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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    divested of the extravagant implications and specula* tions that for the time have obscured and discredited it. A safe and sane Freudianism is not only possible but imperative. The Freudian temper has forsaken a redeeming prin¬ ciple of its own doctrine, that of sublimation: that the wise management of the native urges and their redemp¬ tion consists in their direction to useful, constructive employment, and still more pertinently in their refine¬ ment. This becomes physiologically a discharge of lowly organic energy along highly organized psycho¬ logical outlets; it is hitching the organic wagon to a psychic, even a spiritual star. The psychiatrist above all practitioners of the ministering art should be a humanist; humanism and cultism are not congenial. The history of psychology shows all too plainly that prejudiced speculation has been its undoing, and that psychologists have erected again and again as the statue on the altar of their temple of learning a god made in their own image, as the mind of the day envisaged it. However imperfect his insight, man cannot but make the attempt to see himself rightly, to see himself whole. What we know of the human psyche is a torso; we feel the urge to restore it to its full human completion. The Freudian attempt, however ambitious and logically inadequate, is yet itself the expression of an urge for completion of understanding, that harks back to the first great intellectual awakening and the classic pre¬ cept: Man, know thyself I It is a far cry from the aca¬ demic groves of ancient Athens to the psychoanalytic clinic of modern Vienna. How far the Freudian temper has brought order into the human cosmos, how far it has enhanced or clarified, how far distorted or de¬ graded human values, are questions of large moment for future generations.
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