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The five lectures Freud delivered at Clark University in September 1909 are justifiably famous. The occasion was a memorable one: “Freud spoke … to a highly trained and distinguished group, dotted with men of real eminence in psychology and related fields, in the course of an event of widely acknowledged intellectual distinction” (Ross, 1972, p. 389). Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, under the leadership of G. Stanley Hall, was to be the only institution ever to award Freud an honorary degree. For Freud the trip to North America, which included some steps across the border into Canada at Niagara Falls, represented a taste of dearly sought academic recognition. If Freud retained a lasting disdain for most things American, some of the people he met at Clark, such as William James, were to be among the exceptions that for Freud always proved his rules (Roazen, 1975).
Many readers have been first introduced to psychoanalysis by the clear exposition of his ideas that Freud worked out for his American audience. As late as 1957 James Strachey thought that “in spite of all the additions that were to be made to the structure of psychoanalysis during the following quarter of a century, these lectures still provide an admirable preliminary picture which calls for very little correction.” Almost forty years have passed since Freud's death; by examining his text in the context of the mind/body problem we should have a good idea of the contours of Freud's concepts.