The impartial student of Sigmund Freud need not agree with all his conclusions, and indeed, like the present writer, may be unable to make sex so all-dominating a factor in the psychic life of the past and present as Freud deems it to be, to recognize the fact that he is the most original and creative mind in psychology of our generation. Despite the frightful handicap of the odium sexicum, far more formidable today than the odium theologicum, involving as it has done for him lack of academic recognition and even more or less social ostracism, his views have attracted and inspired a brilliant group of minds not only in psychiatry but in many other fields, who have altogether given the world of culture more new and pregnant appercus than those which have come from any other source within the wide domain of humanism.
A former student and disciple of Wundt, who recognizes to the full his inestimable services to our science, cannot avoid making certain comparisons. Wundt has had for decades the prestige of a most advantageous academic chair. He founded the first laboratory for experimental psychology, which attracted many of the most gifted and mature students from all lands. By his development of the doctrine of apperception he took psychology forever beyond the old associationism which had ceased to be fruitful. He also established the independence of psychology from physiology, and by his encyclopedic and always thronged lectures, to say nothing of his more or less esoteric seminary, he materially advanced every branch of mental science and extended its influence over the whole wide domain of folklore, mores, language, and primitive religion. His best texts will long constitute a thesaurus which every psychologist must know.
Again, like Freud, he inspired students who went beyond him (the Wurzburgers and introspectionists) whose method and results he could not follow. His limitations have grown more and more manifest. He has little use for the unconscious or the abnormal, and for the most part he has lived and wrought in a preevolutionary age and always and everywhere underestimated the genetic standpoint. He never transcends the conventional limits in dealing, as he so rarely does, with sex. Nor does he contribute much likely to be of permanent value in any part of the wide domain of affectivity. We cannot forbear to express the hope that Freud will not repeat Wundt's error in making too abrupt a break with his more advanced pupils like Adler or the Zurich group. It is rather precisely just the topics that Wundt neglects that Freud makes his chief corner-stones, viz., the unconscious, the abnormal, sex, and affectivity generally, with many genetic, especially ontogenetic, but also phylogenetic factors. The Wundtian influence has been great in the past, while Freud has a great present and a yet greater future.
In one thing Freud agrees with the introspectionists, viz., in deliberately neglecting the "physiological factor" and building on purely psychological foundations, although for Freud psychology is mainly unconscious, while for the introspectionists it is pure consciousness. Neither he nor his disciples have yet recognized the aid proffered them by students of the autonomic system or by the distinctions between the epicritic and protopathic functions and organs of the cerebrum, although these will doubtless come to have their due place as we know more of the nature and processes of the unconscious mind.
If psychologists of the normal have hitherto been too little disposed to recognize the precious contributions to psychology made by the cruel experiments of Nature in mental diseases, we think that the psychoanalysts, who work predominantly in this field, have been somewhat too ready to apply their findings to the operations of the normal mind; but we are optomistic enough to believe that in the end both these errors will vanish and that in the great synthesis of the future that now seems to impend our science will be made vastly richer and deeper on the theoretical side and also far more practical than it has ever been before.
G. STANLEY HALL.
Clark University,
April, 1920.
| CONTENTS | ||
|---|---|---|
| [PART ONE] | ||
| The Psychology of Errors | ||
| PAGE | ||
| Preface | G. Stanley Hall | [V] |
| LECTURE | ||
| [I.] | Introduction | [1] |
| [II.] | The Psychology of Errors | [10] |
| [III.] | The Psychology of Errors—(Continued) | [23] |
| [IV.] | The Psychology of Errors—(Conclusion) | [41] |
| [PART TWO] | ||
| The Dream | ||
| [V.] | Difficulties and Preliminary Approach | [63] |
| [VI.] | Hypothesis and Technique of Interpretation | [78] |
| [VII.] | Manifest Dream Content and Latent Dream Thought | [90] |
| [VIII.] | Dreams of Childhood | [101] |
| [IX.] | The Dream Censor | [110] |
| [X.] | Symbolism in the Dream | [122] |
| [XI.] | The Dream-Work | [141] |
| [XII.] | Analyses of Sample Dreams | [153] |
| [XIII.] | Archaic Remnants and Infantilism in the Dream | [167] |
| [XIV.] | Wish Fulfillment | [180] |
| [XV.] | Doubtful Points and Criticism | [194] |
| [PART THREE] | ||
| General Theory of the Neuroses | ||
| [XVI.] | Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry | [209] |
| [XVII.] | The Meaning of the Symptoms | [221] |
| [XVIII.] | Traumatic Fixation—the Unconscious | [236] |
| [XIX.] | Resistance and Suppression | [248] |
| [XX.] | The Sexual Life of Man | [262] |
| [XXI.] | Development of the Libido and Sexual Organizations | [277] |
| [XXII.] | Theories of Development and Regression—Etiology | [294] |
| [XXIII.] | The Development of the Symptoms | [311] |
| [XXIV.] | Ordinary Nervousness | [328] |
| [XXV.] | Fear and Anxiety | [340] |
| [XXVI.] | The Libido Theory and Narcism | [356] |
| [XXVII.] | Transference | [372] |
| [XXVIII.] | Analytical Therapy | [388] |
| [Index] | [403] | |