ABSTRACT
A. Freud’s work carries an intellectual excitement to which it is difficult not to respond. Men have always been aware that there is much not only in the external world but in their inner lives which seems to take place without a cause and to serve no clear purpose—that dreams, moods, attachments to other persons, come and go as though they had lives of their own and were independent of the individual’s will. One can be a believer in witchcraft, or, indeed, a Watsonian behaviorist, and believe that much. The crucial question is whether the specific ideas which Freud introduced—e.g., the “id,” the “Oedipus complex,” the “death wish,”—correctly describe this system of events.
