Page:Freud - The history of the psychoanalytic movement.djvu/33

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HISTORY OF THE PSYCHOANALYTIC MOVEMENT
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sents exhaustively just these achievements in the work of analysis. Besides, here everything is in inchoate form, hardly worked out, mostly only preliminary and sometimes only in the stage of an intention. Every honest thinker will find herein no grounds for reproach. There is a tremendous amount of problems for a small number of workers whose chief activity lies elsewhere, who are obliged to attack the special problems of the new science with only amateurish preparation. These workers hailing from the psychoanalytic field make no secret of their dilettantism, they only desire to be guides and temporary occupants of the places of those specialists to whom they recommend the analytic technique and principles until the latter are ready to take up this work themselves. That the results aimed at are, even now, not at all insignificant, is due partly to the fruitfulness of the psychoanalytic method, and partly to the circumstance that already there are a few investigators, who, with out being physicians, have made the application of psychoanalysis to the mental sciences their lifework.

Most of these psychoanalytic applications can be traced, as is easily understood, to the impetus given by my early analytic works. The analytic examinations of nervous patients and neurotic manifestations of normal persons drove me to the assumption of psychological relationships which, most certainly, could not be limited only to that field. Thus analysis presented us not only with the explanation of pathological occurrences, but also showed us their connection with normal psychic life and uncovered undreamed-of relations between psychiatry and a variety of other sciences dealing with activities of mind. Thus certain typical dreams furnished the understanding of many myths and fairy tales. Riklin and Abraham followed this hint and began those investigations about myths which have found their completion in the works of Rank on Mythology, works which do full justice to all the requirements of the specialist. The prosecution of dream-symbology led to the very heart of the problems of mythology, folk-lore (Jones, Storfer) and of religious abstraction. At one of the psychoanalytic congresses the audience was deeply impressed when a student of Jung pointed out the similarity