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.

    308/324 page 288
    I suspect that they matter enormously. They mat¬ tered to Darwin so much that they became his life work; they remain a monument of the critical pursuit of a master idea. We may endorse the summary of Wells, Huxley and Wells: “Sigmund Freud’s name is as cardinal in the history of human thought as Charles Darwin’s,” yet recognize that the course of his con¬ tribution, for reasons of which this book is an expres¬ sion, must proceed otherwise. “Let not our criticisms,” say the authors of The Science of Life, “seem to be a depreciation of their work, or above all, “a belittlement of Freud”; and in prophetic vein: “we may confidently expect . . . twenty-five years hence, that the whole controversy between Freudian, Jungian, Alderian and other brands of psychologists will have been relegated to the attics of scientific history. . . . Each party is making its contributions to truth; and less partisan psychologists are already drawing impartially on ail those divergent explorers in the field of psychologi¬ cal exploration for a more solid edifice of theory.” Whatever the verdict twenty-five years hence, the interest of the here and now is in the redemption of the Freudian values for the guidance of our thinking, the management of our practice. Attempting to see Freud steadily and to see him whole, we gratefully record that the nuclear core of the construction that places Freud among the master psychologists of all time is the envisagement of man’s total psychic activ¬ ity under a unifying aspect of motivation. That dynamic conception of mental behavior might well have become current as the Freudian “wish”; for this there is no
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