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This is truly a document humain. For time to come it will serve to illustrate the way in which psycho-analysis was received by Scientific Psychology. We use initials for these holy words, as the author does, to shew him that we share his respect for them. They constitute the slogan with which he thunders and fulminates against the heresies of psycho-analysis. He belongs not to the newer type of critics who term Freud a genius but think he has 'overdone the unconscious'—to use the choice expression of another American professor of psychology—but to the good old school who see no merit whatever in psycho-analysis and would extirpate it root and branch as an evil thing.
A note of fear is struck at the outset. '(It) makes its immediate attack on the methods and results of scientific psychology. … The antagonism of spiritualism to science is more open and undisguised. Psychoanalysis, which attempts to creep in wearing the uniform of science, and to strangle it from the inside, is the more immediate danger, and spiritualism can wait' (p. 8). 'It is becoming as strongly entrenched as its several rivals in the field and bids fair to be a formidable obstacle in the pathway of science for some years to come' (p. 46).
Feeling strongly on the matter, the author sets out to rescue the Scientific Psychology so sore beset and with every device at his disposal appeals to his readers' prejudices, 'logical', professional, moral, and so on; when all else fails he stoops to vituperation. He alludes to psycho-analysis as 'the whole poisonous vine, with its tendrils threatening to grasp and choke all forms of learning' (p. 162); to psycho-analysts by implication as 'charlatans and teachers of superstition' (p. 173) or as people 'who do not understand the requirements of scientific reasoning and do not know the empirical basis of mental science' (p. 165). Its