MANY READERS WILL RECOGNIZE THAT THE TITLE of this paper comes from a passage in The Question of Lay Analysis. Freud (1926) wrote that monograph on the occasion of defending Theodore Reik, a nonmedical analyst then practicing in Vienna, against a charge of quackery. There Freud vigorously championed his own view that psychoanalysis was not a medical discipline, although its origins lay in neurology. In the postscript to the monograph, written in 1927, he argued that origin is not a criterion for judging the current status of a discipline. The theory of electricity, he observed, had its beginnings in observations of nerve-muscle preparations, yet it would be absurd today to regard it as a part of physiology. And, further, although radiology has a medical application, it is surely part of physics.

The case against Reik was dropped, probably because of