PREFACE BY THE EDITOR
When Freud delivered the five lectures reprinted in this booklet at Clark University in 1910, fifteen years of hard work lay behind him. His ideas, first outlined in 1895 in a work he wrote together with Joseph Breuer, were met with skepticism ; they were severely criticized, rejected as unscientific, ridiculed as fantastic and arbitrary. Gradually, however, the number of adherents grew ; eminent psychiatrists like Eugen Bleuler at Zurich adopted them and many younger or older alienists and psychologists saw in Freud’s doctrine the most promising advance the science of the human mind had made for a long time. Not that the critical voices were silenced altogether ; but Freud’s ideas were, at least, taken seriously. Before long the « new psychology » had penetrated everywhere. The influence psychoanalysis gained not only in psychiatry but also in psychology, in education and the social sciences, in literature and the theory of art, is too well known to necessitate further documentation. Widely acclaimed, though not always correctly understood, Freud’s ideas soon pervaded every discipline concerned with man and his nature, and became popular so that his originally highly technical terms today belong to the vocabulary of common speech.