ABSTRACT
It is generally agreed today that neuroses are functional psychic disturbances and are therefore to be cured preferably by psychological treatment. But when we come to the question of the structure of the neuroses and the principles of therapy, all agreement ends, and we have to acknowledge that we have as yet no fully satisfactory conception of the nature of the neuroses or of the principles of treatment. While it is true that two currents or schools of thought have gained a special hearing, they by no means exhaust the number of divergent opinions that actually exist. There are also numerous non-partisans who, amid the general confl ict of opinion, have their own special views. If, therefore, we wanted to paint a comprehensive picture of this diversity, we should have to mix upon our palette all the hues and shadings of the rainbow. I would gladly paint such a picture if it lay within my power, for I have always felt the need for a conspectus of the many viewpoints. I have never succeeded in the long run in not giving divergent opinions their due. Such opinions could never arise, much less secure a following, if they did not correspond to some special disposition, some special character, some fundamental psychological fact that is more or less universal. Were we to exclude one such opinion as simply wrong and worthless, we should be rejecting this particular disposition or this particular fact as a misinterpretation – in other words, we should be doing violence to our own empirical material. The wide approval which greeted Freud’s explanation of neurosis in terms of sexual causation and his view that the happenings in the psyche turn essentially upon infantile pleasure and its satisfaction should be instructive to the psychologist. It shows him that this manner of thinking and feeling coincides with a fairly widespread trend or spiritual current which, independently of Freud’s theory, has made itself felt in other places, in other circumstances, in other minds, and in other forms. I should call it a manifestation of the collective psyche. Let me remind you here of the works of Havelock Ellis and August Forel and the contributors to Anthropophyteia; 2 then of the changed attitude to sex in Anglo-Saxon countries during the postVictorian period, and the broad discussion of sexual matters in literature, which had already started with the French realists. Freud is one of the exponents of a contemporary psychological fact which has a special history of its own; but for obvious reasons we cannot go into that here.
