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Perhaps the most direct and persistent attempt to attach a particular philosophical and ethical viewpoint to psychoanalytic theory was that undertaken by James Jackson Putnam. Since Putnam's biography has been amply related elsewhere, I shall simply bring forward some facts which bear on this communication.
He was born in Boston, in 1846, to a distinguished family which counted among its members noted physicians and a grandfather who sat as judge of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. Putnam was educated at Harvard and after studies in Europe with Rokitansky, Meynert, and Hughlings Jackson, among others, he returned to Harvard and remained on its faculty until retirement. One of the first Americans to specialize in neurology, he was the first professor of Diseases of the Nervous System at Harvard and established the Neurological Clinic at the Massachusetts General Hospital. After a career, rich in practice and clinical research, he developed a passionate interest in clinical psychology.
Putnam became intensely drawn towards psychoanalysis after talking with Freud during the latter's visit to the United States in 1909. He soon began to practice analysis and became one of the leading exponents of psychoanalytic ideas in American medical circles. This was often a thankless undertaking, but for the most part, he bore the attacks on analysis, as well as on his person, with equanimity. Without exception, he was regarded as a man of “lofty standards and moral rectitude” (Freud, S., , iii), tolerant, kindly, and deeply empathic with his patients. His philosophic ideas were a curious mdlange of Emerson, Kant, Hegel, his friend Josiah Royce, and Bergson; although personally close to William James, he was never attracted to Jamesian pragmatism.
Putnam had no difficulty in accepting Freud's views on human sexuality. Putnam was no prim, Puritanical naysayer,