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This book is important not only for its subject-matter and for its thoroughness (the bibliography numbers over 700 items, all referred to in the text), but also for its method, which is the application of a sociological insight into the writing of a specialized history: psychoanalysis, a complex of ideas that have begun a movement affecting the widening rings of psychiatry, medicine, science and social culture, originates in continent A and finds its way into continent B, where it sets up a similar but significantly different movement; the process cannot be properly described without descriptions of: (1) the psychoanalytic movement; (2) the setting into which psychoanalysis came; (3) the controversies on related subjects which it found already active and in the light of which it was understood, welcomed and used, misunderstood, rejected, abused and distorted; (4) the agents and agencies that transmitted the ideas; (5) the 'fate' of the original teachings.
These five—Movement, Setting, Controversies, Transmission, and Fate—provide titles for the five main chapters.
Dr Burnham tells the story clearly, with its four main strands: (1) Meyer, stimulating Hoch and Burrow. (2) The Prince group, with Edes and Putnam prominent early and Jones's visits providing stimuli of various kinds (the culmination was the foundation of the American Psychopathological Association in 1910 and the American Psychoanalytical Association in 1911). (3) Brill, sent by Peterson to study with Jung, met Jones and visited Freud; Brill founded the New York Psychoanalytical Society in 1911, translated most of Freud, and early on influenced Jelliffe and White, who started the Psychoanalytic Review, the first psychoanalytic journal in English. (4) Stanley Hall, whose invitation to Freud led to his visit and the Clark Lectures.
The author emphasizes three main chronologies: of events in the European movement, of events in the American movement, and of changes in the content of psychoanalysis as unde