding frame the hide of a reality which they had previously killed.<a id="x.89075"> It is only to minds suffering from the same distortions, to minds also autistically inclined, that those empty, artificial structures appear acceptable molds for philosophic thinking. The pragmatic view that 'truth is what works' had not been as yet expressed when Freud published his revolutionary views on the psychology of dreams.
(3) Five facts of first magnitude were made obvious to the world by his interpretation of dreams. First of all, Freud pointed out a constant connection between some part of every dream and some detail of the dreamer's life during the previous waking state. This positively establishes a relation between sleeping states and waking states and disposes of the widely prevalent view that dreams are purely nonsensical phenomena coming from nowhere and leading nowhere. Secondly, Freud, after studying the dreamer's life and modes of thought, after noting down all his mannerisms and the apparently insignificant details of his conduct which reveal his secret thoughts, came to the conclusion that there was in every dream the attempted or successful gratification of some wish, conscious or unconscious. Thirdly, he proved that many of our dream visions are symbolical, which causes us to consider them as absurd and unintelligible; the universality <a id="x.89078">of those symbols, however, makes them very transparent to the trained observer. Fourthly, Freud showed that sexual desires play an enormous part in our unconscious, a part which puritanical hypocrisy has always tried to minimize, if not to ignore entirely. Finally, Freud established a direct connection between dreams and insanity, between the symbolic visions of our sleep and the symbolic actions of the mentally deranged. There were, of course, many other observations which Freud made while dissecting the dreams of his patients, but not all of them present as much interest as the foregoing nor were they as revolutionary or likely to wield as much influence on modern psychiatry.
(4) Other explorers have struck the path blazed by Freud leading into man's unconscious. Jung of Zurich, Adler of Vienna and Kempf of Washington, D.C., have made to the study of the unconscious, contributions which have brought that study into fields which Freud himself never dreamt of invading. One fact which cannot be too emphatically stated, however, is that but for Freud's wish fulfillment theory of dreams, neither Jung's 'energic theory,' nor Adler's theory of 'organ inferiority and compensation,' nor Kempf's 'dynamic mechanism' might have been formulated. Freud is the father of modern abnormal psychology and he established the psychoanalytical point of view.

— Andre Tridon, Introduction to Freud's Dream Psychology: Psychoanalysis for Beginners

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