In Honour of the Centenary of Freud's Birth

To write a eulogy of Freud to mark the centenary of his birth would be a totally superfluous undertaking since both the acknowledgment accorded to his work and the effect it has had on the whole of Western civilization are unparalleled. Freud has become the classic figure of depth psychology barely fifty years from the time when he himself was quite unheard of and when hardly anyone knew the meaning of the word “psycho-analysis” or had grasped the concept of depth psychology. The outstanding success of Freud's work, which has transformed modern man's conception of life, is as much the result of the absolutely unique and original quality of his basic discoveries, of the brilliance of his prose, and his mastery of the German language, as of the fact that from him a new science was born.

Before Freud's time psychology had found expression in the works of the great poets but, scientifically speaking, had remained a mere branch of philosophy. With Freud it burst into the consciousness of his time and was revealed as the fundamental science of the nature of man. We have before us, without always being aware of it, a remarkable phenomenon. Not only has everything previously called psychology been completely changed by this step-child of philosophy, which is not a true science even today, but further, our entire knowledge of the nature of human health and sickness has been shaken and transformed by the assault of depth psychology on our conception of the world. Not only psychiatry and medicine but philosophy, the history of art and of literature; not only criminology but ethnology and sociology have all been profoundly influenced by depth psychology. Our knowledge not only of the illnesses of mankind but of the child and of primitive man, of the criminal and the artist, has changed so fundamentally within the last fifty years that the ordinary person's approach to human nature—both the good and evil sides of it—can simply not be compared with the attitudes towards, the insig