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This study of the reception of psychoanalysis in Germany in its early days (1893-1907) is one of the impressive monographs in the Psychological Issues series. Done by a historian, its grasp of medical, as well as sociological and philosophical, principles is extremely thorough and grounded in intensive and extensive research. Organized in a systematic manner, it deals with the relation of psychoanalysis to German medicine, psychology, and the educated public. It gives evidence and conclusions often different from those that have customarily prevailed in the history of psychoanalysis: “… the reasons why psychoanalysis ultimately failed to make a significant impression in German professional circles are manifold and extend beyond the usually repeated trio of sexual prejudice, anti-Semitism, and the critic's personal neurosis” (p. 2). Excerpts from the lucid prose of this volume will be employed to display its content.
“The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality which appeared in 1905 was original and profound, but it did not stand alone in its avowal of the importance of sexuality” (p. 9). “… Freud's preoccupations had been anticipated or were being simultaneously shared by the avant-garde in other fields. … Sexual concerns were attracting serious public attention. … Educators and physicians were coming to realize that the early years were truly significant. … In the broad cultural sense, Freud was not in ‘splendid isolation’” (p. 11). “The appearance of The Interpretation of Dreams in November, 1899, made psychoanalysis for the first time the direct concern of the intellectual who was neither a physician nor a psychologist” (p. 20). The educated German public responded to psychoanalysis as early as 1900.
The response of German psychiatry was quite different. “In a revulsion against the speculation of the Romanticists, there was a search for and a cult of objectivity in all fields of human knowledge. The attempts of the Psychiker to understand the disordered mind not a