I. PREFACE TO AMERICAN EDITION

Few, especially in this country, realize that while Freudian themes
have rarely found a place on the programs of the American Psycho-
logical Association, they have attracted great and growing attention
and found frequent elaboration by students of literature, history,
biography, sociology, morals and æsthetics, anthropology, education,
and religion. They have given the world a new conception of both
infancy and adolescence, and shed much new light upon character-
ology; given us a new and clearer view of sleep, dreams, reveries,
and revealed hitherto unknown mental mechanisms common to
normal and pathological states and processes, showing that the law
of causation extends to the most incoherent acts and even verbiger-
ations in insanity; gone far to clear up the terra incognita of
hysteria; taught us to recognize morbid symptoms, often neurotic
and psychotic in their germ; revealed the operations of the primitive
mind so overlaid and repressed that we had almost lost sight of
them; fashioned and used the key of symbolism to unlock many
mysticisms of the past; and in addition to all this, affected thousands
of cures, established a new prophylaxis, and suggested new tests
for character, disposition, and ability, in all combining the practical
and theoretic to a degree salutary as it is rare.

These twenty-eight lectures to laymen are elementary and almost
conversational. Freud sets forth with a frankness almost startling
the difficulties and limitations of psychoanalysis, and also describes
its main methods and results as only a master and originator of a
new school of thought can do. These discourses are at the same
time simple and almost confidential, and they trace and sum up
the results of thirty years of devoted and painstaking research.
While they are not at all controversial, we incidentally see in a
clearer light the distinctions between the master and some of his
distinguished pupils. A text like this is the most opportune and will
naturally more or less supersede all other introductions to the
general subject of psychoanalysis. It presents the author in a new
light, as an effective and successful popularizer, and is certain to be
welcomed not only by the large and growing number of students

5

6 PREFACE

of psychoanalysis in this country but by the yet larger number of
those who wish to begin its study here and elsewhere.

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 fruit-
ful. He also established the independence of psychology from physi-
ology, 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 preevolution-
ary 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 affec-
tivity. We cannot forbear to express the hope that Freud will not
repeat Wundt's error in making too abrupt a break with his more

PREFACE 7

advanced pupils like Adler or the Zurich group. It is rather pre-
cisely 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 con-
sciousness. 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 dis-
posed 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 oper-
ations of the normal mind; but we are optimistic 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.

С. STANLEY HALL.
Clark University.