ABSTRACT
When Sigmund Freud made his triumphant debut in North America with his Clark University lectures of September, 1909, the state of abnormal psychology in America was dominated by the French school of psychopathology. The leader of this school, Pierre Janet, had already visited America on several occasions and had recently completed a course of lectures at Harvard University. Janet’s concepts of “dissociation,” “subconscious,” and “fixed ideas” pervaded American thought. The French masters—Ribot, Binet, and Janet—had a number of their works already published in English when the first sampling of Freud’s papers, mostly on hysteria, were translated by Brill in 1909 (Freud, 1909). His most important work, The Interpretation of Dreams, was not to be published in English until 1913. Yet, because Freud’s lectures “On the Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis” had been translated into English and published in the American Journal of Psychology early in 1910 (Freud, 1910), and because several of his most important English-speaking students, including Ernest Jones and A. A. Brill, were now in North America, Freud’s psychoanalysis began to spread. After a period of intense conflict, it soon dominated abnormal psychology in America. Janet and the French school became no more than a footnote in the prehistory of the psychoanalytic movement.
