ABSTRACT
The psycho-analyst, who has learnt to meet the almost unanimous rejection of his science by mankind whose soul it has disquieted, with a certain fatalism, is, at long intervals of time, temporarily shaken out of this mood by certain experiences. Most rarely of all, however, is one in the position to discover in the works of recognized leaders of present-day science traces of psycho-analytic influence, or a parallelism between their thought tendencies and those of the psychoanalysts. To derive the essential foundations of a highly organized psychic formation by means ‘of constantly repeated memory efforts’ from a primitive one, and to find its roots ultimately in infantile experience, is the essential thing in the psycho-analytic method and its most important result. In Mach’s introductory sentences, however, there are also subsumed other views as yet championed, or first expressly emphasized, almost solely by psycho-analysis.
