Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/179

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PSYCHOLOGICAL LITERATURE
169

essential changes of view-point in his successive editions. Great as his contribution has been, there can be no doubt whatever that he is being slowly left behind by those more interested in minute and careful observation, who are ready to follow facts wherever they lead and are unencumbered by schematizations which, in the Kraepelin camp, have become altogether too cumbersome. Those who have followed the Freudian literature know with what infinite patience and detail the clinical cases are followed up as the investigator penetrates to layer below layer of the patient's soul.

Freud himself is a man of wide reading and of keen literary insight and taste. His pages abound in allusions to literary masterpieces from the Greek drama down to the contemporary novels; but allusions to these he uses as entirely subordinate to his main purpose. In Vienna he has had scant recognition, being, although on in the fifties, only "extraordinary" professor; and he has been largely absorbed by his duties as a medical practitioner. Owing to the large place which he assigns to sex in the development of psychoneuroses, he has been misunderstood and for a time suffered socially. This, however, is happily past and he is now by every token likely to receive full recognition. It was an experience never to be forgotten by those who shared it to listen to the daily lectures for a week in September that he gave at the Clark conference. He spoke in German and without notes, and in a voice of so little power that his hearers drew their chairs in a semi-circle about him. But never in the writer's experience have a group of advanced scholars, many of whom have achieved great eminence in this country, listened with greater interest to the words of a great teacher. His expositions were masterpieces of simplicity, and it is hoped and believed that the lucidity of his expositions, supplemented as they were by a number of private conferences and one most successful demonstration of his method in a Srivate clinic, will lead to the recognition he deserves in this country, ne of his leading disciples, Dr. Jung, of Zurich, accompanied him and also gave a series of lectures in German. Fortunately, too, we now have the above first translation into English of a few of his selected papers. Freud regards his as yet untranslated work on the interpretation of dreams as the key to his system. This, especially the enlarged second edition upon which so much time and labor have been expended, is the best introduction to his work, although it must be admitted that it is hard reading, owing to its technical terms. This, with his other books on wit and on the psychology of daily life, show how his views apply to all the occurrences of human life, waking or sleeping, in health as well as in disease.

Most of his patients have been women and, owing to his fame, many of his cures have been cases of long standing, who have passed through courses of treatment by other physicians. Perhaps the chief common criticism directed against him is that he magnifies the importance of sex in both health and disease. His own claim is that the immense role which this function plays in nearly every form of human ill with nervous complications has hitherto been for various reasons vastly underrated, that its manifestations have been everywhere repressed, and that its influence is profoundly felt at every stage of life beginning with infancy. In this respect and in the thoroughness of his analysis and in his disuse of hypnotism, he differs from his own great teacher, Charcot, and from his earlier and older associate, Breuer, as well as from Janet. To our own thinking, his system so far as it is at present developed, lacks one essential thing, and that is adequate recognition of psychic evolution and the influence of past stages of the soul's development upon its present forms of aberration.