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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    constitutes the neurosis, may be imposed, or more or less accepted, or even sought; if the last, it becomes a solution of a conflict by an “escape into illness”—a formula frequently applied by Freud and Freudians. In the light of such cases, Freud pronounced neuroses to be universally the issues of deep-lying conflicts, often associated with a psychic shock in childhood, and pre¬ dominantly sexual in plot or incident, the mechanism subconscious and psychogenic in this new Freudian sense. Gradually there were recognized certain constant emotional and situational factors in the case-histories, which gave rise to the concept of the complex, and more specifically to definite, typical orders of complexes. The psychoanalyst discovered not only complexes but psy¬ chopathic dramas of the unconscious as the common fate of humanity. The stage is thus set, and the curtain rises upon the central drama of the Freudian “family romance.” It is evolved from what goes on behind the scenes in the psychoanalyst’s clinic, and by him called discoveries. To the sceptical critic they resemble the cryptic pro¬ cedures of Faust’s chamber or the arcana of the oc¬ cultist’s retreat; for no more than these divinational adept discoveries, are the Freudian findings available to laboratory methods. Their truth must be otherwise tested. The theory arises from precisely the same order of scientific interest that supports psychology and psychiatry, and directs their progress. The failure to recognize this is responsible for the attitude of hostile disdain which Freud met for long and lonely years. His theories may be all wrong, his data forced or un¬ real and their significance overstated; but the inten¬ tion is of the same order as that of other solutions ac¬ credited in medical practice. Ridicule and contempt were hardly the appropriate weapons to meet the in-
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