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Foreword
The notion that psychoanalysis was born in passional metaphysics and grew up to be a cult is spread around the globe and by no means held always as unfavorable to the “gospel” according to Sigmund Freud. A review of the actual life of psychoanalysis as a body of men and women with strongly maintained beliefs and practices will show how far the notion is true. From the beginning, certainly there have been germs of religion at least planted in the psychoanalytic movement, germs in whose cultures appeared the everlasting comrades of religion, heresy, counterfeit faith, and so forth. Freud strove to protect the fragments of truth he had discovered from consumption by those growths in two ways: first, by chronically—one may say compulsively—surveying over and again the fundamentals of his findings; second, by forming and promoting clubs with the purpose of saving psychoanalysis for science. The conscious union and fertility of these clubs he conceived as a historic movement, a revolution in the health and learning of mankind. The late Ernest Jones objected to the designation of “movement” for the Freudian forces because he saw the word as almost exclusively political or clerical. After all, no scientists had ever dreamt of calling the influence or spell cast by creators of physics, chemistry and biology the Lavoisier or oxygen movement, the Avogadro or molecule movement, the Lamarck or evolution movement. Was not Freud's insistence on naming his creation a movement simply a relic of his early education in the Jewish creed and its mission of Messiah?
Psychoanalysis may be defined as the science of unconscious mental processes or workings of the mind of which the individual is unaware. As such, it claims to be elemental psychology, the prerequisite for scientific inquiries in emotion, behavior, and thought, human nature especially. For a starting point the date 1885 will do: In this year, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was appointed “professor extraordinary” to the