Freud : his dream and sex theories / by Joseph Jastrow.

  • Joseph Jastrow
Date:
1948,
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Freud : his dream and sex theories / by Joseph Jastrow. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    and the intellectual traditions of one brilliant Austrian, which made him exceptionally creative and as excep¬ tionally uncritical. Disaster is imminent when a crea¬ tive mind undertakes a task that requires creative in¬ sight to see it and plan it, and equally critical aptitudes to execute iL It may be a helpful parallel to reflect what what might have been the course of evolution, had the creative mind of Darwin been far more boldly specula¬ tive and far less exactingly critical. Whatever the source of the discrepancy—for mind is mind with all its contradictions, as man is man with all his —the effect of it upon the acceptance of Freud’s ideas has been marked. My anticipation that the essential values of psychoanalysis will be salvaged and its mis¬ conceptions corrected, may prove to be wrong not for the reason cited, that the scheme will fall into oblivion, but for the very opposite, that it will be acclaimed for its intrinsic worth, and its errors forgiven and for¬ gotten. Such is the view of Stefan Zweig,* whose pen- portrait of Freud conveys a fine appreciation of an admiring friend. He looks upon the advent of Freud as itself the fulfillment of a prophecy, citing Schiller’s none too definite allusion! “If there should arise a Linnaeus to classify impulses and inclinations, he would greatly astonish mankind”; or Nietzsche’s more enig¬ matic: “Alles was tiej ist liebt die Maske ” Zweig is confident that the Freudian renaissance will be recog¬ nized for all time. Freud’s discovery of the dvnamics of the mind,” his “introduction of a new investigatory technique”; the recognition of the “unconscious”_“a supreme act cf genius”: these, as Zweig sees it, assure the future of Freud. If so, “what do the details matter?” * Stefan Zweig: Mental Healers. 1932. An engaging account of the person of Freud and his lift work.
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